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

Producing Early Modern London explores city comedy's production of "a double gaze" (26, passim)—Robert Weimann's phrase for the conceptual muddling of place and space in the European Renaissance and its attendant representational shifts. In London at the turn of the seventeenth century, changes in the city's demography, topography, and social and economic cultures created an urban experience that toggled between familiarity and alienation. Kelly J. Stage argues that "the first generation of London city comedies" (239) uniquely enacts and critiques this experience through innovative use of generic convention and performance practices. Although it does not break new ground, Producing Early Modern London nevertheless succeeds in demonstrating the theatrical strategies by which early city comedies created virtual experiences of an increasingly uncanny metropolis.

The introduction to Producing Early Modern London situates the book's project in the context of spatial theory, urban history, performance practice, and generic convention. Readers may wish that this ambitious contextualization were executed more consistently. While particular spatial theories frame and energize readings of specific plays, the various definitions of place and space obscure rather than clarify Stage's overarching thesis. Nevertheless, the four chapters and epilogue of Stage's book generatively group dramatic and other urban texts to consider various representations of London as known and unknown. Chapter 1 pairs William Haughton's Englishmen for My Money (1598) and Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour (1599) as indexical London city comedies. In both plays, scenes set in the middle aisle of St. Paul's Cathedral reflect the "familiar absurdity" of "the pageant of everyday life" (78, 79). While the meaning of "absurdity" remains unclear, Stage makes a compelling case for the plays' use of metatheatricality to represent characters' urban competence or disorientation as well as to disrupt the audience members' sense of their ability to move deftly and confidently through the city.

Here and throughout the book, "city" denotes the "square mile" (10) of the City of London, and the relationship between this immured urban core and its expanding environs is critical to the next three chapters. Chapter 2 examines the tension between, on the one hand, anxieties about disease created by travel in and around London and, on the other, fantasies of control over a totalizing urban space in Dekker and Webster's Westward Ho (1604) and Northward Ho (1605) and Jonson, Chapman, and Marston's Eastward Ho (1605). Chapter 3 presents a compelling analysis of "urban tactics" (139) and the town as depicted in Middleton and Dekker's Roaring Girl (1611) and Ben Jonson's Epicene (1609–10). Chapter 4 considers representations of mobility throughout greater London in a range of media: John Stow's chorographic Survey of London (1598/1603), Middleton's Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613), and bird's-eye views of London printed throughout the period. The epilogue returns to the indexical city comedy through a discussion of Jonson's revised Every Man In His Humour (1616), which Stage argues "fixes" (251) London in place and thereby ushers in the end of City-based city comedy.

The opposite of fixed is mobile, and the book's inquiries into the dynamic between stasis and motion are among its most consequential. Yi-Fu Tuan's theory of spatializing movement and place-making pauses, which he outlines in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977), carries considerable influence throughout the book. This influence can be felt in Stage's articulations of the book's thesis, such as "For the plays I treat and the world of early modern London, the busy quality of life in the city—the constant motion of spatial experience and of a persistently changing series of human relationships—contrasts with a more stalwart and learned knowledge of the city and its concrete reality of sense of place"(22). It also underlies several of Stage's focused readings. Tackling the challenge of staging...