• 1  Kenneth McRobbie (ed.), Humanity, Society and Commitment: On Karl Polanyi, Toronto: Black Rose Boo (...)
• 2  A recent example of this attitude is Liutpold Frommel who discusses abstract forms and their relat (...)

1What was Shakespeare’s take on the city? This article focuses on how the dramatist represents the city, or more particularly on how some of his more urban plays are “embedded” in the surrounding city and relate to contemporary attitudes to the city. Shakespeare’s plays like other texts belong in socio-economic and cultural spaces that follow laws of causality and logic of their own. They are in a striking metaphor embedded in larger and different contexts and texts, operating in arenas that are continually subjected to change in the form of colonization and invasion. A city is such a vast and comprehensive text that is in continual flux, a site in which the theatre and stage plays are embedded in on-going complex processes. “Embeddedness” is a central concept within economic and institutional sociology, being launched by the Hungarian economist Karl Polyani, in the seminal study The Great Transformation (1944), who opposed the idea in economic theory that the market exists independently from society and possesses its own inherent logic and dynamics.1 In the manner that literary works used to be studied in well-nigh total isolation from their social and ideological contexts, architecture and urbanism too have been studied within similar formalistic frames of analysis, as a pure tekne superimposed upon sites and cities and following abstract laws of their own,2 an analytical approach that today is outmoded.

• 3  Gail Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare, Athens: The University of Georgia Pre (...)
• 4  Mark Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 2009, 53; 176.

2We do not know much about what Shakespeare’s thoughts about actual cities or urbanism were, but he has been studied in relation to idea of the city.3 Judging by his work and recorded life, we know that he took an interest in architecture. Just how his own house, New Place at Stratford-upon-Avon, may have been shaped by that interest, the on-going explorative excavations on the site of the no longer extant building will possibly tell us. Shakespeare was certainly more akin to Prospero in The Tempest, than to men like Lord Burghley who imported “pattern books” from Italy, and built stately Italian-inspired country houses.4 Interestingly, when the banished wizard–duke of Milan, explains to Ferdinand the nature of his faded “insubstantial pageant” (iv.i.155), he refers to and rejects the type of idealised townscape or architectural vision we most readily, but imprecisely, associate with Renaissance urbanism:

• 5  Antonio Averlino, il Filarete, Trattato di architettura (1462-66), 2 vols, ed. A.M. Finoli and L. (...)

3By means of his mouthpiece Shakespeare here implicitly discloses a critical attitude to the new and outlandish type of preconceived model city, seen for example in Antonio Filarete’s complimentary and unrealised ville radieuse outlined in his Trattato della Architettura.5

• 6  The pictured buildings vary both in type, style, size and alignment, Serlio’s “Scena Tragica” and (...)
• 7  For Pienza, see Christine Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics (...)
• 8  Iannotii Manetti, De vita ac gestis Nicolai quinti summi pontificis, edited and translated by Anna (...)

4Shakespeare’s visionary cityscape is nevertheless Early Modern, whereas the imagined cities, small and great, in Thomas More’s in Utopia cannot be said to be expressive of any kind of Early Modern urbanism, – neither in relation to the common notion of the ideal city or its socio-political implications; it is firmly medieval. What we associate most readily with a Renaissance ideal city are perspective representations like the so-called Urbino or Baltimore panels, which are exercises in perspective construction or templates made for painters. We know that the theoretician of linear perspective, Leon Battista Alberti, made such no longer extant perspectives, but we spy similar ones in contemporary and later paintings by Ghirlandaio, Piero della Francesca, and Perugino. Besides these spookily empty orthogonal constructions are not symmetrical in the popular sense of “dead” symmetry, but display a variety of building types and styles, ranging from all’antica building, late Gothic and early Renaissance.6 They are thus perspective anticipations of the material cityscape we can experience at Pienza in Tuscany, in Bernardo Rosselino’s realization of Alberti’s scheme for the transformation of the village Corbignano, the birthplace of Pope Pius ii.7 The medieval or early Renaissance social hierarchy embedded in the city as built, again reminds us of the widespread and imprecise opinion that a Renaissance town need have an ideal design. Contrary to opinion I would argue that there are two main kinds of Renaissance city or two types of urbanism: an aristocratic or absolutist urbanism represented by Sforzinda, Palma nova and Sabbioneta; and a republican one, based in particular on the stylistic ideal of convenientia with varietas and a dialogic principle, dialogue being the preferred genre of Humanists like Alberti. Pienza is possibly the best extant example but the plan for the Borgo in Rome, surviving only in the prose of Antonio Manetti’s Vita ac gestis (1453), embodies similar principles.8

• 9  See my discussion in The Building in the text. Alberti to Shakespeare and Milton, University Park, (...)

