Producing Early Modern London: A Comedy of Urban Space, 1598–1616 by Kelly J. Stage (review)

The city comedy genre of Renaissance drama has experienced something of a renaissance of its own of late. Following initial investigations by Brian Gibbons (1968), Alexander Leggatt (1973), Gail Kern Paster (1985), and Theodore Leinwand (1986), the past two decades have seen many new explorations from scholars such as Janette Dillon (2000), the contributors to Plotting Early Modern London (2004), Jean Howard (2007), Darryll Grantley (2008), Julie Sanders (2011), Adam Zucker (2011), the contributors to Performing Environments (2014), and Nina Levine (2016). To merit mapping out another foray into this territory, as Kelly Stage seeks to do, thus requires that a scholar has a substantial, new claim to stake out. Producing Early Modern London proposes to show how city comedies 'produce and modify the idea of London through the theatrical negotiation of comedy, space, and place' (29). To do this, the book aims to demonstrate how theatre constructed Londoners' conceptualizations of—using Yi-Fu Tuan's terminology—their city's 'places' (physical locations) and 'spaces' (points constructed by social activities).¹ Rather than seeing these plays as merely reflecting life in London's places, Stage sees the genre as participating in the building of urban spaces. Making a claim about the 'productive' work of literary works is familiar new historicist territory, and, in the process of pursuing it, Producing Early Modern London offers useful original readings of several city comedies; however, because of that familiarity, they do not entirely add up to a particularly revelatory or specific argument, so much as a broad restatement of conventional critical truisms about the genre.

The first chapter explores how Haughton's Englishmen for My Money and Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour create for the audience a sense of estrangement from previously familiar urban spaces. Stage's reading of Englishmen is persuasive, especially her observation of how Frisco's misleading trip through the city for the foreign suitors produces its dislocated sense of London by means of the empty stage platform on which it is performed. The actors' performances within the open architecture of the playing 'space' compel the audience to consider how performances in the urban 'space' that it represents can make one an alien even in one's own 'place'. In Every Man Out, Stage focuses on how the use of the aisle of St Paul's as a space of 'artifice' (that is, self-performance) and the un-spaced chorus scenes both draw audience members' attention to their own 'performative function' in the city by distinguishing those who possess 'urban knowledge from those who do not' (74). It is unfortunate little historical evidence survives about the effects these plays actually produced for early modern audience members' perceptions of their urban environment; like most literary criticism of early modern drama, Stage's must rely on the assumption that the critic's interpretive response accurately, and intuitively, reflects that of the early modern audience, whose interpretive authority then, in a circular fashion, the critic deploys to justify their own claims.

Chapter two focuses on Westward Ho, Northward Ho, and Eastward Ho, three plays that draw upon the relationship between London and its extra-mural communities. Through intersections between the plays and contemporary works, such as Dekker and Middleton's Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary and Dekker's The Wonderful Year—as well as later works, such as Camden's 1610 Britain and Peacham's 1642 The Art of Living in London—Stage explores the creation of the idea of the city's periphery, as well as the nature of productive mobility between the urban centre and that periphery. This leads into the book's most effective close reading, considering how Westward Ho encodes anxieties about urban disease, and especially the 1604 plague outbreak, within city comedy conventions of sexuality and social disorder. The readings of the other two plays are not quite as compelling. Stage's conclusion, for...