Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (review)

This is a very instructive book. It takes a fresh look at city comedy by asking us to take “city” as a specifiable noun of place and thus seriously exploring the ways a social mapping project is undertaken by London plays. Jean Howard’s delineation of this project involves neither polemic about the importance of subordinating drama’s literary or professional singularity to larger social forces, nor special pleading about the power of drama to shape social change by intense proleptic representation of emergent social tendencies. Howard seems to assume that we are less interested in these perspectival power issues than we used to be. Her convincing, although unsurprising, thesis is that plays both respond to and shape the evolving urban self-understanding of Londoners. She points out that any likely early modern audience in London of a London play will have included both seasoned Londoners and aspirant newcomers, and that plays cater to the needs of both: “In invoking the places of the city and filling them with action, the plays also construct the city and make it intelligible for those unfamiliar with its places or the uses to which they can be put, and they parse the permissible and impermissible actions attendant on those places” (23). As she puts it more pithily later, “London comedies made London as much as they were made by it, and they made Londoners, as well” (40).

Howard points out that the early modern word “foreigner” included not only non-English Londoners, but Londoners who came to the city from other parts of England (8–10), thus including rural-to-urban English migration as part of a rich vein of intercultural comparison focused particularly in London places that imitate non-English models (the Royal Exchange, French dancing academies, Italian fencing schools) or London places (such as the lodging of the title character in Marston’s Dutch Courtesan) that bring together foreign workers and often foreign clients. She groups London plays, some well-known but many not, locating them with respect to four distinctive London locales: the Exchange, the Counter or debtors’ prison, the brothel, and the ballroom or academy for training in manners. Alongside its helpful topical grouping of plays infrequently read (and virtually never seen), Theater of a City assembles useful historical information, and it is pleasant and straightforward in presentation. Roughly speaking, its four chapters are chronologically ordered: the Exchange plays are among the earliest London comedies, as are the Counter plays; the brothel plays get their initial impetus from James’s attempt to knock down the brothels in the suburbs in 1603 but run through the period of Howard’s study; and the academy plays date mostly from the 1630s. The book aims to help: as Howard sums things up in the epilogue, “My purpose has been to suggest the utility of place as a way to understand the synergy between the city and the theater and the role of plays in constructing the social meanings of place and the ideological implications of the stories that unfold upon its terrain” (215). “Synergy” here is a word that comfortably includes—or at least does not rule out—the possibility that it bundles a set of related nonidentical synergies that are all part of a phenomenon of urban change and evolving never-complete urban self-awareness too large for any one play, place, genre, or commentator to master. Nonetheless, Howard stresses the ways plays grouped by their treatment of particular places “participate over time in rendering the city ideologically knowable, in regulating conduct within it, and in negotiating the most vexed issues with which Londoners were confronted” (23).

The first “place” is Sir Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange, built in 1568 and modeled after bourses in Antwerp and in the Islamic and Christian Mediterranean. Howard argues that plays representing the Exchange both educated Londoners about an institution they had seen but...