Shakespeare and the City

Shakespeare and the City

Adam Hansen*Queen’s University Belfast

Abstract

This article discusses how critics have conceived the relationship betweenShakespeare and the city. Discussion necessarily focuses on early modern London,the city where Shakespeare’s plays were first produced and received. The playsrepresent and are conditioned by the institutions and features of this particular city,such as the Court, the suburbs, the market, citizenship and migration. What willbecome clear, though, is that critics have shown how Shakespeare’s plays constructedunderstandings of these institutions and features. This article also suggests that earlymodern London is not the only city to which Shakespeare’s works relate. Othercities, past and present, actual and imagined, also affect the plays’ production,conception and reception, and their appropriation in media such as film. Surveyingand evaluating recent scholarship, this article details some of the socio-historicalcontexts of ‘Shakespeare’s’ cities, and raises questions for further study. Whereappropriate, discussion refers to specific plays, integrating these references intobroader models of interpretation.

Introduction

This article discusses how critics have considered the relationship betweenShakespeare and the city. Discussion necessarily focuses on early modernLondon, the city where Shakespeare’s plays were first produced and received.Scholars have described the ways in which the plays represent and areconditioned by institutions and features of this particular city, such as theCourt, the suburbs, the market, citizenship and migration. What will becomeequally clear, though, is that Shakespeare’s plays constructed understandingsof these institutions and features.

However, this article also suggests that early modern London is not theonly city to which Shakespeare’s works relate. Other cities, past and present,actual and imagined, affect the plays’ productions, conceptions andreceptions, and their appropriations in media such as film. To understandShakespeare now is also therefore to consider the urban contexts in whichhis work has been reconceived. Throughout, then, reference will be madeto both early modern London and these other cities, while highlightingrelevant points of contact and contrast between them, and between thesediverse cities and Shakespeare’s plays.

© 2007 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 820–850, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00452.x

Early Modern London: Shakespeare’s London?

It is the ideal time to visit this lively, bustling city. . . . Try to catch a play by thepromising young playwright William Shakespeare. There are daily performancesof his plays in the Globe theatre, which opened earlier this year. (Ferris 4–5)

Julie Ferris’s Shakespeare’s London: A Guide to the Tudor City and Its Theatresis one of a series of books that try to bring to life certain historical periods,often focussing on specific cities to do so. Though not explicitly aimed atthose of school-age, the accessible register of language and eye-catchinggraphics indicate the book’s appeal to younger members of a mass-market.While the book’s end-piece promises readers will ‘Marvel at the colour andsplendour of Elizabeth’s royal court’, far from offering a wholly nostalgicvision of the early modern capital,Shakespeare’s London highlights differencesin social and cultural experience, in terms of food, accommodation andtheatre-going. Shakespeare’s London also occasionally discusses some of theconsequences of these inequalities, observing ‘There is a great number ofbeggars’ (28–9).

Ferris’ book provides one instance of how the relationship betweenShakespeare and the city, and early modern London in particular, has assumedwidespread significance in Shakespeare studies. Additionally, though orperhaps because Shakespeare’s London is for non-specialists, it might usefullybe read as an introduction to some of the critical concerns relevant toconsidering Shakespeare and the city. Ferris constructs an image of a distanthistorical period in order to enrich Shakespeare’s current readers’ knowledgeof the plays. In this regard,Shakespeare’s London accords with some influentialapproaches in academic criticism of early modern literatures that emphasisehow important it is to explore the ways in which such literatures respondto and construct the diverse and sometimes conflicted material, social,ideological and historical contexts of their production and receptions,including receptions in the present day.1 Such approaches present a curiousparadox though. Critics detailing what was specific about the relationsbetween culture and history in the periods they discuss also insist on thedifferences between the past and the present. Yet by consciously committingto reading the past in relation to the present (and vice versa), these criticssometimes seem to suspend the very differences they identify, if not collapseor transcend them.

Ferris does this too. The consistent use of the present tense throughoutShakespeare’s London suggests we can have unmediated access to early modernLondon. Properly clued up, we visit a history whose realities are portable:‘Why not commission a miniature portrait of yourself? It would make agreat holiday souvenir!’ (12). Such phrases play upon the cliché that the pastis another country, but also indicate ambiguity. On one hand Ferris makesthe past past, proving how ‘Shakespeare’s London’ differed from cities welive in today, and was so different that we need a guide-book to understandit. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s London implies this difference can and

© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 820–850, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00452.xJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Shakespeare and the City . 821

should be surmounted: Shakespeare’s London becomes our London. Yet ifthis happens, do we risk losing a sense of what was special about the Londonin which Shakespeare lived and worked? In turn, do we also risk misreadingthe relations between Shakespeare and the city, past and present? Perhapsnot: any attempt to historicise is always conditioned by the perspective ofthe observer. Clearly, Shakespeare’s London is not uniquely flawed becauseit provokes such questions nor does its accessibility make it worthy of scorn.Equally, it is not only works for a popular non-specialist audience that exhibitthese issues; rather, these issues affect all contextualising commentary.

But in its very title, Shakespeare’s London suggests another connectedproblem about negotiating the relationship between Shakespeare and thecity. Ian Munro has recently discussed how the phrase ‘Shakespeare’s London’might be seen as ‘cognate to “Shakespeare’s Rome”, meaning his artisticcreation of the city’, and goes on to note that ‘Shakespeare’s London’ is a‘possessive phrase’ (75–6). Arguably, though, Munro underestimates thequestions posed by the phrase’s proprietorial investment, an investmentevident in Ferris’s title: in what sense can any city be possessed, dominatedor artistically created (‘even’ by Shakespeare), not least the early moderncapital? All Shakespeare’s plays were made possible by the constellation ofvarious factors and diverse conditions in one particular city, at a specifictime: England’s capital, roughly twenty years either side of 1600, a periodand a place in which the first commercial playhouses were instituted. OscarWilde observed that ‘there is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet’: actors’interpretations of the role make the character as much as authorial intent(911). Comparably, there is no such thing as Shakespeare’s London. In otherwords, beyond critical ascriptions and attributions, the Bard has no necessaryor exclusive claim on the city at this time. In these terms, perhaps London’sShakespeare is more appropriate.

Early Modern London: Setting the Scene

In 1567, the first public playhouse was unveiled at the Red Lion inWhitechapel, overseen by John Brayne, a London grocer. In 1576 Braynecollaborated with James Burbage, a London joiner who had become anactor, to open The Theatre in Shoreditch. When the lease for The Theatreexpired in 1599, the playhouse’s timbers were transported across the Thamesto Bankside, and re-erected as the Globe, the theatre in which Shakespeareinvested energy and money. Accessed for as little as a penny, such theatreswere one of many amusements available to London’s diverse consumerswith any time on their hands, including, but not exclusively limited to,servants, apprentices, holiday-makers, students, lawyers, visitors, soldiers onleave and gentlewomen. It has been estimated that in 1595 15,000 peoplevisited London’s theatres each week; in 1625 the figure was 25,000. Thissuggests ‘about 15 or 20 per cent of all the people living within reach ofShoreditch and Southwark were regular playgoers’ (Gurr 213). It is difficult

822 . Shakespeare and the City


to precisely determine the constitution of these audiences. Yet thedependence of open-air commercial playhouses on paying customers impliesthe mixture of spectators at such playhouses (Cook 317–18). These arenotable details in a well-rehearsed scholarly narrative that groundsShakespeare in early modern London.2

However, some critics have suggested that the incredible flourishing ofdramatic and literary creativity initiated by the establishment of purpose-built,permanent, viable, commercial stages was not completely dependent on thecapital, or on this period. Given the rural discreteness of some of the suburbsin which theatres were located, and the continuing financial importance ofprovincial touring for theatrical companies,William Ingram notes that ‘theterm “London-based” is a shifting one, potentially misleading’ (14). Equally,the vitality of dramatic traditions in and before the early sixteenth centurycannot be dismissed. Nonetheless, by the early 1590s London was clearly aspecial place, and offered special conditions for drama. For the first timein the city’s history ‘there were regular venues, regular audiences, regularincomes’ (Gurr 6).

The background to this simple statement is complex. If cities in generalrepresent ‘the point of maximum concentration for the power and cultureof a community’, Elizabethan and Jacobean London conformed to type(Mumford 3). Susan Brigden asserts ‘London was not all England’ (NewWorlds 214). Yet with the development of Tudor administration, the citymanifested profound cultural, economic and political centralisation. Historiansdiffer over the exact numbers, but agree that London’s population grewrapidly from the mid-1500s.3 If urbanisation was moderate in the rest of thecountry, ‘London alone accounted for half the increase in England’s urbanpopulation between 1500 and 1700’ (Beier and Finlay 2). Relative to therest of the population of England and Wales, this means that whereas onein 50 people lived in London in 1500, by 1600 one in 20 did (Keene 57). ToLawrence Manley, ‘early modern London was the largest and most widelyexperienced human creation in Britain’ (1). Contemporary perceptionsevoked this:

London is the capital of England and so superior to other English towns thatLondon is not said to be in England, but rather England to be in London . . . hewho sightsees London and the royal courts in its immediate vicinity may assertwithout impertinence that he is properly acquainted with England. (Platter 10)

The city’s material hegemony was becoming plain. The Royal Exchangeopened in Cornhill in 1566, facilitating international trade. Wages were 50per cent higher than in the provinces (Archer, Stability 11). Augmentingcritical interest in the material conditions in which London’s stagesdeveloped, recent commentators have suggested how the city’s trades andmarkets informed popular drama. Michael D. Bristol suggests speculators’‘desire for a lucrative return’ inspired their ‘investments’ in the theatre, andthis was ‘at least as important as any artistic aspirations . . . or . . . politicalagendas’ in the development of the popular stage. If the liberties and the© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 820–850, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00452.xJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


suburbs granted theatres some cultural autonomy, this autonomy was alsoevident in the merchant class, ‘in which ideas of economic self-determinationand the pursuit of economic advantage were well understood’ (245–6).Evidently, the ‘elective affinities’ between London’s markets, merchants andtheatres were more than simply material – they were also ideological (Agnew54). While recognising the differences in patterns of consumption, JanetteDillon emphasises the analogy of the stage and the marketplace:‘The RoyalExchange was not just a place for display; it was also a place of display’(61). Anti-theatrical detractors criticised the Exchange’s dissimulationsaccordingly.

