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