‘What can there be in any place under the heavens that is not in this noble city either to be bought or borrowed?’, John Lily writes about London in Euphues and His England (1580). Singling out England’s capital as a place where everything is up for sale, Lily describes it the site of a new way of life that was both liberating and threatening, in its subjection of all aspects of life – even sex and religion – to the forces of the market. In the early modern period, London underwent an exponential population growth, quadrupling from c. 100’000 inhabitants in 1580 to c. 400’000 in 1650, which profoundly transformed its social and cultural character. Almost holding a nation-wide monopoly over printing and the book trade, London became a highly dynamic literary marketplace, which enabled new forms of distinctly urban writing and new opportunities for the development of literary writing as a profession, culminating in the unprecedented flowering of Elizabethan drama on the commercial stages of London’s bourgeoning entertainment industry, where Shakespeare made his living. Civic pride found an outlet in the annual Lord Mayor’s Show, an important occasion for the communal construction of London’s urban identity and emancipation from the royal court, but beyond such official representations, a plurality of voices also explored less savoury aspects of the ever-transforming metropolis, which had become a national and international melting pot by the end of the sixteenth century. In a world obsessed with fantasies of social mobility and unfettered consumerism, early modern urban literature often puts a spotlight on the darker aspects of London’s bustling urban development, on ruthless social and economic competition, moral corruption, prostitution, fraud, and violence. New forms of pamphlet literature commented on the latest trends of the city and dissected the tricks of conmen and impostors. A short but energetic revival of verse satire, which took its cue from classical models such as Horace and Juvenal, chastised the vices and excesses of London with comic gusto until its satirical impetus was temporarily silenced with the ban of verse satire in 1599 – only to resurface on the commercial stage in the newly developed genre of city comedy. Set in contemporary London, city comedy anatomised the gullibility of social climbers, the fanaticism and hypocrisy of religious radicals, and the wily stratagems of the wives of respectable citizens who knew exactly what they wanted and how to get it.
This lecture will give an overview of these and other new forms of urban writing in the early modern period. We will trace new urban literary aesthetics in the period’s pamphlet literature, consider specifically urban forms of performance in civic pageants and sample the ‘snarling satire’ of the late Elizabethan period. The lecture’s main focus, however, will be on city comedy. We will discuss canonical plays such as Ben Jonson’s Alchemist (1610) or the multi-authored Eastward Ho! (1606), which mercilessly parodied Shakespeare’s Hamlet and got its authors sent to prison for offending the King, alongside underappreciated gems of the genre, such as Lording Barry’s Family of Love (1608), a satirical portrayal of the religious sect of the Family of Love, which was rumoured to practice a form of communism that extended to its members’ wives. The ‘divine service’ of the Familists (i.e. their orgies) is accordingly the talk of the town in the play and attracts the attention of sex-starved young courtiers and jealous husbands alike. Finally, we will also consider the social and religious debates on these new urban forms of writing, as Puritan moralists and preachers launched scorching attacks especially against the theatre as a site of moral corruption and infection (both metaphorically and literally, as large crowds were seen to contribute to the spread of the plague), while simultaneously participating in the same commercial logic of London’s book market and spaces of performance.
Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of the course, students will have familiarised themselves with the ways in which London’s increasing urbanisation in the early modern period affected literature as a social practice on all levels, ranging from aesthetic principles over generic innovation to the material conditions of literary production. They will thus get a better sense of the interactions between literature and its social contexts and learn how to analyse literary texts in light of their social and material conditions of production.
Bibliography
Texts that students are expected to read will be made available online on Moodle.
- Docente: Kilian Markus Schindler