Shakespeare’s plays realise the demands and problems of this analogy. If,as will be seen,The Comedy of Errors links private and public worlds, chainingor twinning people together, this is perhaps due to a partly nostalgic, partlyoptimistic vision of the ‘intense sociability fostered by the culture of credit’in the play (Perry 47). Yet, less positively, the play superimposes the temporalpressures of an early modern mercantile world onto the classical unity oftime manifested in Plautus’s Menaechmi. In Ephesus, traders say in themorning ‘Soon at five o’clock’ (1.2.26). The force of ‘time’s deformèd’ anddeforming ‘hand’ writes ‘strange defeatures’ all over characters with violentinsistence, changing how they seem to others and themselves (5.1.299).Without redemption, Egeon will be executed before the sun sets; Dromioof Ephesus is ‘strucken’ on the face just as a clock’s bell peals (1.1.45–46).Life is marked with ever more precise measures; it is also reduced to itsmarket value, as Egeon’s ‘ransom’ is set at ‘a hundred marks’ (1.1.24). If theplace of dramatic performance echoes with the sound of the market, marketsmimic stages. Coriolanus is repeatedly called to perform at Rome’s market.Citizens ‘attend’ rulers there (2.2.161), and want a satisfying show, a showCoriolanus is disgusted to have to give:

Mother, I am going to the market-place.Chide me no more. I’ll mountebank their loves,Cog their hearts from them, and come home belovedOf all the trades in Rome. (3.2.131–4)

Douglas Bruster has shown how works such as Troilus and Cressida,seemingly geographically and temporally remote from London’s exactingprofits and losses, deploy ‘the parlance of the market’ as ‘a readilyrecognizable dialect’ (97–117). Yet the behaviour and conditions evokedby this dialect thwart, or dissipate, some characters’ more (putatively) nobledesires. Comparably, Dillon suggests that Love’s Labours Lost problematisesany attempt to separate a spatial or creative location from the demands ofthe ‘expanding’ city and its commercial ‘rush and noise’. Such attempts tocreate a ‘retreat’ fail because the punning language of the characters seekingto sequester themselves is ‘commoditised’ as a ‘fashionable object, revellingin its own novelty value’, and thus subject to, and signifier of, novel marketforces. When this comedy’s characters exchange witticisms, they conversein a ‘currency’, marketing their linguistic wares ‘as goods are displayed in



the luxury shops of the Royal Exchange’. Dillon concludes that this signalsShakespeare’s ‘ambivalence’ to the fashionable commodification andconspicuous consumption of his ‘product’ (66–78). Timon of Athens takesthis ambivalence to satiric extremes. Commercial ‘traffic’ is ‘god’ here(1.1.241). So, Gail Kern Paster suggests, the ‘materialism’ of what Timonterms the ‘detestable town’ (4.1.33) perverts and infects even the ‘traditionalguardians’ of refined sensibilities, ‘its artists’ (92). Moreover, if Athens’financial and social relations bind people to each other, this is largelypredatory, conditional and ultimately ‘destructive interdependence’ (101).

Evidently, London’s material dominance caused concern. By 1616,James I marvelled at, yet was appalled by, London’s prodigiousness: ‘all thecountrey is gotten into London; so, with time, England will only be London,and the whole countrey will be left waste’ (qtd. in Munro 97). As a denselypopulated space of physical and socio-economic interdependence andproximity, London offered ‘infinite connectability’ (Munro 132), and ‘newpossibilities for exchange and combination’ (Manley 1). These possibilitieswere not necessarily benign. Rooms in old, cramped houses, or evennew-built multi-occupational residences, were ‘multifunctional’ and‘bipermeable’; for better or for worse, households were ‘embedded’ in thewider community (Gowing 135). This provoked anxiety as much ascommonality. Scholars have shown how such characteristics of urban liferegister in Shakespeare’s plays. The Comedy of Errors problematises modernattempts to separate a public, masculine, commercial world from a private,feminised, domestic environment.4 Due to pressures brought to bear onpeople and places in the plot, these domains become ‘mutually constitutive’,materially interrelated, and so ‘farcically interfere with each other’(Christensen 20, 23). The chain that circulates and connects characterstogether financially and dramatically thus emerges as an emblem of urban‘concatenation’ (Bruster 77).

London could seem a victim of its own success. Few escaped the effectsof poverty, disease or crime at one time or another. In 1563, plague killedmore than 20,000 people in the City and London’s liberties (almostone-fourth of the population); in 1593, nearly 18,000 perished; in 1603,the death-toll was 30,000 (Brigden,New Worlds 298). Such horrors impactedupon every aspect of the city, including the playhouses. Given early moderntheories that disease was spread by respiration, and the press of crowds atcertain places in the city, contemporaries perceived intense connectionsbetween plague, language, theatre and urban space: all were contaminatedand contaminating. Anti-theatrical commentators read the spread of diseaseas punishment for the dissolute comminglings and confusing dissimulationsgenerated in playhouses. In 1577,Thomas White sermonised: ‘the cause ofplagues is sinne, if you looke to it well: and the cause of sinne are playes:therefore the cause of plagues are playes’ (qtd. in Chambers 4:197). London’stheatres were closed and performances adjourned during times of plague:between 1603 and 1610 playhouses shut for 60 out of a possible 96 working



months. If the depredations caused by plague affected theatres politicallyand economically, they also altered plays lexically. Munro has recentlydiscussed the plaguey properties of Coriolanus (176–99). But for Keir Elam,Timon of Athens is the ‘most pestilential’ Shakespearean drama. Timon’s‘disease-spreading’ lines at 4.1 are only part of the ‘mortal halitosis’ of a playin which the word plague (or similar terms) occurs fourteen times (20–1).Clearly, though, problems of city life (and death) also offered creativeopportunities. Disruptions due to plague also necessitated writers diversifyingtheir activities, as Shakespeare did.

If problems like disease were a symptom of broader socio-economic anddemographic factors, historians generally agree that disorder in the capitalwas rare, and when it did occur was not organised. Londoners coheredthrough a variety of institutions: community, neighbourhood and familynetworks; alliances among responsive elites; charity; and administrative unitssuch as wards, parishes, companies and guilds. As Ian Archer observes, theseinstitutions mitigated potential disruption or anomie (Stability 17, 74). Therewas no ‘chronic instability’, but neither was the city ‘absolutely stable’(Rappaport 18). Policing London may have been difficult, especially in thesuburbs, but governance did go on, and seems to have included a diverserange of people to do so (Archer,‘Popular Politics’ 36). Perceptions of socialchaos in London, especially in the 1590s, did not necessarily reflectreality. Yet such perceptions were significant. Essex’s rebellion of 1601 mayhave failed because of a lack of popular support, and because London’sauthorities remained loyal to the Queen. But the errant Earl presumed suchsupport might materialise, and the court subsequently ‘took great pains tosecure the city’ (Sacks 33–5). This reveals the perceived potential for disorderin the capital.

Shakespeare’s plays reflect critically on the contradictions and compromisesof the material conditions in which they were produced; accordingly, theyevoke this perceived potential for disorder in urban environments. Forcertain critics, this potential is evident at the level of the plays’ language. InJulius Caesar, Goran Stanivukovic notes, characters often omit or repeatconjunctions such as ‘and’, in rhetorical asyndeton and polsyndeton. Whetherdesperately repeated or dislocated, the fraught relations between parts ofspeech and clauses echo the discontinuities within and between factions inRome (56–9). To go by the words of any number of nobles or patriciansin the plays, all cities are places in which an agitated, critical mass readilychallenged the curbs of ‘duty and obedience’ (Sir Thomas More 1.56–7). Ofcourse, through the efforts of administrators like Thomas More, evenone-time rebels accept ‘Obedience is the best in each degree’ (7.58). Suchis the ‘frailty of the multitude’ (7.170). Crucially, though, More is speciallyqualified: he knows, is known to, and thus respected by the rioters as aconcerned ‘friend’ (14.44). More may be acting this role, but his goodadministrative conduct exposes the complacencies of some in the rulingclass. Munro has recently explored the figure of the crowd in early modern



London, yet in all the plays’ portrayals of disordered cities, one motif recurs:the most potent threat is not the mob but their conflicted elite, some ofwhom would rather see the city destroyed than redistribute power andresources. As Jonathan Dollimore influentially argued in 1985, Measure forMeasure suggests how ‘disorder generated by misrule’ is ‘ideologicallydisplaced onto the ruled’; the problem is not the ‘low-life’, but factions inthe dominant order (78). Returning to Julius Caesar, Rome’s people aredescribed as fickle or inhuman, a ‘common herd’ (1.2.264). Yet Caesarhimself is ‘prodigious grown’ (1.3.76), and those who plot against him seem‘monstrous’ (2.1.81), threatening city and empire.

Early Modern London: The City, the Court, and the Theatres

Perceived crises aside, dramatists and actors benefited from the fact thatLondon’s stability and burgeoning population could sustain a diversetheatrical world, including temporary stages at inns and schools, open-aircommercial theatres like the Globe, and enclosed spaces like the Blackfriarsplayhouse (into which Shakespeare’s company moved in 1608). Of course,in addition to the commercial and ideological pressures of performing inthe city, plays were subject to official censorship, by the Master of Revels,by the Lord Chamberlain, and, up to 1607, by the Archbishops of Londonand Canterbury (see Dutton). Moreover, London’s stages could also be thefocus of intense anti-theatrical invective from the capital’s vocal religiouscultures. Yet the city’s cultural infrastructure did facilitate innovative writing.Book-sellers purveyed the translations and chronicles that became dramatists’source material. Printers published play-texts, poems and prose when theatreswere closed or revenues were tight. Entrepreneurs speculated, like-mindedcollaborators were at hand, and rival writers challenged each other, in moreor less amicable terms, if only to ensure audiences.5 As Martine Van Elkshows, references in plays such as The Taming of the Shrew and The Comedyof Errors suggest Shakespeare consumed literary forms with a particularrelevance in London at the time, not least the brilliant and morally ambiguousnarratives known as cony-catching pamphlets (324–6).

Theatre in London was also stimulated by the presence of the royal court,and attendant aristocrats and gentry. Patronage provided a vital cash injectionand political protection when revived in earnest in the 1580s and 90s (Ingram86; see Parry). Critics have recently explored how, in addition to playsfunded and masques commissioned by the court, the presence or arrival ofthe monarch in London also offered another opportunity for dramaticproduction: royal pageants.6There is no evidence to indicate that Shakespearecontributed to masques or to pageants, though it has been argued that eventslike James I’s coronation procession echo in works such as Coriolanus (seeGeorge). Such pageants consolidated the idea that London was camera regis,the monarch’s room at the centre of an expansionist nation, what Jameshimself would gloss in 1603 as ‘the Chamber of our Imperiall Crowne’ (qtd.



in Goldberg 50). James ‘orchestrated’ this discourse as a ‘symbolic conquest– a “pacification” of the city’, mimicking colonial ambitions (Marcus,Puzzling Shakespeare 168). Yet the fact that such pacification was necessaryindicates that the trope of camera regis sought to obscure or reduce the city’sunruly autonomy. Urban ceremonies might idealise and aggrandise the city,as much as the monarch entering it. Ben Jonson’s Londinium Arch, builtfor James’s procession into London in 1604, displayed a ‘panorama’ of thecity in a monumental sequence (Munro 51). Coronation pageants couldalso prescribe how monarchs might rule, and as such were not necessarilyeulogistic. As Munro notes:

London served to frame the pageants, to authenticate their rehearsal of power,but it also undermined the ideal they put forward by contextualizing andcontemporizing it, bringing to the surface the artificiality of the ritual and thepolitical motivations that guided its expression. (58)

Citing the Venetian ambassador Horatio Busino’s account of the vexedreception of a mayoral show in 1617, Munro observes that London’s crowdsrefused to act as ‘mere endorsers’ (71). With this in mind, it is possible toperceive how relations between the city and the court, and Shakespeareantheatre and the court, were sometimes strained.

