Playing the Tourist in Early Modern London: Selling the Liberties Onstage

Abstract

This article attempts to reconstruct a mental cartography of early modern London, the ensemble of material, social, and symbolic codes that made up the social architecture of the city. The article extends Steven Mullaney's work by giving scholars a more accurate understanding of the geography of London and its liberties, especially those that housed private theaters, such as Shakespeare's Blackfriars. I look in particular at the liberty of the Whitefriars, arguing that between 1600 and 1615, two theaters used the liberty's reputation to draw visitors to both the theater and the neighborhood in an early modern version of cultural tourism. The theater thrived on a symbolic economy, a commodification of local color that drew people to the district, from in and outside London. I bring theories of space and tourism into play when considering the complexities of how a theater commodifies its neighborhood in this manner.

The Woolfes of Wine Street: Middling Culture and Community in Bristol, 1600–1620

“…For Leech, Clovell's goods perfectly encapsulate the life of a reasonably well-to-do goldsmith who was 'not part of the city's elite'; his house, moreover, had an open hall that had not yet been ceiled-another indication, for Leech, of his distance from elite status. 98 104 These observations can be extended to Wine Street, which brought together a distinctive retail environment with an area for play. The goldsmiths' shops and standings added to the leisurely character of the area, providing a mixture of practical and high-end goods.…”

Shakespeare and the ‘Spatial Turn’

“…This topic has been a rich and enduring one as the development of London during this time was rapid and intense, with socio‐economic forces moving the city away from its medieval past. Often such studies acknowledge the importance of Mullaney's The Place of the Stage but wish to challenge the work he began, in particular the binary between inside and outside the city walls (Bly, ‘Playing’; Ward; House). As Mary Bly points out, ‘scholars have fallen into viewing the historical city as a monolithic unit, distinguished by the suburb‐city divide underscored by Steven Mullaney's groundbreaking work on the city margins’ (‘Playing’ 62).…”