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Theatre of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642.

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Theatre of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642

By Jean E. Howard

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007

For reasons that we will probably never know, Shakespeare seems to have made a point of creating some geographic distance between his playgoers and the plays they watched. With very few exceptions, most famously that of Merry Wives of Windsor (set, obviously, in Windsor, not London), Shakespeare did not locate his plays in the geographically familiar world of early modern England. Necessarily, since London, the metropolis itself, was such a new phenomenon, the majority of the stories that playwrights chose to tell on the stages of the commercial theater in early modern England were indebted to a literary and popular tradition that was decidedly not about the commercial venture of which the theater was so much a part. Nor was the drama in any very direct way about day-to-day life in London. This would seem to make plays that did engage their contemporary milieu of particular historical and critical interest. Yet, as this book shows, other than those...

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