Munro traces how Shakespeare uses the discourse of camera regis, if onlyto unsettle it, especially in the histories. Buckingham greets Edward V inRichard III with, ‘Welcome, sweet Prince, to London, to your chamber’(3.1.1). Since Edward is later confined in the Tower of London, this tropeis ‘deeply ironic’ (83). In the two parts of Henry IV, London is fragmentedinto ‘intimate and quasi-private spaces’: if the monarch can’t make the citytheir chamber, the play makes chambers of the city, staging but also isolatingits subversiveness (85). Through Hal’s performances in these distinct citystages, ‘the court encloses London’ (86). By Henry V, London ‘vanishes’from the plays’ ‘dramatic world’ (87). Henry VIII finally overturns modelsof camera regis in the earlier histories: ‘here it is London that surrounds theprivate and protected domains of court theatrics’ (92). Since the ideologicaland actual architecture of camera regis could be shaken, pageantry also hadsometimes demystifying implications. Shakespeare may not have contributedto pageantry, and may or may not have had republican proclivities, but heapparently appreciated this. In Henry VIII 4.1, when Shakespeare does portraya pageant, the orgiastic, celebratory London crowds are not disloyal ordisobedient, but they are ‘too much: they offer more joy, more loyalty than isneeded or desired’ (Munro 102). With his modulated use of the camera registrope, and his echoes of unruly pageants, Shakespeare staged monarchs’ ambi-valence to having to stage themselves to a rapacious, sprawling, illegible city.

It would be a mistake, though, to isolate the historical court from theactual city that sustained (or threatened) it. Dillon notes court and the citywere ‘inextricably symbiotic’: each benefited from the resources and powerof the other (1). In turn, theatre benefited from this symbiosis. Dillon usefully



articulates this relationship: London’s theatres had a ‘double orientation’towards the ‘two locations’ of court and city, locations that were ‘necessarilyin dialogue with each other as well as with the theatre’ (4). Much recentscholarship has built on Steven Mullaney’s influential work in The Place ofthe Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (1988) to show thatthe relationship between court and city was not harmonious, and that thishad implications for the theatre. As Ingram describes, from the 1570s,London’s Lord Mayors habitually sought to stop playing at city inns, and toban plays from the City’s limits (119–38). This brought civic authoritiesinto conflict with royal representatives such as the Lord Chamberlain, whowanted to protect professional theatrical companies, so they could performfor the Queen at festive occasions, and also, in Louis Montrose’s view,aggrandise state ideology and supervise subjects (29). To Montrose, thesecontradictions exposed a gap between ‘the theory and practice of stateregulation’, in which Elizabethan dramatists ‘discovered a conceptual spacefor the exercise of their own authority’ (65). This may be overstating thecase. Yet in the actual spaces of suburbs and the liberties either outside thecity walls or beyond City jurisdiction, theatres did survive due to historicalprecedents, inefficient administration, and legal ambiguity.

However, this model of theatre’s development in the actual and conceptualspaces outside or between competing authorities appears to depend onseparations of suburb and city, margin and centre, that did not necessarilyhold firm in the period.7 Suburban population growth is undeniable, andthis did impact upon administrative control of the city. In 1560, 73 per centof Londoners lived in the City, while in 1600 that proportion had droppedto 54 per cent (Finlay and Shearer 45). As Paul Griffiths and Mark Jennerobserve: ‘By the 1630s . . . only a minority of Londoners fell under Cityrule’ (‘Introduction’ 2). But this did not mean the suburbs and liberties wereanarchic. So while Mullaney accepted that the liberties and suburbs hadsome material and legal relations with the rest of the city, perhaps heoverestimated their autonomy, and overlooked the fluid exchanges betweenparts of the city, and between the city and the country around it. Theseexchanges animated Shakespeare. Measure for Measure dramatically realisesthe interpenetrations between central-licit and marginal-illicit activities andspaces in a corrupt urban environment where citizens, aristocrats andmerchants alike invested in and frequented brothels (Griffiths, ‘Structure’44, 55). Thomas Nashe fittingly termed brothels ‘licensed stews’ (483). AsPompey opines to Mistress Overdone, in an explicitly political register:‘Good counsellors lack no clients’ (1.2.98–9).

Lawrence Manley observes that early modern cities display a ‘paradoxicaltendency . . . to enslave and liberate their populations (indeed to liberate bymeans of hyperorganization)’ (17). It is hard to claim early modern Londonwas ‘hyperorganized’, but the city was riven by competing jurisdictions,including parishes, suburban limits and county borders. Shakespeare evidentlyperceived how these multiple structures of authority could be repressive:



‘To the Tower Shakespeare has more references than to any other greatbuilding in London’ (Wheatley 157). But just as the sonnet’s strictures freedShakespeare to experiment with that form, so London’s compromising yetalso compromised constrictions offered opportunities that licensed creativity.

Early Modern London: Styled by Strangers?

Critics have argued another structure of life in early modern Londonconditioned and was realised in Shakespeare’s plays: citizenship. Earlierscholarship by the likes of Alexander Leggatt, Brian Gibbons and HarryLevin tended to associate portrayals of citizenship with particular genres,such as comedy, or with particular modes of citizen-related pageantry; morerecent work (notably by Jean Howard) has widened the scope.

A citizen in early modern London had earned and been enfranchisedto certain social, commercial, legal and political powers, rights andresponsibilities. To be enfranchised, a male head of a household had toundergo formal oath-taking and rituals; citizen status was then ‘secured’through ‘patrimony, purchase, or most usually, a seven-year apprenticeshipunder the authority of a freeman’ and their guild, ‘mystery’, craft orprofession (Withington 10).8 Citizenship involved communal duties,requiring ‘qualities of civility and governance’, and ‘an acquaintance withthe personal skills required of rational and effective discourse’ (12, 150).Given these conditions, not everyone was eligible or equipped to be acitizen. Accordingly, in his recent study of the concept in relation toShakespeare, John Michael Archer describes how citizenship was definedby anxious opposition. Citizens were located ‘against the aristocracy . . . butmore pressingly in opposition to urban noncitizens, especially immigrantsfrom continental Europe’ (1). Such definition by opposition is demonstratedin some plays, where London’s citizens are notable by and privileged fortheir absence. Thomas Cartelli argues that Shakespeare removes ‘the literate,industrious, law-abiding citizen class’ from the scene of Cade’s rebellion in2 Henry VI. This absenting represents or even promotes ‘the point of viewof the one component of English society that presumably remained bothstable and reliable in the face of wholesale social disorder’ (58). However,with John Archer’s insights into the conflicted and oppositional state ofLondon citizenship, Cartelli’s ‘presumably’ is somewhat strained here. JohnArcher also stresses how Shakespeare explores the communal and civicconcerns of citizens by appropriating a ‘stock of words and turns of phrase’from discourses of citizenship (1). Yet with the tensions conditioningcitizenship, the plays’ uses of such discourses at once undermine and enlargecitizen status. In Measure for Measure, Archer suggests, citizen life is‘degraded’ (67). Even the bawd Mistress Overdone has a ‘trade’ with ‘clients’(1.2.99–100), and throughout 4.2 the hangman Abhorson intimates he is amember of a professional and technically skilled ‘mystery’. Following PhilWithington’s analyses of citizenship in the period, such characters might be



seen to prefigure ‘anti-citizens’ in later drama (such as Philip Massinger’s1630s play The City Madam), as figures ‘through which the principles ofcitizenship were at once expounded in words and subverted in practice’(164).

Other works grant more legitimate agency to those like citizens. InCoriolanus, Thomas B. Leinwand notes, Rome’s inhabitants represent a‘middling sort’ seeking the kinds of ‘entitlement’ familiar to London’scitizens (295–6). Modifying this approach, Cathy Shrank suggests ‘politicalparticipation’ in Rome depends upon ‘verbal capacity’. Coriolanus’ plebeians‘do not simply labor any more; they are starting to talk’ (415–17). In otherwords, they are becoming citizens. Yet where citizens are staged, and licenseda political stake in the state, they have a paradoxical role. In Richard III,Richard perceives his rule requires the consent of London’s citizens. Thesecitizens are not easily fooled, and show how they are able to critically evaluatepolitical events (as in 2.3). Yet, when confronted with Richard’s propagandamachine (at 3.7), they possess only ‘equivocal power’ in their ‘silentresistance’ to Buckingham’s ‘arrogant theatricality’: ‘It is at their momentof greatest political weakness that the power of the citizenry is asserted toits greatest extent’ (Archer, Citizen Shakespeare 90–1).

If citizens have recently received scholarly attention, so too have thoseexcluded from citizenship, especially migrants from within ‘Britain’ (termedforeigners), and those born outside it (termed strangers or aliens).9 Suchattention suggests that perhaps the most significant detail to consider whenthinking about Shakespeare’s relation to the city is that he wasn’t born inone. He was an outsider, an interloper from the country, and only movedto London some time in the mid-1580s. John Archer has recently historicisedthe complexities of Shakespeare’s status in the city, relating that status to therealities of citizenship:

Was Shakespeare a citizen? Yes, if we use the word in its everyday sense of‘inhabitant of a city’, for he spent most of his life in London. But Shakespearewas not admitted to ‘the freedom’ of the city, and thus he never became a ‘citizenof London’ in the accepted legal and political sense of his time. (1)

Despite his intimate familiarity with civic life in London and in Stratford,by his own lack of citizenship Shakespeare was ‘technically a foreigner’, aposition consolidated by his spatial and social location in the capital: ‘helived among aliens in the peripheral wards and neighbourhoods non-citizenstended to inhabit’ (Archer, Citizen Shakespeare 9). Documentary conjecturesuggests that ‘Shakespeare’, the man and the dramatic corpus, had closeconnections with London’s immigrants – the frontispiece to the 1623 Folio,and his bust in Stratford, were styled by strangers.10

