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The time of Shakespeare's Jewry.

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LIKE ITS TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY COUNTERPART, early modern London has recently become a good deal more cosmopolitan. Literary critics and cultural historians increasingly regard it as not just an English but also a British and even international city. Ruled by a Scottish king, it teems with emigre Irish costermongers, Dutch textile workers, and Portuguese merchants. Nor is it any longer monolithically Christian. We have learned from Inquisition records about London Jews celebrating Passover in 1605; we are aware, too, of London's African visitors, such as the presumably Muslim Moroccan ambassador whose portrait is often reproduced in editions of Othello. New economic criticism supplements this multicultural picture by reminding us of how London's rapidly growing involvement in global commerce flooded its markets with exotic commodities from Asia and the Americas, creating new cosmopolitan consumers of the kind parodied by Dekker and Middleton in The Roaring Girl. The picture is supported also by the widespread popularity of the joke that the Englishman's clothes comprise the fashions of the world. As Portia says of her English suitor in The Merchant of Venice: "How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany and his behavior everywhere"(1.2.68-70). (1)

This is not to say that we now read these signs of London's globalization as evidence of inclusiveness or tolerance. Scholars of early modern London recognize that globalization and xenophobia are often partners, as the city's growing immigrant populations knew all too well from the riots against foreign artisans, the Dutch Church libel, the edicts to expel "blackamoors," or the slanders against Dr. Lopez. But even as we complicate early modern London's cosmopolitanism by insisting on its complicities with practices of exclusion, we can all too easily reproduce an interpretive tendency endemic to modern multiculturalism: that is, understanding the relations between London's different cultures (whether linguistic, religious, or ethnic) in simply secular and spatial terms, as the favored American images of the mosaic and the rainbow or, less rosily, the ghetto and the gated community all suggest.

The tendency toward secularization is underscored by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It defines the "cosmopolite," an early cognate of "cosmopolitan," as "a citizen of the world," listing as the first recorded instance Richard Hakluyt's 1598 reference to "cosmopolites" in his tale of King Edgar's travels. (2) So long as we think of the cosmopolitan in purely secular terms, we are likely to accept the OED's implicit assurance that the word originated in a genre devoted to mapping transnational movement within a newly global conception of geographical space. But the OED doesn't note how Hakluyt's "cosmopolites" derives less from experiences of global travel than from fantasies of universal...

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