Introduction: Strangers and Aliens in London ca 1605 — Is Anyone Stranger than a London Gallant?

This special issue on John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan illustrates the various tensions in London at the start of James I’s reign. This city comedy deploys satire to urge its audience to see the anxiety and fears caused by misogyny, xenophobia, religious dissent, and contact with European foreigners, all of which create an alien environment infecting those who live in it. Each of the ten essays that make up the issue touches on these anxieties, or at least elements of strangeness that need arguing away or accepting as unresolvable in Marston’s view of human nature.