It is only relatively recently that criticism has sought to emphasise this,perhaps because centuries of bardolatrous scholarship privileged Shakespeare’spower as the laureate of a homogenous England, and because critics havebecome sensitive to contemporary debates about exile, globalisation,nationalism and multiculturalism.11Yet Shakespeare’s outsider status enhances© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 820–850, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00452.xJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


the significance of how he staged cities. Precisely because he was a migrant,Shakespeare had much in common with other people in London at thetime. His experience of the city was not unique but typical. London was acity of newcomers, aliens, strangers, visitors and foreigners. Given mortalityrates, it has been estimated that between 3,750 and 6,000 immigrants wererequired each year to sustain the levels of population growth Londonexperienced.12 Ian Archer suggests that 20 per cent of adults living in thecity at the same time as Shakespeare were not born there (‘Shakespeare’sLondon’ 44). Such statistics indicate that by the early 1600s, ‘the majorityof London’s population was composed of first generation immigrants’ (Dillon25). These levels of immigration were not constant, or constantly rising:proportionally fewer strangers lived in the capital in the 1590s than atElizabeth’s accession (Rappaport 105). All the same, perceptions of largenumbers of incomers abounded, and demographic shifts did occur. Alienscontributed to a range of industries and trades, stimulating England’s growthand competitiveness.13 An anonymous text from 1626 realised this:

I London, that haue beene styled by Strangers, Emporium celeberrium totius Orbis;The most famous Citie and Marketplace of the whole World. By others styled,Trinobantum, I. Troynovant or New Troy: by others Augusta, I. An Imperiall Citie,by all, euer held, Camera Regis, I. (qtd. in Munro 177)

At one level, this passage restates the relationship between camera regis andempire. At another equally obvious level, it imagines how strangers ‘styled’,that is named or termed, London. But these lines also imagine how outsidersperceive and construct the city. Consequently, these lines also signal howthese terms, perceptions and constructions have been internalised by London:the narrator builds up London’s image with others’ words. The passage alsotherefore registers how London has been and is ideologically and materiallyconstructed by its comparisons and connections with strange, foreign people,tongues and global cities (past and present). This city, like Shakespeare, wasstyled by strangers. Perhaps by 1626, such processes of construction wereself-evident; perhaps they were still imagined, or feared. Yet Shakespeareanticipates both the reality and the fantasy. Discussing Bassanio’s listof Antonio’s extensive trading ‘ventures’ with ‘Tripolis . . . Mexico . . .England . . . / Lisbon,Barbary, and India’ in The Merchant of Venice (3.2.266–7), John Gillies notes:

What is suggested, therefore, by the intrusion of this geography into a play about‘merchants of Venice’, is not the Venetian reality (scarcely even the Venetianmyth) but Elizabethan ambitions for London. (66)

Some historians emphasise that the city capably assimilated lots of incomers,and this assimilation did not create ‘serious’ tensions between ‘nativesand immigrant’ (Rappaport 84). Yet there were problems, not least fornewcomers themselves. Londoners were intensely suspicious of the liberaleconomic policies that gave such cities like Antwerp the edge, and those inindustries affected by immigration would occasionally make their suspicions



violently apparent. Not all immigrants were the same, or seen to be thesame. The xenophobic riots of Evil May Day in 1517 were uniquely violent,but prefigured later flare-ups from the 1560s onwards. Yet while Londonershad a reputation for xenophobia, Laura Yungblut notes reactions toimmigrants displayed a ‘dichotomy of attitudes’ that were ‘neither simplenor clear’ (44). Such equivocations provided rich material for drama likeShakespeare’s, drama interrogating ‘questions of difference’, and examiningissues of urban assimilation, integration and identity (Loomba 154–5).Shakespeare contributed to the staging of large-scale xenophobic violenceonly once, with the portrayal of Evil May Day in the collaborative Sir ThomasMore. More’s speech to rioting Londoners is remarkable not simply becauseit demands and invokes imaginative sympathy for ‘the wretched strangers /Their babies at their back, with their poor luggage’ (6.84–5). He also assertshow an attack on such ‘strangers’ is also an attack on kingly and divine‘authority’ (6.106). Rioting in turn induces self-destructive violence, as‘other ruffians . . . shark’ on England’s most vulnerable, including the rioters(6.94 –6). More ends threatening banishment, a punishment to make therioters know what it is to be a refugee:

What country, by the nature of your error,Should give you harbour? . . .Why you must needs be strangers. (6.141–5)

More’s speech expediently restrains unrest, and the exchange around hisrhetoric confirms Londoners’ fickleness yet again. Yet as Munro observes,‘the description of Londoners as strangers themselves would have had strongresonance in a city increasingly composed of immigrants’ (Munro 44).Additionally, Shakespeare does not simply realise popular anti-immigrantfeeling in London. He also conveys how desperate elites might incitexenophobic discourses. In Henry VI, Part 2, Clifford marvels at his ownability to distract and subdue Cade’s followers, by emphasising the weaknessand illegitimacy of Cade’s spatial and social dislocation in the city (turninghim into an errant exile), and by summoning the spectre of a French invasionof the city:

Alas, he hath no home, no place to fly to, . . .Methinks already in this civil broilI see them lording it in London streets. (4.8.193–200)

If he records the voices of xenophobes, Shakespeare also articulates beingdifferent in the urban environment with the words of characters who areconstructed as different: Shylock and Othello are obvious examples. Perhapsin staging conflicts between such outsiders and insiders in cities, Shakespeareconfirmed topical divisions and discriminations. But the power of a playlike The Merchant of Venice was also in part due to Shakespeare’s audience’s‘susceptibility’ to any ‘dramatic theme derived from their new sense of thefragility of belonging anywhere’ (Kingsley-Smith 175). What was said aboutor done to a Jew in Venice (or 1590s London), or a victim of May Day,© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 820–850, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00452.xJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


could relate to contemporary spectators in the crowded capital, especiallyin the ‘extraterritorial’ space of theatre (Agnew 11). There, momentarily,people might be combined not despite but in and because of their differenceand strangeness, like the celebrants at the end of Henry VIII:‘all were woven/ So strangely in one piece’ (4.1.82 –3). Fabrication or not, by describingEngland’s infant future Queen as ‘this stranger’ (5.1.169), Henry VIII crownsthis dislocation as part of Elizabethan identity, in the theatre and beyond.Indeed, to some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, because London’s vitalitydepended on the arrival of the displaced, ‘strangers’ and immigrants, so,consequently, did the brilliance of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage.Shakespeare’s stake in the globe/Globe echoes in Thomas Heywood’s AnApology for Actors (1608). Heywood recognises the energies that madeLondon’s theatres what they were, connecting home and abroad, past andpresent, and aesthetic and mercantile worlds, and intimating that migrantsenriched the capital culturally not just economically:

Now, if you aske me why were not the theatres as gorgeously built in all othercities of Italy as Rome, and why are not play-houses maintained as well in othercities of England as London? My answere is . . . Rome was a metropolis, a placewhither all the nations knowne under the sunne resorted: so is London, andbeing to receive all estates, all princes, all nations, therefore to affoord them allchoyce of pastimes, sports, and recreations. (qtd. in Chambers 4:251–2)

In many plays across genres and years, Shakespeare repeatedly stages peoplearriving in a strange city, perceiving that city with strangers’ eyes. Strangers’perceptions often evoke alienation from the city, and from their own senseof self (see Antipholus’s complaint in The Comedy of Errors, 1.2.30–40). Yetsuch alienation and dissolution doesn’t just affect outsiders. Because of theuncanny relations possible in cities, these confusions also disturb insiders.Gail Kern Paster suggests that The Comedy of Errors makes Ephesus both‘home and alien city’, ‘welcoming and hostile’, for estranged and nativecharacters (187). Doubled and confused identities mean ‘outsiders’ and‘insiders’ experience the city in unfamiliar ways. So Adriana laments, whenfacing an Antipholus she does and does not find familiar (2.2.122–32). Instaging the city like this, might Shakespeare have also been portraying theexperience of a foreigner or immigrant coming to London? In turn, mightsuch stagings also show a familiar London to ‘native’ Londoners in unfamiliarways? Barbara Friedman observes that just as twinned twins lose and findthemselves in a bewitching, transforming Ephesus, so the theatre audiencewould have recognised homely London landmarks (such as inns called thePhoenix and Centaur) or concerns (the timely press of the market) in adistant port (79).

As with lots of migrants to the city, though, Shakespeare was not entirely‘foreign’, and retained strong connections to the England beyondLondon. The conveyance deeds registering Shakespeare’s co-purchase ofBlackfriars’ gatehouse in 1613 exemplify this paradoxical urban location anddislocation, listing the playwright as ‘of Stratford Vpon Avon in the countie



of Warwick gentleman’ (qtd. in Schoenbaum 221). It would seem that youcould take the actor out of the country, but not the country out of thenewly genteel owner-entrepreneur. Shakespeare existed at once in the city(or partially investing in a liminal bit of one), while also shoring up his roots:though the house was conveniently only 600 feet from Blackfriars’ theatre,Shakespeare leased it at once to a John Robinson, and it was bequeathed toShakespeare’s daughter in 1616.

The ‘constantly shifting perspectives’ evoked by Shakespeare’s plays ‘owesomething’ to his own ‘lack of rootedness’ in London (Archer,‘Shakespeare’sLondon’ 55). In this sense, invoking Theodor Adorno’s dictum that ‘it ispart of morality not to be at home in one’s home’, the plays’ political andethical commitments are informed by Shakespeare never being at home ina place that he arrived in, left and came back to (39). Perhaps, then, it wasthis polymorphous, ambivalent status that corresponded most closely witha city of strangers and of citizens, apprentices, merchants and aristocrats:‘Londoners lived in a multitude of worlds within worlds’ (Rappaport 215).

When considering drama, this multitudinousness is perhaps nowheremore evident, or significant, than in relation to language. Incomers,immigrants, aliens, translations, texts in other tongues, and the argots oftrades and professions made early modern London a city of great linguisticdiversity. There, if anywhere, it was becoming apparent that the Englishvernacular was not an autonomous absolute, but related to, opposed against,conditioned and informed by other languages. As Mullaney observes, citingMikhail Bakhtin, any such juxtaposition and interorientation of languagescould bring about cultural shifts.14 Did the city create self-consciousness ofthe idioms, tricks and tropes of one’s own tongue, or of the hybridity,conditionality, and plasticity of one’s own language, stimulating the creativeuse of that language? As Sigmund Freud affirmed, in an essay on theinterrelations of the foreign and the familiar, the homely and the unfamiliar:‘we ourselves speak a language that is foreign’ (‘The “Uncanny” ’ 341).

Early Modern London: Other Cities?

In 1935,William Empson asserted ‘(all large towns in the plays are conceivedas London)’ (35). The analyses above similarly implied that when Shakespearewrote of other cities, he can be considered to be writing of London. Thissection discusses how critics have questioned this implication. Empson’sparentheses betray his own reservations about his claim, for it is debateable:conceived by whom – Shakespeare, audiences past, audiences present,‘him’,‘us’ or ‘them’? Other scholars have taken Empson’s reservations further.Mumford observed that while Shakespeare ‘shared’ the ‘milieu’ ofLondon-based contemporaries such as Thomas Dekker, he ‘transcended itat a hundred points’ (139). In other words, Shakespeare’s cities have auniversal significance beyond London. At the other extreme, criticshistoricising Shakespeare suggest his commitment to representing the city



he lived in was not comprehensive. John Twyning argues that Measure forMeasure represents Shakespeare’s ‘only full-scale intervention into thecontemporary milieu of the metropolis’ (London Dispossessed 20). Put anotherway, Shakespeare never really wrote about London at all.

