Spatial practice and the theatrical authoring of Jacobean London (England, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker)

The early seventeenth century saw changes in the ways Londoners conceived of their city, changes in their experience of drama and its relation to their everyday lives, and changes in their methods for comprehending space and the lived environment. Early modern playwrights' construction of civic and theatrical space influenced the development of a new urban consciousness and of new conceptions of authorship.; On the stage, moving through and occupying space creates meaning in a way analogous to writing or reading, and the burgeoning dramatic culture of London extended this function of space to the city itself. Because it uses vocabularies of space as well as language, theater provides an experimental environment in which to explore the role of space and place in early modern London, and it also provides a means for the emergence of a new sort of authorial consciousness.; This allows authors to claim a control over the spaces of the city that has the potential to contend with institutions of power, and one potent example of this is to be seen among the authors of the pageantry for King James's 1604 entry into London. Substituting an authorial progress through London for that of the king, Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson present a potentially subversive challenge to official attempts to control the pageant's literalization of the idea of London. Similarly, the official goals of two Lord Mayor's Shows of 1612--13 are informed and compromised by their authors' imaginative practices of London's space. The dramatic genre of city comedy gave playwrights a similar sort imaginative control over the city's spaces. By portraying contemporary London with some exactitude, playwrights could extend the protean flexibility of the non-representative early modern stage to London itself, making the city's spaces as malleable as the playhouses. The environmental poetics that emerged from dramatists---particularly Ben Jonson---employing and reflecting on their potential to shape urban and theatrical space deserves consideration alongside the textual and material factors central to current debates about the development of early modern authorship.