3 - Houses in the Suburbs

Summary

Brothels, theatres, monasteries; hospitals, prisons, bathhouses, inns. In Chapter 1 I showed that in the early modern city single buildings could change their function over time, passing diachronically through several of the institutional uses synchronically displayed in Measure for Measure, with religious houses becoming theatres, and palaces being transformed into prisons. A further link between this motley set of places is that, in Shakespeare's London, they all shared a symbolically and geographically significant location at the edges of the city, in an area known as the Liberties. With the notable exception of the theatre, conspicuously absent from Shakespeare's Vienna, this list of urban sites has a good deal in common with the locations of Measure for Measure, which takes us to a prison and a courtroom, a convent, a moated grange, a place at the threshold of the city gates, and alludes to a holy well just outside the city, a brothel, and a walled garden. Of these places, almost none is strictly private: Measure for Measure is a play that essentially takes place in the public urban realm.

In an influential account, Steven Mullaney has investigated the location of theatres within the cultural geography of early modern London. He describes the Liberties as ‘a geopolitical domain that was crucial to the symbolic and material economy of the city and that had traditionally been reserved for cultural phenomena that could not be contained within the strict or proper bounds of the community’. For Mullaney, the significance of the location of the public theatre in the Liberties of Shakespeare's London is that for a brief time popular drama was able to appropriate the traditions of moral and cultural licence that had for centuries been maintained in the Liberties in order to achieve an ideological liberty of its own. Situated at the edges of London, where the city butted up against the countryside, subject to the titular authority of the City of London but effectively beyond its control, the Liberties were neither quite in London nor wholly distinct from it. Excluded from the city but maintained within sight, they were a frequent destination for its inhabitants when they were in search of pleasure or destined for punishment and suffering. A marginal place that nevertheless served many vital social purposes, the Liberties marked the troublesome limits of the urban community.