However this debate is resolved, it is clear that sometimes Shakespeare’sstage cities, like Shakespeare, were simultaneously distanced in time or spacefrom London. So while Shakespeare’s stage cities were and are inconceivablewithout early modern London, not one of his plays presented contemporaryLondon to a contemporary London audience. This is all the more remarkablesince other dramatists were willing and able to do this by the late 1590s atleast. Perhaps Shakespeare consciously chose not to do this, deciding insteadto explore the implications of presenting ‘his’ city as somewhere different,and so both uncannily familiar and uncannily estranged, ‘at once foreignand disconcertingly close to home’ (Barton 115). So there are vital reasonswhy it is necessary not to try to conceive ‘all large towns’ simply as London,but instead to insist on the differences between the temporally orgeographically ‘other’ cities Shakespeare staged and the city in which theywere staged. Part of this may involve how a city such as early modernLondon related to other cities near and far, real or imagined, materially andconceptually. In her ground-breaking study of the idea of the city inRenaissance culture, Paster suggested that cities should not be seen solelyin opposition to the ‘country’, but also in opposition to other cities.Crucially, Paster argues this opposition between cities is also evident withincities. Divided, socially, spatially, economically and ideologically, the cityemerges ‘as its own antitype’ (2). From this perspective, London becomesan other to itself, with ‘many guises’ strange to its inhabitants and itself(Orlin,‘Introduction’ 1).

Shakespeare’s histories often stage the irruption of the present city into afabricated world of the past, thereby representing the various forms of theLondon he lived in. Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin argue this occurswith the unruly tavern scenes in Henry IV, Part I and Part II (164). Puttingdisorderly behaviour apparently in the past might have made it possible tostage. Yet the relevance and location of these women would also have beenimpossible to ignore, because they embodied the gritty actualities of life inthe late sixteenth-century city (176). The power for this comes by stage andaudiences keeping the close and contemporary capital and a historicallydistant city in view at once.

London assumed other identities beyond its past form. As seen, politically,the city could be the monarch’s chamber, in which all others merely resided.Humanist revivals of classical ideas translated London aesthetically andideologically, conceiving it, for example, as Troy (old and New).15 Intensifiedby the strife of the Reformation, religious discourses constructed Londonas Jerusalem, imminent, besieged or fallen (and so a city of devils, aBabylon).16 To visitors, merchants and expansionists, London was an



economic rival to but also mimic of continental economic powerhouses:the Royal Exchange was styled after Antwerp’s trading hall.

Critics have shown that one such powerhouse assumes great importancein terms of how Shakespeare staged cities: Venice. For early modern Englishcommentators,Venice was a beguilingly contradictory place. A model ofRepublicanism, a paradigm of economic ambition and success, a pinnacleof open and liberal human interaction, and therefore invested with thepotential for changing itself and its inhabitants,Venice was, like the rest ofthe Italy, tainted by Machiavellianism, full of hierarchies, intrigues, and evenAnti-Christian.17 To Jonathan Goldberg, the contradictions realised by thesecommentators produced a ‘double’ or ‘mixed Venice’ (77). This doublenessand mixture is evident in Shakespeare’s Venetian plays. Notably, in bothThe Merchant of Venice and Othello, characters invoke ‘two-headed Janus’, afigure often represented as combining opposites (Merchant, 1.1.50; see Othello1.2.33). Lancelot Gobbo’s internally contradictory dialogue at 2.2 vocaliseshis divided loyalties: he is a servant bound by duty and economy to a master,yet also a Christian disgusted by a diabolical Jew. Shylock’s servant mightthus be considered as a suitable representative of Venetian conflictedidentities. As Bassanio marvels in his discussions with Lancelot and his father,‘One speak for both’ (2.2.135).

Part of the purpose of Shakespeare’s representations of Venice may havebeen to explore or inform contemporary ideas about a foreign city-state,bringing the globe to the Globe (D’Amico 5). Yet Shakespeare’s Venice isdeliberately inauthentic. This is clear in one key regard – as Richard Sennetnotes, unlike the real city-state, Shakespeare’s Venice has no Ghetto, spatially,socially and ideologically dividing Jews and other ‘foreigners’ from the restof the city (215). Why? Perhaps Shakespeare exaggerates what contemporariessaw as Venice’s ‘disturbing porosity’ (Gillies 137), and thereby hypothesiseswhat could happen to an Englishman if London’s discriminations lapsed,and aliens used native laws or customs against their ‘host’ culture.Conversely, perhaps the play also discloses the implicit ghettoisation inLondon, betraying, in turn, the brutal expediency of interactions withoutsiders reduced to economic ciphers in Venice and London.

In their portraits of religious and cultural outsiders, plays like The Merchantof Venice and Othello find much material in perceived differences in statusand power in Venice. Lombardo and Mullini suggest that what may alsohave fascinated Shakespeare about Venice, and what may have motivatedhis repeated staging of it, was the city’s reputation for theatricality. Iago’saudacious soliloquies publicise how he plots Othello’s tragic fall, and reflecta city where identity is established through pageants, masques and shows.Shakespeare exploited this theatricality to interrogate how performanceconstituted social distinctions in London. Yet by staging Venice’s difference,Shakespeare could imagine what London might or might not be, and realisewhat it was not yet.



Other critics discuss how Italian cities of the past feature significantly inthe plays, most obviously Rome. Shakespeare’s contemporaries had the samekind of ambivalences about Rome as they did about Venice.18 Rome wasbuilt into London’s ‘folkloric topography’ (Archer, Citizen Shakespeare121). As Orrell affirms, the very theatres themselves modernised Romanmodels, and apologists for the theatre proudly invoked this heritage (104).Others sustained the connection to condemn London’s stages for being, inStephen Gosson’s words, ‘as full of secrete adulterie as they were in Rome’(qtd. in Chambers 4:218). Equally, some writers maintained links betweentyrannical, classical Rome and diabolical, papal Rome.

As seen above, certain characteristics of Shakespeare’s depictions of Romehad topical relevance in London. Yet, as with Venice, and following hisambivalent contemporaries, Shakespeare cultivated important differencesbetween London and Rome. The Roman plays often reveal somethingabout the nature of cities not immediately comprehensible or necessarilyexpressible in London. Rome is voracious, prodigious, haunted, restless,restive, changeable and changed, endlessly up for grabs; Romans and othersfight over its contradictory identities. In Coriolanus, Paster notes, ‘theanonymous plebeians never use the word’, while the tribunes only do sixtimes: ‘ “Rome” belongs to the patricians’ (66–7). By making a Rome likeLondon, perhaps Shakespeare realised these contradictions in London. Yetby displacing London’s voracity and mutability onto, or into the form of,another city, the plays emphasise how hard it is to read London’scontemporary form. Equally, perhaps the plays’ Romes imagine alternativesfor London that were not yet possible. However we address these alternatives,sustaining the difference between Rome staged and London staging remainsvital. For just as Shakespeare hints at and explores the potential formetatheatre in Venice’s theatrical cityscapes, so his Rome can suggest thefabricated discriminations in London, only because it isn’t London:

Rome is Shakespeare’s well-equipped, sharply lit laboratory for research into thenature of politics. Not being England, the Roman political system lends itself tothe kind of cold, unsentimental analysis that could not be practised on one’s ownsystem. Rome is no demi-paradise. It boasts no hereditary monarchs; indeed itsfounding acts include rebellion and regicide. . . . Rome is a city of men andwomen, a cultural construct. ( Jagendorf 232)

Cultivating difference was more than merely experimental. Marcus’ petitionto the massed ‘Romans’ (and Goths) to ‘speak’ in Titus Andronicus (5.3.134),seems altogether more inclusive than what has gone before. Sid Ray suggeststhat by showing leaders incorporating different voices at the end of theplay, Shakespeare ‘condemns rapacious, nonconsensual political rulership’(39). Andrew Hadfield develops Ray’s argument to posit that while being‘politically suggestive rather than definitive’, Titus Andronicus does indicatethat the ‘fictional classical Rome’ it represents ‘cannot be ruled without thesupport of its citizens’ (129). Such readings are open to criticism and question(Dessen 104–6). Nonetheless, it has been suggested Shakespeare sought to



represent similar urban empowerment in his staging of Rome later in hiscareer. Critics have often related the Romans’ hunger and anger in Coriolanusto the Midlands Rising of 1607. But Leah Marcus notes another significantcontextual event in 1608: London was granted a new charter by James Iincreasing the city’s jurisdiction over Blackfriars,Whitefriars and other areas.Reading Coriolanus in relation to this shift in civic authority, Marcus suggeststhe play has an improving impulse related to a London that did not yet exist,but might:

The 1608 Coriolanus invites Londoners to don a robe of humility . . . and wearit more productively than Coriolanus – see their own weaknesses as a groupreflected in their Roman counterparts so that they can cast off their unsettledfragmented factionalism and prepare themselves for increased political autonomy.(Puzzling Shakespeare 210)

In Coriolanus, the people’s tribune Sicinus asks: ‘What is the city but thepeople?’ (3.1.198). His prompt to Rome’s citizens may represent anotherexpedient manipulation, but it raises significant questions. Read one way,Sicinus’s words intimate a city cannot exist without its people. A city mightbe defined by its people, excepting all others. Such conclusions empowerthe people. However, inverting the line offers other possibilities: what area people without the intense interrelations offered by a city? How can people,in London, or other cities, attain power and autonomy without the socialdensity and collective experiences induced by urbanisation? As Paster notes,of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s Rome is constructed so as to convey the‘horrific intimacy of life . . . that makes any event political’ (73). Whetherthis reflected London’s realities, or fashioned alternatives for the city, dependson one’s sense of the limits of what Shakespeare sought to achieve.

