Arguing that the commercial stage depended on the unprecedented
demographic growth and commercial vibrancy of London to fuel its own
development, Jean E. Howard posits a particular synergy between the
early modern stage and the city in which it flourished.
In London comedy, place functions as the material arena in which social
relations are regulated, urban problems negotiated, and city space
rendered socially intelligible. Rather than simply describing London,
the stage participated in interpreting it and giving it social meaning.
Each chapter of this book focuses on a particular place within the
city--the Royal Exchange, the Counters, London's whorehouses, and its
academies of manners--and examines the theater's role in creating
distinctive narratives about each. In these stories, specific locations
are transformed into venues defined by particular kinds of interactions,
whether between citizen and alien, debtor and creditor, prostitute and
client, or dancing master and country gentleman. Collectively, they
suggest how city space could be used and by whom, and they make place
the arena for addressing pressing urban problems: demographic change and
the influx of foreigners and strangers into the city; new ways of making
money and losing it; changing gender roles within the metropolis; and
the rise of a distinctive town culture in the West End.
Drawing on a wide range of familiar and little-studied plays from four
decades of a defining era of theater history, Theater of a City shows
how the stage imaginatively shaped and responded to the changing face of
early modern London.
