The drama of early modern London has been popular territory in recent years. Making space in this crowded marketplace is not easy, but this new work announces itself on the scene as an important study. Tackling a corpus of selected city comedies, the author makes the case that “London plays comment on London by staging its topography, by remaking the strategies of control over urban space that are a part of London life, and by exposing the reproduction of, and sometimes the questioning of, those strategies” (5–6). As the title suggests, Stage's study is indebted to the work of Henri Lefebvre, exploiting the tension in his theorization between the “representation of space” and the “space of representation”—glossable as the conceptualizations of planners, set against lived space of users and artists. In a nuanced critical introduction, Stage argues for the particular properties of the London stage, bringing together Lefebvre's suggestive comments on the Elizabethan stage scene as “third space,” Yi-Fi Tuan's reflections on space versus place, and Robert Weimann's reflections on the “double gaze.” It is in the moment of performance, Stage argues, that these concepts “make something meaningful in their practice of iteration: iterating the city, iterating the drama, iterating the usefulness of the place of the stage, and iterating its ability to expand and project beyond these boundaries” (29). The four chapters that follow seek to map these iterations onto a series of innovations in form.

This work begins with Haughton's Englishman for My Money, where Stage contrasts the use of iconic settings—the Royal Exchange, St. Paul's—with those street scenes that exploit the qualities of the stage to challenge the certitude of place. Where Haughton's drama places this disruption in the service of an ideological narrative of English spatial mastery, Stage's discussion of Jonson's Every Man Out foregrounds its more radical metatheatrical challenge to spatial totalization. Chapter 2 explores the relations of center and periphery in the dramatic exchanges of the three Ho plays. In leaving London, each play finds a way of contesting the order of its totalizing visions. In Westward Ho, the city's moral and social health is challenged by grafting a topography of sexual taboo onto the traumatic memories of civic plague regulation. In Northward Ho, civic sexual morality is further undercut in a localized representation of London's trading networks that “maps the circulation of material goods and people onto the idea of a comedy plot itself” (95). Finally, in Eastward Ho, the grand voyage east is mocked and London's hierarchic organization is critiqued as the play places city pageantry under the spotlight on the commercial stage.

Chapter 3 turns to The Roaring Girl, using Michel de Certeau's formulation of “tactics,” and the resistance to civic organization inscribed within them, to show how Moll contests paradigms of urban space, and its economic and gendered constructions to maintain “a metropolis of possibilities” (163). This rich reading leads into a brief consideration of Jonson's Epicoene, which focuses on a failed resistance to the urban in the play's depiction of a nascent town culture struggling to define itself against the deafening reach of the city's noise, symbolizing and enacting the insistent pressure of urban jurisdiction and control. The final chapter, devoted to Middleton's Chaste Maid in Cheapside, reads the play's opposed households of the Yellowhammers and the Allwits in terms of contrasting logics of containment and liquidity, where, despite the seeming triumph of containment in the play's conclusion, Stage stresses the significance of the Allwits’ escape westward as a figure for the city's accommodation of contrasting philosophies. Stage concludes with a discussion of Every Man In, whose rewriting in 1616 signals the retreat from the explorations of the earlier plays, toward a fixity in both generic terms and ideas of the city.

This is not a work that is rooted in rigorous historicization, and several of the contextual readings lean somewhat toward the anecdotal. Equally, the subtlety, critical acuity, and intensity of the dramatic readings here are not always matched in the engagement with the broader textual culture of the period. However, in the elegance of its critical formulations carefully applied to the close reading of key works in the city-comedy canon, this is an astute and important book that makes a significant contribution to understanding the placemaking of early modern London drama.