The significant differences of Shakespeare’s other cities also informMarcus’s reading of Measure for Measure in Puzzling Shakespeare. Vienna is‘uncannily like London’ (192), yet any ‘aura of familiarity . . . is suddenlyshattered’ (183) when a continental city at the heart of the Holy RomanEmpire is named (186). This simultaneous (un)familiarity matters. If theplay’s city is located, in Marcus’s terms, ‘within the walls’ of London’slimits, it responds to concerns in the Jacobean capital about disease,prostitution, conflicts between jurisdictions, and the City and the new Court.If, however, the play’s city is positioned ‘without the wall’, ‘in terms of thegoals of international Catholicism’ a different local reading emerges: ‘aHapsburg duke marries an Isabella and takes over a Vienna markedly likeLondon – or . . . a London subsumed under Catholic Vienna’ (192).Crucially, though, Marcus suggests that the play allows double readings thatcollocate these different cities. Diverse audiences might have been able toplace the city shown in Measure for Measure as both London and Vienna atthe same time, and this had profound implications:

If Vienna is taken to be London, then the play goes a fair distance toward theJacobean line, displaying a ruler who succeeds in establishing equity and a



semblance of social order when his deputy has spectacularly failed. But if Viennais Vienna, or (worse yet) a London become Vienna, then the play’s topicalresonances turn completely inside out: all of the gestures which seem to praiseJames in his triumphant mastery over London can become elements in a darkfantasy of alien Catholic domination. (164)

Future Cities

Since the seventeenth century, Shakespeare’s works and words have beenappropriated in global cultures and diverse contexts. For this reason, thecorrelation of ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘the city’ cannot be restricted solely todiscussions of early modern London. This is not to suggest Shakespeareanplays have some universal qualities transcending the time and place of theirinception. On the contrary, numerous critics have shown how contextualizingShakespeare’s works in specific urban environments at specific times aftertheir inception can reveal particular tensions in those environments and times.

When considering these futures, scholars reveal Shakespeare’s relationshipto London is still relevant. As in the early modern period, arguments aboutthe proper place of the Shakespearean stage in early nineteenth-centuryLondon realised socio-cultural shifts in the capital. Jane Moody discusseshow, in the face of legislation limiting performances, a socially diverse rangeof spectators attended illegitimate, popular, burlesque, Shakespeareanproductions in the city’s minor theatres, and on stages located in ‘an oldclothes factory, a shop or a disused chapel’ in the East End (61). Manycommentators satirised such productions, thereby policing the unauthorisedconsumption of culture. Yet still mixed audiences came, and their presenceconfused the ‘old moral topographies’, spatial divisions and social separationsby which the city had been apprehended:‘theatrical practice, and in particularpopular consumption, disturbed existing assumptions about the control,dissemination and patronage of dramatic culture in the metropolis’ (69). Inlater years, and with the re-construction of the Globe on the Thames’ SouthBank, the Shakespeare industry – an agglomeration of culture, entertainment,heritage, patronage and business – has literally re-shaped the topography ofcontemporary London (see Worthern). Such is Shakespeare’s hold on ‘his’city, further attempts to resurrect London’s past in his name and in the bodyof the Globe eagerly promise (or threaten) to recreate the current city’s fabric:‘Unfortunately, too much of the foundation lies under remaining buildingsto excavate more at present’ (Astington 101).

As Shakespeare has been appropriated, other media have evoked uncannyalternative visions of London. Richard Loncraine’s 1996 film version ofRichard III (starring Ian McKellen as Richard) imagines a parallel, potentialcapital, where it is as if Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts had won theBattle of Cable Street against anti-fascist Londoners in 1936. Richard cannotthrive as a civilian, so he cuts the world in his image, militarising the entirecity. The South Bank becomes a theatre of war, not a playground for art,and the redundant shell of Battersea power station abounds with guns, as



men struggle for dominance. Peter S. Donaldson identifies how the film’seclectic techniques reference silent cinema and still photography, techniqueshe links with the rise of fascism. Donaldson argues Loncraine explicates that‘cinema cannot escape its history’ (249); film becomes a ‘necropolis’ (244).Read in terms of the twentieth-century metropolis, perhaps Richard III alsobetrays how London contains deathly streets and decaying sites secretingwhat is inescapable, and what ‘might-have-been’, from their history.

But London is not the only future city in which Shakespearean dramaresonates. As Dorothy Wong describes, until fairly recently, the ‘fervour’for Shakespeare in Hong Kong was in part because of his status ‘as Englishlanguage’ (47–8). Located in and contributing to the cultural and economicinfrastructure of a city, Shakespeare was ‘closely interwoven’ with thehegemony of ‘British colonial interests’ (48). Language acquisition,established by studying Shakespeare, was considered vital to success incommercial or bureaucratic vocations, and made so by both British admini-strators and subjects.Yet as British influence in Hong Kong was supersededby Chinese interests and language,‘so Shakespeare vanished from the Englishsyllabus’ (53).

In addition to assessing Shakespeare’s significance in colonial andpostcolonial cities, critics have evaluated his place in ‘post-conflict’ urbanenvironments. Shakespeare occupies a ‘vexed but integral’ position in Irishimaginations past and present, not least when manifested in school anduniversity curricula north and south of the border (Burnett, ‘Introduction’1). Ramona Wray explores the dynamics of teaching Shakespeare in Belfastin the 1990s to what is known as the ‘Troubles generation’, those born afterthe beginning of sectarian hostilities in the late 1960s (238). Discussing herown teaching practice,Wray describes how a range of Shakespearean playsactivate yet also inhibit diverse ‘Northern meanings’, that is, contextualisedclassroom interpretations (or silences) regarding Shakespeare’s stagings ofdivision, conflict, and discrimination (251). Shadowing critical approachesthat emphasise such concerns, students empower themselves to locateShakespeare in ‘a society’ and a city ‘in which marginality and modes ofoppression are familiar material realities’ (252). Of course, such realities andinterpretations are not exclusive to Belfast, or cities.19 But as a city like Belfastbecomes a focus for such conditions, it also becomes a place for vitally criticaland creative analyses of them.

Evidently, far beyond London, early modern or otherwise, cities do thingsto Shakespeare. Equally, versions of Shakespeare can do things to cities, andthe cultures they sustain. Adrienne Scullion discusses how Glasgow’s Citizens’Theatre staged several ‘extraordinary’ productions of Shakespeare’s plays inthe early 1970s (175). Variously featuring all-male casts, stark sets, physicallyexposed actors, heightened sexual ambiguity, or ‘highly demonstrative’emotional displays, these productions prompted ‘outrage’ in the city’s press,with critics intimating that the theatre compromised norms of Scottish civic,sexual and gender identity (175). However, the company resisted such



concerns. Instead, they insisted such productions realised their ambitionsfor European relevance for their theatre and their city, while also beingresponsive to the population of a modern, progressive metropolis. As theprogramme notes for a 1972 version of Antony and Cleopatra insisted: ‘wefeel we are doing what we should be doing within this community’ (qtd.in Scullion 179).

Modern appropriations create new, and similarly challenging, relationshipsbetween Shakespeare and cities. As Stephen M. Buhler reveals, films locatingShakespeare in a city often identify and expose that city’s ‘cultural faultlines’(227). Buhler describes how Steve Martin’s 1991 film L.A. Story reveals aconurbation abounding in Shakespearean significances. Beyond insistentvisual and aural echoes (notably of Hamlet), L.A. Story casts Shakespeare asa marker of high culture and ‘English authoritative speech’ set against thehybrid, multicultural, commercialised and ‘polyglot’ West Coast: ‘the filmis predicated upon some Angelenos’ envious desire for ‘authentic’ Englishculture and their reliance upon it in the face of other cultural threats’(214). Yet this desire to embed Shakespeare in L.A. has a consciously ironicstrain. At one point Martin’s character, Harris K. Telemacher, and the BritishSara McDowell (Victoria Tennant), uncover ‘a monument commemoratingShakespeare’s alleged visit to Southern California’; the date of this monumentplaces Shakespeare ‘on the North American continent at the historicalmoment of expanding English colonization’ (217–18).

If Shakespearean films shadow fault-lines in modern cities, films withurban settings can also intensify tensions within Shakespearean texts.Discussing Michael Almereyda’s film Hamlet (2000), Mark Thornton Burnettinterrogates the reasons for locating the action in another Americanmetropolis: ‘But why New York?’ (49). Burnett suggests New York isreplete with ‘ersatz architectural symbols’, and stands as a ‘fragmentarylandscape’; visually, spatially and socially, it ‘represents, par excellence, apostmodern urban phenomenon’ (49). Extrapolating from the play’s concernswith obsessive reflection, surveillance and enclosure, and a filmic traditionthat figures New York as a ‘breeding ground for psychotic neuroses andmaterial acquisitiveness’, Almereyda exploits these urban features to createa ‘cinematic grammar of confinement’ (49, 53). The city’s ‘glassy’manifestation in buildings surfaced with ‘hard transparent materials’ constructsa ‘resistant architecture’ that dwarfs and alienates characters, not least Hamletwith his ‘decentered soul’ (50 –1). And yet, just as Shakespeare’s cities areboth constricting and unruly, so Almereyda’s New York ‘offers alternatives’to the ‘corporate anonymity’ of the metropolis (48–9). Ethan Hawke’sHamlet seems ‘vitalized’ by the countercultural citations he makes in hiscritical and reflexive version of the play within a play (61). The technologiesof control and incarceration in New York and the Denmark Corporationcan at times be subverted by alternative modes of being and seeing possiblevia the media aggregated in a globalised city.



Conclusion: Realising the City

Despite the claims of this article, linking Shakespeare and the city has notalways been accepted or unproblematic critical practice. With forensic skill,Leah Marcus compares the 1602 Quarto, 1623 Folio, and modern editionsof The Merry Wives of Windsor, showing how references to and elements ofcity life have been excised from printed versions of the play. Foliocompositors who did this were followed by later editors seemingly keen toconsolidate Shakespeare’s ‘organic connection as national Genius with aquintessentially English country landscape’ (Unediting the Renaissance 88). YetMarcus suggests Shakespeare himself may have participated in editing outthe city from the play in response to monarchical demands, introducing‘rural life at Windsor, enlivened by the presence of the court’ (84). If thisis the case, Merry Wives is not the only play in which Shakespeare himselfdiminished the urban character of his work. Comparably, Paster also arguesShakespearean comedies tend to ‘ruralize’ their cities (178).

Nevertheless, all Shakespeare’s plays depended on an urban settingfor their production, and are thus impossible to perceive without it.As such, the city insistently proves its presence. Yet this insistence anddependence involved compromises to diverse audiences, perhaps stimulatingShakespearean ambivalence to the city and to theatre in the city. Mullaneyhypothesises that Pericles reveals a ‘systematic effort’ to ‘dissociate’ the placeof the stage from the ‘marginal contexts and affiliations that had formerlyserved as the grounds of its possibility’. In other words, when Marina findsherself in the brothels of Mytilene, she ‘preaches’ to, improves, and ‘converts’her audience of bawds and clients, and resists any form of transaction orprofit for her ‘chaste’ performance (145–9). This may be theatre, but not asShakespeare’s audiences in the feisty liberties or dissolute suburbs wouldhave known it. Shakespeare’s ambivalence to stage cities takes even moreobvious forms, as he frequently depicts them threatened by destructionwrought by outsiders and insiders: London, Rome, Troy, Athens, Corioli,Venice,Vienna,Angers.

