In ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’ Jonson celebrates an Horatian ideal of modest conviviality with intimates. The ironies of that poem, which hint at excesses waiting to erupt, point to another way in which he could be seen – as a man given to bodily excess and driven by his appetites. The anecdote of Jonson drawn drunk through Paris on a cart by his young tutee, Wat Raleigh, helped construct that image, along with the many references to his love of wine and to his physically imposing body. This essay explores the ways in which Jonson’s London plays – especially Epicene, Bartholomew Fair, and The Alchemist – contributed to his popular image as a recorder of and participant in the sensory excesses possible in the urban context where he spent much of his life. Jonson was acutely attuned to the sensory environment of London: to the sounds, sights, smells, and touches that invited its residents to indulge their senses even while threatening to shatter their self-control and social identities. This essay demonstrates the role of the urban plays in the construction of a Jonson whose contemporary image was in part defined by his corporeality and immersion in the life of the senses.

The one thing most scholars know about Thomas Heywood is his claim, included in his 1633 preface to The English Traveller, to have had ‘an entire hand, or at the least a maine finger’ in 220 plays. We don’t know if this is true, but it seems probable, given the length of Heywood’s career (he started writing in the 1590s and continued until his death in 1641), his productivity in many genres and his apparent penchant for collaboration. He was, for example, a probable collaborator in The Book of Sir Thomas More (1592–3) and a certain collaborator in plays such as The Witch of Edmonton (1621). A man of modest origins, Heywood was the son of a country parson, and his studies at Cambridge were cut short when his father died in 1593. Settling in London, he spent most of the rest of his life in the city, becoming in every way a man of London and of the London theatre world.

While the majority of Heywood’s writing was done for the theatre, he also wrote a number of works of poetry, including the early ‘Oenone and Paris’ (1594), a narrative poem resembling Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’, and Troia Britannica (1609), a history of the world to the present; a defence of the theatre entitled An Apology for Actors (1607); two collections of prose stories about women, Gunaikeion (1624) and Nine the Most Worthy Women of the World (1640); and a rambling philosophical compendium entitled The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1635). In the 1590s Heywood was associated with the theatrical enterprises of Philip Henslowe and wrote plays for the Lord Admiral’s Men at the Rose. In 1599 the Earl of Derby’s Men staged his two-part play, Edward IV, and soon thereafter he joined the Earl of Worcester’s Company, which metamorphosed into the Queen Anne’s Men after King James ascended the English throne in 1603. With the Queen’s Men, playing primarily at the Red Bull theatre in Clerkenwell, Heywood had a long and fruitful relationship.

The changing city and the commercial stage, c. 1600

It is a curious fact of London theatre history that around about 1598 playwrights quite suddenly began to write plays that in a sustained way depicted aspects of contemporary London life. London streets and London places began to be mentioned prominently in theatrical dialogue, and those familiar streets and places became the setting for stories about London economic life, the struggles among various social groups for dominance within the city, and the domestic disputes and intrigues that percolated through London households.

While prior to 1598 there had certainly been plays with scenes set in London, such as Richard III, and others, such as The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590), that evoked London as a place to be redeemed from sin, nonetheless, 1598 marked a real change in how and how frequently the city was staged. Dramas such as William Haughton's Englishmen for My Money (1598) and the early comedies of Ben Jonson did not treat London as an abstract landscape populated with allegorical figures, nor did they set the occasional scene within the city; rather, they luxuriated in 'place realism', that is, in the depiction of a particular cityscape and its contemporary inhabitants. Most of these plays were comic in form, and they are generally known as city comedies, or London comedies, in recognition of the fact that they constitute a distinct subgenre of comedy in general.

In Caryl Churchill's first full-length professionally produced play, a woman named Marion deals with the aftermath of a nervous breakdown by becoming a real estate magnate and voraciously acquiring property. Constantly eating bananas and chocolate bars and anything else that comes to hand, Marion consumes and acquires, the avidity of her appetite for food mirroring the avidity of her pursuit of one more block of flats, one more townhouse. Her cure for mental illness is not therapy, but acquisition pure and simple, capitalism's all-purpose panacea. But this cure brings new pathologies in its wake. It does not matter to Marion whom she ousts from the buildings she acquires or what pain she causes by her deals. At one point, in a scenario Swiftian in its cruelty, she gets the bedraggled and impoverished wife of her former love, Alex, to sign over to her their newborn baby, a human being replacing a building in Marion's endless acquisition schemes. Marion's reasons for this transaction are multiple but ultimately somewhat mysterious. She wants a piece of her former lover for her own; she wants to spite the woman Alex had married; she wants to give her own husband the son she herself has not produced; and above all, she wants the baby because others do. When the birth mother pleads to get back her child, Marion insists: 'I will keep what's mine. The more you want it the more it's worth keeping.' At no point does Marion herself show any interest in the actual baby or in its wellbeing. At a crucial point in the plot, she does not notice that the baby left in her care has gone missing.

Like a prism, Shakespeare's plays are shot through with the political thought of his time; but like a prism, they omit no single ray, but refract a multitude of colours. In the much-cited 1993 volume, The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800, John Guy, Donald Kelley and Linda Peck delineate many of the recurring topics that informed political thinking before the Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century. The role of counsel in good governance, the proper education of a prince, the body politic as concept and informing metaphor, Tacitus, Ovid, and republicanism, resistance theory, Machiavelli and the new statescraft: these are but a few of the topics discussed throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and hardly one fails to make an appearance in Shakespeare's works.

Of course, Shakespeare might not to everyone seem the most obvious source of political reflection on the Elizabethan stage. After all, it is Marlowe in The Jew of Malta who brings Machiavelli on stage, vaunting his free-thinking ways:

But it is Shakespeare, in Richard III, who creates a villain hero who, ‘set[ting] the murderous Machiavel to school’, embodies the new philosophy as a means to power and a principle of rule and not just as the signature of an exotic Italian villainy.