Gail Kern Paster explores the role of the city in the works of William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and Ben Jonson. Paster moves beyond the usual presentation of the city-country dichotomy to reveal a series of oppositions that operate within the city's walls. These oppositions—city of God and city of man, Jerusalem and Rome, bride of the Lamb and whore of Babylon, ideal and real—together create a dual image of the city as a visionary ideal society and as a predatory trap, founded in fratricide, shadowed in guilt. In the theater, this duality affects the fate of early modern city dwellers, who exemplify even as they are controlled by this contradictory reality.

"Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642 explores how the public stage represented the city of London in the opening half of the seventeenth century. Drawing on a wide range of familiar and little-studied plays from four decades of a defining era of theater history. Theater of a City shows how the stage shaped and responded to the changing face of early modern London."--BOOK JACKET.

This focused but far-reaching work by the distinguished scholar Angus Fletcher reveals how early modern science and English poetry were in many ways components of one process: discovering the secrets of motion. Beginning with the achievement of Galileo, Time, Space, and Motion identifies the problem of motion as the central cultural issue of the time, pursued through the poetry of the age, from Marlowe and Shakespeare to Ben Jonson and Milton.

Rather than seeking to survey the historical 'background' to Shakespeare, the essays in the collection display a variety of perspectives, insights and methodologies found in current historical work that may also inform literary studies. In addition to Elizabethan and early seventeenth century polities, they examine such topics as the characteristics of the early modern political imagination; the growth of public controversy over religion and other issues duringthe period and ways in which this can be related to drama; attitudes about honour and shame and their relation to concepts of gender; histories of crime and murder; and ways in which changing attitudeswere expressed through architecture, printed images and the layout of Tudor gardens.

In The Age of Shakespeare, Frank Kermode uses the history and culture of the Elizabethan era to enlighten us about William Shakespeare and his poetry and plays. Opening with the big picture of the religious and dynastic events that defined England in the age of the Tudors, Kermode takes the reader on a tour of Shakespeare’s England, vividly portraying London’s society, its early capitalism, its court, its bursting population, and its epidemics, as well as its arts—including, of course, its theater. Then Kermode focuses on Shakespeare himself and his career, all in the context of the time in which he lived. Kermode reads each play against the backdrop of its probable year of composition, providing new historical insights into Shakspeare’s characters, themes, and sources. The result is an important, lasting, and concise companion guide to the works of Shakespeare by one of our most eminent literary scholars.

"Producing Early Modern London analyzes theater's use of city spaces and places, showing how the satirical comedies of the early seventeenth century came to embody the city as the city embodied the plays"--

"Recent influential work on Jacobean city comedies, by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Douglas Bruster in particular, is confined to the well-worn topics of urban alienation and the avaricious merchant, drawing on 1550s sermons and tracts against usury. In this model, where social credit is deemed to circulate without limit, the city comedy's specific reference to contemporary ideas of trade, cash, and credit is lost. The plays are reduced to moral satires against greed, humoural comedies of the hollow self, or self-referencing literary artifacts which create and interact with a coterie audience. Aging rants against avarice might account for earlier interludes which mock usurers and misers, but not for the slick, formal pleasures of the city comedy, bringing together gull, courtesan, prodigal gallant, virgin daughter, and jealous citizen father or husband."--BOOK JACKET.