Yet the dependence of profitable theatres on London also proved thatthe capital was viable, booming, world-class, civilised. The connectionswere profound. Heywood asserted: ‘Playing is an ornament to the citty’(qtd. in Chambers 4:253). This article has suggested how critics contendthat Shakespearean stages in the city, and Shakespearean stagings of the city,were much more than this. Such stages can be seen as the city, and quiteliterally: the spectators’ yard at the Rose ‘and probably at the first Globe’was surfaced with a type of mortar ‘sometimes used for paving streets’ (Orrell111). Early modern Londoners certainly perceived the intense material andideological relationships between theatre and the city. Commenting onElizabeth I’s coronation progress through London, Richard Mulcasterobserved: ‘If a man should say well, he could not better tearme the citie ofLondon that time, than a stage’ (qtd. in Kipling 153).



If cities could seem like theatres, so Shakespeare’s plays reflect back tocities their social, economic and political developments, their conflicts andhistories. In Henry VIII, two Gentlemen discuss how the name of YorkPlace has changed to Whitehall, as the King deposed his Cardinal. OneGentleman is enveloped by and vividly evokes such radical transitions inLondon’s ideological and topographical forms:‘ ’tis so lately altered that theold name / Is fresh about me’ (4.1.100–1). Such shifts mean, though, thatdislocation, defamiliarisation, or even alienation occurred in scenes stagingLondon, or other cities. Shakespeare revealed characters’ estrangements inunfamiliar urban contexts, and made strange urban contexts uncannily familiarto audiences. These creative estrangements allowed dramatist and spectatoralike to scrutinise their own city, and themselves, through strange and neweyes. Alienation and unfamiliarity in the theatre could integrate disparatecharacters into cities on and off stage. Yet while Shakespeare’s urban dramasintegrate, they also express the painful discriminations and violent conflictsin cities, the material and discursive structures that conceal, prohibit orchallenge urban integration.

So Shakespeare realised the city in two senses. Informed by the cityin which he worked, he displayed and represented the realities of earlymodern urban life, exposing contradictions and dynamising tensions.Appropriations of his works have done so since. Yet Shakespeare alsoinformed the city, contributing to and unsettling how spectators con-structed their realities. According to the OED, uniquely among hiscontemporaries, in Henry VIII Shakespeare revived a denomination forpeople in (and by implication, seeing) his plays, unused in print since theearly 1500s: ‘Londoners’ (1.2.155). This naming imagines, creates orconsolidates a collective, corporate identity of or for the inhabitantsof the capital, an urban self-consciousness. Yet as the speakers invoking‘Londoners’ make plain, this identity was not settled, or homogeneous.The ‘grievèd commons’ (1.2.105) of the capital in this play have a potentialfor anxiety, intractability and dissidence: ‘Tongues spit their duties out’(1.2.62). Shakespeare’s invocation of collective ‘Londoners’ may, then, havebeen deeply ironic. It may also have been conceived as he was in theextended process of extracting himself from a city he was ambivalentabout. Yet it could equally have contributed to suggesting, or wishfullyconceiving, how a city’s people might combine in shared motives oraspirations.

Critics attest that the afterlife of Shakespearean drama in other cities andother media continues to evince how Shakespeare and the city areinextricable. Now, internationalised conurbations and the social andeconomic networks they manifest condition the consumption, productionand persistence of his drama. London (and Londoners) may no longer simplybe Shakespeare’s, if they ever were, but he still has a stake in the globe, andits cities.



Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers who commented on an earlierversion of this paper.

Short Biography

Adam Hansen received a B.A. from Oxford University, and an M.A. andPh.D. from York University. He has taught at the University of Lodz(Poland), York University, South East European University (Macedonia),and Brasenose College, Oxford. He is presently Lecturer in RenaissanceLiterature at Queen’s University Belfast. He has published articles, chaptersand reviews on early modern prose, poetry, drama and criticism in journalssuch as Cahiers Elisabethains and Literature and History, and recently updatedthe Cambridge University Press edition of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part II.Having contributed to Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (MichiganUP, 2004), he is currently working on a book-length study of representationsof rogues, vagrants and vagabonds from the Renaissance to the nineteenthcentury. In addition to exploring the relationships between culture andideology, this involves a strong focus on the literatures and histories ofLondon.

Notes

* Correspondences: Queen’s University Belfast – School of English, 2, University Square BelfastAntrim BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, UK. Email: [email protected].

1 For more on these approaches – loosely termed New Historicism or Cultural Materialism – seethe essays contained in Dollimore and Sinfield. For an overview of such approaches see Ryan.For particularly strident critiques see McAlindon and also Vickers.2 For accessible and scrupulously detailed versions of this story see Orrell, Gurr, and Ingram.Throughout this article, and with direct reference to London, ‘the City’ can be taken to meanthe administrative area demarcated by the old city walls on the eastern, northern and western sides,and the river Thames on the south, excluding main suburbs and Westminster. The ‘city’ is Londonin its broadest sense, including Westminster, and suburbs north and south of the river.3 Finlay and Shearer (48) estimate that the city’s population grew from around 120,000 in 1550,to 200,000 in 1600, and to 375,000 in 1650. In ‘Shakespeare’s London’, Archer suggests that in1564 the population was 80,000, rising to 200,000 in 1616 (43).4 Unless otherwise stated, all references will be to Complete Works, eds. Jowett et al. Dating andattribution follow the guidance given there.5 For one useful account of these creative interrelations, see Mowat. Greenblatt (216 –24) hasrecently suggested that Hal’s relations with Falstaff in 2 Henry IV are analogous to Shakespeare’sinteractions with other writers of his generation in London. As Hal learns ‘language gamesand . . . role-playing’ in his tavern lessons with Falstaff, so Shakespeare served a ‘linguisticapprenticeship’ with brilliant but dissolute authors like Robert Greene in ‘seedy inns’ aroundLondon’s theatres. Consequently, by staging Hal’s rejection of Falstaff, Shakespeare figures hisown repudiation of city wits. To spurn the fat knight is to accept the necessity and benefits ofprudent speculation and graft; yet it is also to acknowledge the influence of minds that shonebrightly but briefly in the capital.6 On London’s ceremonial pageantry, see, for example, Manley 212–93; Paster 124–49; Goldberg28–34, 50–4; Smuts. For a longer perspective, see Lancashire.



[email protected]

7 See Dillon 33; Montrose 34–5, note 25; Bruster 9–10.8 For more on citizenship and guilds, see Rappaport 29–36;Withington 10–15, 51–84.9 On these definitions see Yungblut 128, note 1.10 See Honigmann.11 As one possible point of inauguration for such criticism, see Fiedler.12 The lower figure is in Rappaport 76; the higher figure is given by Archer ‘Shakespeare’s London’44.13 See Yungblut 106–13; Brenner; Chitty.14 See Place of the Stage, 77–9; Bakhtin 471. For perspectives on the contradictions surroundingand inherent to linguistic nationalism, with a focus on London, see also Leith; Helgerson; Smith.15 On the trope of translatio, see Manley 168–200; on the influence of Humanism on perceptionsof London, see Bruster 32–5. For an extended assimilation of these ideas, see James, Shakespeare’sTroy.16 See Brigden, New Worlds 241; London and the Reformation.17 See Salingar. D’Amico usefully locates these ideas about Venice in a larger discussion of howShakespeare and his contemporaries staged Italy; see Shakespeare and Italy 1–9.18 See Miola; Hutchins; Kahn 4.19 Given recent changes in international politics, much critical attention has focused on Shakes-peare’s place in cities post-conflicts of various kinds. On Shakespeare in post-communist cities,see Stríbrný, 136–47; Blumenfeld. On reconceiving Shakespeare in South Africa’s cities,post-Apartheid, see Sher and Doran; Hendricks.

Works CitedAdorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. Rpt.

ed. London:Verso, 2000 [1974].Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought,

1550–1750. Rpt. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993 [1986].Archer, Ian W. ‘Material Londoners?’ Material London, ca.1600. Ed. Lena Cowen Orlin.

Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. 174–92.——. ‘Popular Politics in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’. Londinopolis: Essays in

the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London. Eds. Paul Griffiths and Mark S.R. Jenner.Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2000. 26–46.

——. The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1991.

——. ‘Shakespeare’s London’. A Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Blackwell:Oxford, 1999. 43–56.

Archer, John Michael. Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays. NewYork and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Astington, John H. ‘Playhouses, Players and Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Time’. The CambridgeCompanion to Shakespeare. Eds. Stanley Wells and Margreta De Grazia. Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 2001. 99–113.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP,1984.

Barton,Anne. ‘The London scene: City and Court’. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Eds.Stanley Wells and Margreta De Grazia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 115–28.

Beier, A. L. and Roger Finlay. ‘The Significance of the Metropolis’. London 1500–1700: TheMaking of the Metropolis. Eds.A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay. New York: Longman, 1986. 1–33.

Blumenfeld, Odette-Irene. ‘Shakespeare in Post-Revolutionary Romania: The Great Directorsare Back Home’. Shakespeare in the New Europe. Eds. Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova, andDerek Roper. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994. 230–46.

Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’sOverseas Trade, 1550–1653. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Brigden, Susan. London and the Reformation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.——. New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485–1603. Harmondsworth: Penguin,

2000.



Bristol, Michael D. ‘Theater and Popular Culture’. A New History of Early English Drama. Eds.John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 231–48.

Bruster, Douglas. Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.Buhler, Stephen M. ‘Antic Dispositions: Shakespeare and Steve Martin’s L.A. Story’. Shakespeare

Yearbook 8 (1997): 212–29.Burnett, Mark Thornton. ‘Introduction’. Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture. Eds.

Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray. Houndmills: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’sPress, 1997. 1–5.

——. ‘ “To Hear and See the Matter”: Communicating Technology in Michael Almereyda’sHamlet (2000)’. Cinema Journal 42.3 (Spring 2003): 48–69.

Cartelli,Thomas. ‘Jack Cade in the Garden: Class Consciousness and Class Conflict in 2 HenryVI’. Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Earl Modern England. Eds. Richard Burtand John Michael Archer. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1994. 48–67.

Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923.Chitty, C. W. ‘Aliens in England in the Sixteenth Century’. Race 8 (1966–67): 129–45.Christensen, Ann C. ‘ “Because their Business Still Lies out A’Door”: Resisting the Separation

of the Spheres in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors’. Literature and History 3rd ser. 5.1 (Spring1996): 19–37.

Cook, Ann Jennalie. ‘Audiences: Investigation, Interpretation, Invention’. A New History of EarlyEnglish Drama. Eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.304–20.

D’Amico, Jack. Shakespeare and Italy: The City and the Stage. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2001.Dessen,Alan. Shakespeare in Performance: Titus Andronicus. Manchester and New York: Manchester

UP, 1989.Dillon, Janette. Theatre, Court and City 1595–1610: Drama and Social Space in London. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 2000.Dollimore, Jonathan. ‘Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure’. Political Shakespeare:

Essays in Cultural Materialism. Eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester and NewYork: Manchester UP, 1996. 72–87.

—— and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. Manchester andNew York: Manchester UP, 1996.

