Postscript: The Open Street

Abstract

This article serves as a postscript for the ‘London as Theatrical Space’ special issue of The London Journal. It reads the early modern English jest book archive for its illustrations of common sense attitudes towards individual street performances by pedestrians. The variety of topics the article considers includes feathers, gallants, disabled bodies, and the generality of display in public urban space.

KEYWORDS:

• Jestbook
• gallant
• plague
• public street
• disability
• laughter
• street life

Notes

1 Thomas Jordan, Pictures of Passions, Fancies, and Affectations (London, 1641), sig. C3r.

2 See, for example, Charles I’s proclamation of 20 June 1632 ‘commanding the Gentry to keep their Residence at their Mansions in the Countrey’, in James F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, Volume 2: Royal Proclamations of King Charles I, 1625–1646 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 351.

3 Anthony Copley, Wits Fittes and Fancies (London, 1595), sig. V2r. Further references to this text will be made parenthetically in text.

4 A.S., The Book of Bulls (London, 1636), sig. a5r. Further references will be made parenthetically in text.

5 Robert Chamberlain, Jocabella (London, 1640), sig. B6r. Further references will be made parenthetically in text.

6 For recent work on this pattern, see: Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and Katherine Schapp-Williams, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021).

7 A.S., The Book of Bulls, sigs. b9r–b9v.

8 That said, if one would like to read excellent work in this mode, see: Bruce Thomas Boehrer, The Fury of Men’s Gullets: Ben Jonson and the Digestive Canal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

9 Copley, Wits Fittes and Fancies, sig. D3r.

10 Amanda Bailey, Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

11 In addition to the work discussed here, see the brief scene set at a feather-seller’s shop in Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl (London, 1611), during which the gallant Jack Dapper decries the common ‘general fether’ and demands instead to be shown a ‘spangled fether’ (sig. D1r).

12 Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare (London, 1603; STC 6535.5), sigs. B1v, C2v.

13 Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare, sigs. C3v–C4r.

14 [Thomas Dekker], The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie (London, 1604), sig. B2v.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Zucker

Adam Zucker is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (2011), which was shortlisted for The Globe Theatre Book Award in 2012. He co-edited with Ronda Arab and Michelle Dowd Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater (2015), a collection of essays written to honour Jean E. Howard, and with Alan B. Farmer he co-edited Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage (2006). He is currently a co-editor of the journal English Literary Renaissance.