Jean Howard's fascinating and highly readable exploration of city comedies takes as its starting point the location of the action of numerous plays in key places in the city, both specific (the Royal Exchange and the city prisons) and generic (whorehouses and dancing academies). The dramatic action contributes to the imagined “construction” of the city, turning its places into social spaces where the opportunities and tensions of the new urbanism were explored and identities, civic, national, and gendered, negotiated. The plays do not necessarily reflect the realities of commerce, consumption, credit, and sexual practice in the city, but they do tell us a lot about the range of ways in which contemporaries understood the changes going on around them and the fears that they aroused. Howard broadens the genre of city comedies to include not only the satiric plays about the vices of Londoners that were popular fare between 1598 and 1615 but also the civic history plays chronicling the deeds of virtuous citizens and the subgenre of plays focusing on the sites of urban leisure that flourished in the 1630s.

The various London locations she explores generated contradictory attitudes, which reflected the ambiguous reactions of contemporaries to change. Thus, the plays featuring the Royal Exchange might celebrate the expansion of the capital's commercial horizons, but they could also articulate anxieties about the role of alien merchants in economic expansion, about the forms of consumption that went on in the shopping galleries on the upper floors of the building and about the apparent flouting of social conventions of submissiveness by city women in those shops. The plays that feature the counters (primarily debtors’ prisons) might offer conventional moralities about the likely consequences of prodigal behavior, but they might also enter more critical territory in laying bare the machinations of predatory creditors and the corruption of prison administration, while a number of plays refused to accept the moral convention of the debtor as a figure of folly and celebrated him as a skilled performer, querying the logic of the marketplace and embodying new forms of social credit. The whorehouse plays likewise do not easily fit into a simplistic view of comedy as exercising a disciplining role: whores might be constructed as monstrous exemplars of the dangers of unchastity, offering warnings to chaste maids of the ease with which one might turn into a whore; prostitution might be invoked to draw the parallel between sexual corruption and the machinations of city business more generally, but the revelation of the blurriness of the boundary between chastity and whoredom was destabilizing as the malleability of female identities and the basic “illegibility” of whoredom were laid bare. A play like A Chaste Maid in Cheapside ruthlessly analyzed the connections between commercial and sexual exploitation, but it flouted the moralizing discourses. Moreover, some plays presented whoredom in a more alluring light: Marston's creation Franceschina, the “Dutch Courtesan,” buys into the conventional construction of whoredom as alien and threatening, only to subvert it in this doubled character who embodies the allure of the alien and sophisticated, which might tame the boorish English. The final chapter on the dancing academies shows how they both provided access to new forms of cultural capital by which the elite was marked out and carried a threat to conventional notions of English masculinity. This chapter neatly encapsulates Howard's key themes for change: the gradual movement of the location of the drama westward away from the commercial city to the newly emerging “town” where fashionable society congregated and the shift in notions of social esteem, downplaying simplistic economic criteria and elevating cultural and social sophistication, forms of speech, bodily deportment, and fashion.

It is one of the fine features of Howard's contextualization of this drama that she has read her historians and that she is up to date. The text is generously peppered with references to recent work by (among others) Faramerz Dabhoiwala, Paul Griffiths, Craig Muldrew, and Alex Shepard. One worries as a historian that sometimes the traffic with literary critics is one way: we note with condescending satisfaction that our literary colleagues have got it right with proper attention to context and genre, but have these literary sources really got very much to offer historians? In the hands of Howard the answer is a decided yes. This is because in the first place she has opened up some topics that have been neglected by historians: for this reader the most exciting chapter was that on the city prisons, which reminds us just how little serious study of imprisonment there has been. Second, the plays, used as sensitively as they are here, give us insight into the variety of “discourses” that might shape contemporary attitudes. On whoredom, for example, the moralizing discourse of total and unconditional condemnation (and the uncomplicated construction of prostitute as monster) is prevalent within the sermons and pamphlets, but in Howard's materials we see a greater diversity of outlooks, and this must complicate our understanding of chronologies of change. Likewise, a theme running throughout Howard's book is the complexity of attitudes toward aliens: on the one hand there is a considerable amount of the conventional satiric stuff about their inability to master the language, and they are often figured as threats (especially sexual threats), but on the other hand the attitudes revealed are more incorporative. Pisaro, the dominating alien merchant in An Englishman for My Money is not demonized but incorporated through the marriage of his daughters to Englishmen. Doll, the whore in Northward Ho, welcomes an international clientele and is enriched by it; the French dancing masters might be the harbingers of dangerous effeminacy, but they were the key transmitters of new forms of social estimation. Howard has made a vitally important contribution to our understanding of the construction of identities in the emerging London metropolis.