Donaldson, Peter S. ‘Cinema and the Kingdom of Death: Loncraine’s Richard III’. ShakespeareQuarterly 53 (2002): 241–59.

Dutton, Richard. ‘Censorship’. A New History of Early English Drama. Eds. John D. Cox and DavidScott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 287–304.

Elam, Keir. ‘ “I’ll Plague Thee for that Word”: Language, Performance, and CommunicableDisease’. Shakespeare Survey 50 (1997): 19–27.

Empson,William. Some Versions of Pastoral. Rpt. ed. London: Chatto and Windus, 1950 [1935].Ferris, Julie. Shakespeare’s London: A Guide to the Tudor City and Its Theatres. London: Kingfisher,

2000.Fiedler, Leslie A. The Stranger in Shakespeare. London: Croom Helm, 1972.Finlay, Roger and Beatrice Shearer. ‘Population Growth and Suburban Expansion’. London

1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis. Eds. A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay. New York:Longman, 1986. 37–57.

Freud, Sigmund. ‘The “Uncanny” ’. The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 14, Art and Literature. Ed.Albert Dickson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. 339–76.

Friedman, Barbara. Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy.Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1991.

George, David. ‘Coriolanus’ Triumphal Entry into Rome’.Notes and Queries n.s. 43.2 (June 1996):163–5.

Gibbons, Brian. Jacobean City Comedy. London: Methuen, 1980.Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.Goldberg, Jonathan. James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their

Contemporaries. Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.Gowing, Laura. ‘ “The Freedom of the Streets”: Women and Social Space, 1560–1640’.

Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London. Eds. Paul Griffithsand Mark S. R. Jenner. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2000. 130–51.



Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare. Rpt. ed. London:Pimlico, 2005 [2004].

Griffiths, Paul. ‘The Structure of Prostitution in Elizabethan London’. Continuity and Change 8.1(1993): 39–63.

—— and Mark S. R. Jenner. ‘Introduction’. Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social Historyof Early Modern London. Eds. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner. Manchester and New York:Manchester UP. 1–23.

Gurr,Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.Hadfield,Andrew. Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics. London:Arden, 2004.Helgerson, Richard. ‘Language Lessons: Linguistic Colonialism, Linguistic Postcolonialism, and

the Early Modern English Nation’. Yale Journal of Criticism 11.1 (Spring 1998): 289–99.Hendricks, Margo ‘ “’Tis not the Fashion to Confess”: Shakespeare – Post-Coloniality –

Johannesburg, 1996’. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. Eds.Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin. Londonand New York: Routledge, 1998. 84–97.

Honigmann, E. A. J. ‘Shakespeare and London’s Immigrant Community Circa 1600’. Elizabethanand Modern Studies Presented to Professor Willem Schrickx on the Occasion of his Retirement. Ed. J.P. Vander Motten. Gent: Seminarie voor Engelse en Amerikaanse Literatur, 1985. 143–53.

Howard, Jean E. ‘Women, Foreigners, and the Regulation of Urban Space in Westward Ho’.Material London, ca.1600. Ed. Lena Cowen Orlin. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000.150–67.

—— and Phyllis Rackin. Engendering a Nation: A Feminist account of Shakespeare’s English Histories.London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

Hutchins, Christine E. ‘ “Who is Here so Rude that would not be a Roman?”: England asAnti-Type of Rome in Elizabethan Print and Julius Caesar’.Ben Jonson Journal 8 (2001): 207–27.

Ingram,William.The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in ElizabethanLondon. Ithaca and Cornell: Cornell UP, 1992.

Jagendorf, Zvi. ‘Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts’. Coriolanus: Critical Essays. Ed. DavidWheeler. New York and London: Garland, 1995. 229–50.

James, Heather. Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics and the Translation of Empire. Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 1997.

Kahn, Coppélia. Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women. London and New York:Routledge, 1997.

Keene, Derek. ‘Material London in Time and Space’. Material London, ca.1600. Ed. Lena CowenOrlin. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. 55–74.

Kingsley-Smith, Jane. Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.Kipling, Gordon. ‘Wonderfull Spectacles: Theater and Civic Culture’. A New History of Early

English Drama. Eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.153–71.

Lancashire, Anne. London Civic Theatre: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558.Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Leggatt, Alexander. Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare.Toronto and Buffalo: U of TorontoP, 1973.

Leinwand, Thomas B. ‘Shakespeare and the Middling Sort’. Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993):284–303.

Leith, Dick. ‘Tudor London: Sociolinguistic Stratification and Linguistic Change’. Anglo-AmericanStudies 4 (1984): 59–72.

Levin, Harry. ‘Notes toward a Definition of City Comedy’. Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory,History, and Interpretation. Ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Cambridge, MA and London: HarvardUP, 1986. 126–46.

Lombardo, Agostino. ‘The Veneto, Metatheatre, and Shakespeare’. Shakespeare’s Italy: Functionsof Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama. Eds. Michele Marrapodi, A. J. Hoenselaars, MarcelloCappuzzo, and L. Falzon Stantucci. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1993. 143–57.

Loomba,Ania ‘Outsiders in Shakespeare’s England’. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Eds.Stanley Wells and Margreta De Grazia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 147–66.

McAlindon, Thomas. ‘Testing the New Historicism: “Invisible Bullets” Reconsidered’. Studiesin Philology 92.4 (Fall 1995): 411–38.



Manley, Lawrence. Literature and Culture in Early Modern London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1995.

Marcus, Leah S. Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents. Berkeley and London: Uof California P, 1988.

——. Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton. London and New York: Routledge,1996.

Miola, Robert. Shakespeare’s Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.Moody, Jane. ‘Writing for the Metropolis: Illegitimate Performances of Shakespeare in Early

Nineteenth-Century London’. Shakespeare Survey 47 (1994): 61–9.Mowat, Barbara A. ‘The Theater and Literary Culture’. A New History of Early English Drama.

Eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 213–30.Mullaney, Steven. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England. Rpt. ed.

Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004 [1988].Mullini, Roberta. ‘Streets, Squares and Courts: Venice as a Stage in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson’.

Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama. Eds. Michele Marrapodi,A. J. Hoenselaars, Marcello Cappuzzo, and L. Falzon Stantucci. Manchester and New York:Manchester UP, 1993. 158–70.

Mumford, Lewis. The Culture of Cities. London: Secker and Warburg, 1940.Munro, Ian. The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double. New York

and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works. Ed. J. B. Steane. Rpt. ed.

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 [1971].Orlin, Lena Cowen. ‘Introduction’.Material London, ca.1600. Ed. Lena Cowen Orlin. Philadelphia:

U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. 1–19.Orrell, John. ‘The Theatres’. A New History of Early English Drama. Eds. John D. Cox and David

Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 93–112.Parry, Graham. ‘Entertainments at Court’. A New History of Early English Drama. Eds. John D.

Cox and David Scott Kastan. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 195–211.Paster, Gail Kern. The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare.Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985.Perry, Curtis. ‘Commerce, Community, and Nostalgia in The Comedy of Errors’. Money and the

Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism. Ed. Linda Woodbridge. Basingstoke andNew York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 39–51.

Platter,Thomas. The Journals of Two Travellers in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England: Thomas Platterand Horatio Busino. London: Caliban Books, 1995.

Rappaport, Steve. Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London. Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 1989.

Ray, Sid. ‘ “Rape, I Fear, was Root of thy Annoy”: The Politics of Consent in Titus Andronicus’.Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998): 22–39.

Ryan, Kiernan, ed. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader. London:Arnold, 1996.Sacks, David Harris. ‘London’s Dominion: The Metropolis, the Market Economy and the State’.

Material London, ca.1600. Ed. Lena Cowen Orlin. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000.33–5.

Salingar, Leo. ‘The Idea of Venice in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson’. Shakespeare’s Italy: Functionsof Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama. Eds. Michele Marrapodi, A. J. Hoenselaars, MarcelloCappuzzo, and L. Falzon Stantucci. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1993. 171–84.

Schoenbaum, Samuel, ed. William Shakespeare, A Documentary Life. New York: Oxford UP andScolar Press, 1975.

Scullion, Adrienne. ‘Citz Scotland Where it Did? Shakespeare in Production at the Citizens’Theatre, Glasgow, 1970 –74’. Shakespeare and Scotland. Eds.Willy Maley and Andrew Murphy.Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2004. 172–88.

Sennet, Richard. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. Rpt. ed. Londonand Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996 [1994].

Shakespeare,William. The Complete Works. Eds. John Jowett,William Montgomery, Gary Taylor,and Stanley Wells. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.

Sher, Antony and Gregory Doran. Woza Shakespeare!: Titus Andronicus in South Africa. London:Methuen, 1996.

Shrank, Cathy. ‘Civility and the City in Coriolanus’. Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2003): 406–23.



Smith, Emma. ‘ “Signes of a Stranger”: The English Language and the English Nation in the LateSixteenth Century’. Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago 1550–1800. Eds. Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor. Hampshire:Ashgate, 2004. 169–79.

Smuts, R. Malcolm. ‘Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma: The English Royal Entry intoLondon, 1485 –1642’. The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of LawrenceStone. Eds. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim. Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1989. 65–93.

Stanivukovic, Goran V. ‘ “Phantasma or a Hideous Dream”: Style, History and the Ruins ofRome in Julius Caesar’. Studia Neophilologica 73 (2001): 55–70.

Stríbrný, Zdenêk. Shakespeare and Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Twyning, John.London Dispossessed: Literature and Social Space in the Early Modern City. Houndmills:

Macmillan, 1998.Van Elk, Martine. ‘Urban Misidentification in The Comedy of Errors and the Cony-Catching

Pamphlets’. Studies in English Literature 43.2 (Spring 2003): 323–46.Vickers, Brian. Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels. London and New Haven:

Yale UP, 1993.Wheatley, Henry B. ‘London and the Life of the Town’. Shakespeare’s England: An Account of the

Life & Manners of His Age. 2 vols. Rpt. ed. London: Oxford UP, 1950 [1916]. 2:153–81.Wilde, Oscar. ‘The Critic as Artist’. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds.Vincent B.

Leitch et al. New York and London: Norton, 2001. 900–12.Withington, Phil. The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.Wong, Dorothy. ‘ “Domination by Consent”: A Study of Shakespeare in Hong Kong’. Colonizer

and Colonized. Eds. Theo D’Haen and Patricia Krüs. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi,2000. 43–54.

Worthern, W. B. ‘Reconstructing the Globe: Constructing Ourselves’. Shakespeare Survey 52(1999): 33–45.

Wray, Ramona. ‘Shakespeare and the Sectarian Divide: Politics and Pedagogy in (Post)Post-Ceasefire Belfast’. Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture. Eds. Mark ThorntonBurnett and Ramona Wray. Houndmills: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997.235–55.

Yungblut, Laura. Strangers Settled Here Amongst us: Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens inElizabethan England. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.



Documents

Shakespeare and the City