This description of London, written by Frederick, Duke of Wirtemberg, who visited London in 1592, attests to the impressive size and perceptible commercial energy of England’s premier metropolis. Although the Duke assumed that London was preeminent among other English towns, what he could not know was just how considerably it outstripped them in population and commercial activity at the end of the sixteenth century. In 1600 the population of London included approximately 200,000 people, up from 55,000 just fifty years before. The next largest English city was Norwich, with a population of 15,000 in 1600, followed by York and Bristol...

Almost from the moment of its completion in 1568, Gresham’s Bourse, better known as the Royal Exchange, became a significant place in London life. Its founder, Sir Thomas Gresham, modeled it on the great Nieuwe Beurs of Antwerp near which he had lived during his years as a merchant and Royal Agent on the Continent in the 1540s and 1550s.¹ Located at the corner of Threadneedle Street and Cornhill within the walled city of London, the Royal Exchange was designed to give the city a meeting place for merchants that would rival in beauty and scope the great bourses of...

In 1573, Isabella Whitney’s second book of verse, The Sweet Nosegay, appeared in the London bookstalls near St. Paul’s Cathedral.¹ The final poem in this collection, her “Wyll and Testament,” takes the form of a poetic will in which the speaker, a fictional version of Whitney herself, leaves various bequests—not to relatives—but to the city of London. The speaker assumes the persona of an unemployed servant who, having lost her position in a London household, has descended into poverty and feels death approaching. Remarkably, though the speaker is writing a will, she is actually so poor that she...

It has become a critical truism that in early modern England, the reputation of middling sort men, in particular, depended largely on their credit in the economic realm, while women’s reputations pivoted on their sexual honesty.¹ In the last chapter I argued that London comedies both confirm and challenge this view of male reputation. Plays that use the London debtors’ prisons as a setting routinely stage the loss of financial credit as a kind of social death for men; but at the same time London plays such as Eastward Ho energetically articulate alternative norms for judging masculine credit or reputation,...

In the last chapter I explored the link in London comedy between cosmopolitan sophistication and foreign prostitutes, especially Italian courtesans. Through an ars erotica encompassing a knowledge of music, languages, and conversation, foreign whores, or domestic prostitutes who mimicked them, could inculcate civility and banish boorish rudeness in their clients. Whores were thus often represented in surprisingly upbeat ways in London comedies—not only as wily and successful commercial entrepreneurs, but also as instructors in the arts of civility. In this chapter I turn to another agent of cultural instruction—namely, the French dancing master—and to another scene of...

Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy lies outside this book’s primary temporal frame, but it suggests that there were forms of continuity between pre-War Caroline and post-War Restoration drama—continuities that tend to be obscured by the division between Renaissance and Restoration that has structured traditional accounts of seventeenth-century literary history. The Cavendishes, male and female, were deeply enmeshed in London court and town culture in the 1630s, and, having lived out much of the Interregnum on the Continent, they brought memories of the theatrical culture of the pre-War decade with them when they returned to London in the 1660s. They...