Theatre, Community, and Civic Engagement in Jacobean London by Mark Bayer (review)

Once a critique becomes a commonplace it is clear that the ground has shifted. Since at least the advent of the Records of Early English Drama, it has become conventional for theater historians of English drama to criticize the “metropolitan bias” that long dominated their discipline. By now, references to the metropolitan bias are more invocation than critique, inoculations against a blinkered view of early English dramatic history. It is, then, within but also against this context that Mark Bayer’s Theatre, Community, and Civic Engagement in Jacobean London emerges. Bayer’s book joins the backlash against metropolitan bias, but his daring thesis is that a London-centric scrutiny sets the lens not too narrowly but too widely. He argues for a fine-grained analysis of Jacobean drama, setting his sights on parish and ward, not city and suburb, arguing for the power of locally sourced drama.

Instead of an overview, Bayer offers a street-level historiography, arguing that theater collects and distributes meanings within its immediate, material context. The Rose’s experience of itself is, in these terms, not one of marginality (to the City proper) but of centrality to its immediate surroundings. The most meaningful proximities are not those of suburb and city, therefore, but of the people, pubs, and places that players encountered in the course of their day-to-day lives. Bayer’s book recenters each theater at the heart of its neighborhood’s experience and explores the intricately latticed relationship between a playhouse repertory and local audience, conceptually situating every playhouse as a node of social capital. This thesis is not entirely new, but it is argued here with such comprehensive lucidity that its effects should ramify across the field.

To fix his focus at the local level, Bayer begins by “Rethinking City and Suburb” in the book’s opening chapter. He traces, briefly, the genealogy of our governing metropolitan idea, arriving inevitably at Steven Mullaney’s 1988 Place of the Stage. Although challenges have since offered a more nuanced topography, those challenges are still playing on Mullaney’s map and thus the need for Bayer’s opening sally. A map dominated by “City” and “suburb,” in Bayer’s terms, “flattens the nuances of theatrical activity … and fail[s] to account for the peculiarities of audiences and how they attended the theaters not as a homogenous aggregate of consumers seeking to maximize entertainment value but as a collection of discrete social groups with particularized tastes” (38). In a sense, Bayer pursues the “place of the stage” (35) to its logical extreme, thinking more about what one might see from the theater’s front door than what Claes Visscher “viewed” from a Southwark steeple.

Bayer’s nonpolemical point—and just one virtue of this virtuous book is its generous, likeable tone—is that theater functioned not as solvent but as gluten, a binding force within the metropolitan mélange. Each theater, with its immediate neighborhood, was a singularity unto itself rather than an integer in a binary contest. Theater therefore gathered and generated its meaning-making power “locally, in the neighborhoods where it was most visible” (38) rather than producing and being produced by an enabling antagonism between center and margin, city and suburb. Furthermore, as theater ceased to be occasional—governed by “liturgical calendar[s] or … seasonal cycles” (19)—and became a part of the everyday, the “temporal specificity of drama was replaced by a new kind of spatial orientation around London’s playhouses, which became a physical destination for citizens to meet for the same kind of collective recreation enjoyed on holidays” (19). This is a London theater less licentious than we may like, but Bayer’s notion of a theater as agent of stability rather than change is persuasive.

Having sketched a new map of theatrical London, Bayer then focuses on particular playhouses and their peculiar neighborhoods. He shrewdly looks at the northern playhouses, the Fortune and...