Christopher Highley has achieved a masterful work of scholarship that stands to be the standard reference for historical scholarship on the little world of the early modern precinct of Blackfriars. This book, supported by a sprawling archival record, synthesizes virtually everything it is possible to know about the built environment, demographics, competing ideologies, and social history of the neighborhood, from the dissolution of the Dominican priory in 1538 to the onset of the civil war. Highley tells a compelling story—its protagonists figures like Master of Revels Thomas Cawarden, impresarios Richard Farrant and James Burbage, Ben Jonson, and the two influential semi-conforming preachers Stephen Egerton and William Gouge—that calls into question much of what theater historians think we know about the relationship among Church, stage, and government in the Blackfriars.

The first section traces the emergence of a city within the city, unique among London's neighborhoods in many respects, from its imposing physical boundaries to its strong and relatively integrated immigrant presence, to the social solidarity—derived from its Henrician charter as a liberty and its very architecture—that made it “an inclusive, place-based, community that could . . . transcend alternative and even competing allegiances to nation, trade, or religion” (52). The book interrogates the ideological bent of both contemporary images of the Blackfriars: the place was neither simply the lawless liberty depicted by city officials and popular culture (including the stage), nor precisely the idealized, self-governing world that its denizens conceived.

In the second, most provocative section, Highley calls into question common critical notions of a universal antitheatricalism in the strongly Puritan Blackfriars, drawn from a limited understanding of the 1596 citizens’ petition to prevent Burbage from opening a playhouse. Even before the professional theaters, Highley points out, the neighborhood had a long history of theatrical associations, housing the Revels office and the Master of the Revels himself, a presence that “laid down a trace memory that marked the neighborhood not only as a site of the production of props and costumes . . . but also as a place of actual performance” (89). The book presents the history of the three playhouses in the district—Richard Farrant's first playhouse for the Chapel Children (1576–84), the second playhouse sought unsuccessfully by Burbage in 1596 and opened for a children's company in 1600, and the King's Men's playhouse from 1680—and questions the narrative of Puritan hostility from several angles.

Highley replaces a narrative about abstractions in conflict with a nuanced story of the interaction of individuals with complex motivations, and argues not only that was theater of economic importance to the Blackfriars but that the religious resistance to civic and royal authority that gave the neighborhood its reputation for nonconformity was echoed and reinforced by its stages. His reexamination of the 1596 petition and the characters involved asks important and neglected questions: who didn't sign it? Why were there no petitions during the following two decades of successful professional theater in the Blackfriars? He makes a convincing case that local opposition to the theater, when it did surface, was often more about the practicalities of local politics and space-sharing than any larger ideological conflict between the godly and the stage.

The book's third section presents three informative case studies, including an informative local contextualization of Jonson's The Alchemist, a reading of Henry VIII and Duchess of Malfi as engaging specifically with the Blackfriars’ Catholic past, and a thorough examination of opposition to the Spanish Match from both stage and pulpit.

Blackfriars in Early Modern London convincingly challenges received wisdom in so many ways, broad and picayune, that it would be impossible to catalogue them here. At every turn, it reintegrates our idea of the drama of the Blackfriars into the lived experience of the neighborhood's citizens in often surprising ways: Cynthia's Revels wasn't written for court? Poetaster satirizes specific neighborhood merchants? In case after case, Highley's book asks us to reconsider the story we think we know about the conditions and output of the Blackfriars stages with regard to their location in this idiosyncratic London neighborhood.