The history of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre has too often been written as the tale of ‘Shakespeare's London’. Mark Bayer widens the focus with a history of the playhouses in London's northern suburbs, whose plays, companies and audiences have chiefly been used as foils to set off the Globe's glories. Bayer refuses the traditional depictions of London's suburbs as cultural wastelands inhabited by Philistines, on the one hand, or as hotbeds of interestingly subversive counterculture, on the other, both of which define the suburbs strictly through binary opposition, as the place that they are not. Instead Bayer treats Jacobean Clerkenwell and Finsbury as their own places with their own cultures. And he neatly sidesteps the well-worn arguments about whether early modern plays were ideological expressions or subversions of authority, focusing instead on the early modern playhouse as a nexus of ‘social capital’, a term he borrows from Pierre Bourdieu and Robert Putnam (although Bayer's use of the term is more like Putnam's than like Bourdieu’s). ‘[S]ocial capital’, Bayer writes, ‘is a resource that inheres in the connections formed between individuals in various communities’ (p. 3, italics in original). ‘The central idea . . . is that the density of social networks matters’ (p. 3). Bayer charts a London of neighbourhoods, situating the playhouses in their urban villages, nourishing and nourished by their local economies. This is a fruitful approach, and other theatre historians will profit by it.

It is clear that Bayer's scholarly heart lies in Jacobean Clerkenwell, with the Red Bull playhouse. This is as it should be; in Bayer's model, all theatre history is local. And the Red Bull deserves far more attention than theatre history has given it. I half suspect that the pressures of scholarly publication demanded that the author give the book a nominally broader focus, although Bayer's grand idea is local specificity. A title listing three abstract nouns is evidently more marketable than the words ‘Red Bull Playhouse’, which is a pity. ‘Red Bull’ makes a better name, and if this book openly took a single playhouse as a test case for Bayer's historical methods it would be a work of enormous general value. Each of Bayer's chapters grows more focused and more alive, building to an illuminating reading of Thomas Heywood's spectacular Ages cycle at the Red Bull and a superb final chapter on the Clerkenwell riot of 1616/17, when the local apprentices tore apart the new Cockpit playhouse rather than allow the Red Bull actors to move there. In Bayer's reading this outburst is fundamentally conservative, aimed at preserving the existing fabric of the neighbourhood. The apprentices rioted in pursuit of tradition and continuity, a startling but nearly indisputable revelation. The concluding chapter is the book's heart; when Bayer makes his arguments local, they are most universal.