Written at a time when the nature of place was reimagined, John Lyly’s Endymion draws upon Neoplatonic theories of desire to present space as a domain continually reshaped by contemplative thought. In his commentary on Plato’s Symposium , Marsilio Ficino argues that desire can traverse the cosmos in an ecstatic flight toward the Beautiful and the Good, bringing the contemplative soul closer to its object of devotion. Lyly’s play represents this negotiation of earthly and heavenly beauty in Endymion’s simultaneous attraction to Tellus and Cynthia, an attraction that locates Endymion somewhere between the earth and the moon. Lyly, in turn, maps the structure of contemplative desire—namely, its uneven distribution across lover and beloved—onto the early modern court, transforming political space into a sphere shaped by devotion. Together, Ficino and Lyly reveal the way that contemplative thought extends itself across bodies and spaces in early modern culture.

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage traces the way that characters think through their surroundings in early modern drama—not only how these characters orient themselves within unfamiliar or otherwise strange locations but also how their locations function as the scaffolding for perception, memory, and other forms of embodied thought. Such moments of thinking through place stage a process that both resembles and parallels the cognitive work that early modern playgoers undertook as they reimagined the stage as the settings of the dramatic fiction. The book traces the vexed relationship between these two registers of thought in works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Jonson. In doing so, it counters a critical tradition that figures drama as a form of spatial abstraction and demonstrates, instead, that theatrical performance constituted a sophisticated and self-reflexive mode of thinking through place in the early modern period.

The conclusion draws together the book’s major findings through a reading of Descartes’s Discourse on Method, focusing primarily upon the relationship between place and thought in the theorization of the cogito. Against Descartes’s fantasy of disembodied and placeless mind, the conclusion suggests that early modern English drama stages the impossibility of separating thought from its foundation in embodiment and environment, as well as the consequences—alternately tragic and comic—of attempting to do so. Not only do the plays considered in this book show thinking to be an ecological phenomenon; they also reveal that the act of thinking through place can transform the contours of a location.

Taking its cue from William Sly’s performance of a disoriented playgoer in the Induction to John Marston’s The Malcontent, this chapter puts theatrical performance in dialogue with two other modes of thinking through place in the early modern period: first, what Mary Carruthers has termed the “architectural” model of the arts of memory, and, second, chorography, or the practice of describing a region in terms of its topographical features and history. It argues that these modes resemble one another in depicting place as a kind of phenomenological assemblage, one that comes into being as the disparate features of an ambient environment are perceived and organized within embodied thought. This resemblance reveals the intimate relationship between environment and embodied thought within the early modern English playhouse, and it thereby suggests that theatrical performance was less a form of spatial abstraction than a means of transforming the way that playgoers perceived, experienced, and navigated their surroundings.

This chapter uses Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair to theorize the performativity of place on the early modern stage. The Induction establishes what will be a central concern for Jonson’s play: namely, how can Bartholomew Fair contend with the memories that playgoers have of the fair’s setting in Smithfield, when such memories may reveal the inadequacy of the theatrical enterprise? Tracing the play’s efforts to resolve this problem in its engagement with the perceptions and the memories of playgoers, the chapter shows how the Induction functions as a cognitive system for managing thought within the playhouse, to the specific end of creating a theatrical Smithfield. Similarly, the play’s depiction of Smithfield shows how perception, movement, and other forms of embodied thought work together to bring place into being. Like the atoms of the Lucretian universe, which shape the cosmos through continual swerving, the characters of Bartholomew Fair create Smithfield through their collective movement, revealing that space is not an a priori dimension but rather an emergent entity. By figuring Smithfield as a site in which individuals and ideologies repeatedly collide with one another—most notably in the interaction of Bartholomew Cokes and Zeal-of-the-land Busy—the play foregrounds the generative potential of disruption and displacement to suggest that disorientation can alter the physical contours of a place.