6In the 17-line speech describing how the Tiber cuts Rome into two parts, there is a cluster of words underpinning that fact (“iust through the midst”, “two parts”, “two Bridges”, “double Cannons”), so that the actual divided topography of the urbs becomes a template for the speech itself and its distribution of semiotic markers (one/Rome containes/Bridges/passage//Rome//Bridge/passing/contain’d/one). It is repetitional pattern typical of the Marlovian speech and its corresponding in the A-text typically fails to reproduce its pattern. For the recommendation of such patterning cum accompanying textual analysis by Tarquato Tasso, see the latter’s Lezione on a sonnet by Giovanni della Casa.9

• 10  See my “Shaping the Sonnet Italian Style: Petrarch, Tasso, Daniel and Shakespeare”, in ed. Sonja F (...)
• 11  The Building in the text, pp. 1-10.

7Like Marlowe before him Shakespeare sometimes uses architectural terms almost as self-referring passages and comments on the action. In fact, sporting current architectural terminology seems to have been fashionable among Elizabethan writers in general, if we consider writers as different as Richard Wills, George Gascoigne, George Puttenham, Samuel Daniel, and William Scott.10 In 2 Henry iv (i.iii.35-62) Shakespeare reveals a surprising number of both traditional native and up-to-date Italian terms in relation to building and to the planning of a work in hand (plot of situation, model, foundation, and erection). For instance, the English term “plot” – corresponding to “site,” or a place ready to receive the “ground-work” – acquires the sense of a dramatic action.11 In the speech from 2 Henry iv Lord Bardolph considers a line of action that will coincide with the ensuing action, and does so using architectural terms. That coincidence may of course be given structural expression in terms of the actual dispostio and elocutio, but tells us little about how such metaphors bear on the city embedded in the play.

• 12  Park Honan, The Lodger. Shakespeare on Silver Street, London: Allen Lane, 2007, p. 32.

9In spite of spending most of twenty-five years in London, Shakespeare never became a Londoner. As Park Honan reminds us, “he was born, married and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon. And this provincial town remained, in most senses, his home.”12 And I would strongly argue that his mind-set remained very much of the village, when in play after play he tries to give ethical order and dimension to human life. This contrasts with the urban mind-set of Leon Battista Alberti, for whom the city was the highest achievement of public architecture, citizens and buildings alike being the ornaments of the city state.

• 14  Ibid.

13The grotesqueness of Falstaff matches that of Thomas Nashe’s Jack Wilton and some of the novella’s cronies, but he does not at all move in the same urban landscape. Wilton moves in cityscapes whereas Falstaff moves between taverns, an opening in the forest, and along country roads. In fact, there is little in the plays mentioned by Paster that turns them into city plays to the exclusion of others like Twelfth Night; or distinguishes them from the three plays she presents as “Shakespeare’s City Comedies”: The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure.14

• 15  On Shakespeare’s use of plot in relation to Alberti and early Elizabethan practice by e.g. Shute, (...)
• 16  Muriel Cunin, Shakespeare et l’architecture. Nouvelles inventions pour bien bâtir et bien jouer, P (...)

17We are reminded of the negative image of the house without a roof, but the metaphor does not approach Plato’s of the body as a city, which Shakespeare reserves for the patrician Menenius’s parable in Coriolanus of the mutinous body drawn from Aesop. The patrician tells a tale that is essentially political and ideological, and it does not reflect on how Shakespeare in the play reduces Rome to an idea and a site for ideological conflict, rather than to a diversified oikos of conflicting interests based on concrete and material economic concerns. In the earlier Roman play, Titus Andronicus, Aaron, who works from a Machiavellian hidden design on his opponents’ lives, is dubbed by his victims “architect and plotter of these woes,” thus being a poet of actions (v.iii.121).15 Whereas Muriel Cunin observes that “[p]our Shakespeare, nous le verrons, l’édification semble passer davantage par l’architecture poétique que par l’architecture imaginaire,”16 I would like to add that there is a decided movement towards ethics and away from the actual urban setting of the dramatic action as well as of the playhouse itself. In this sliding away from or avoidance of city contingencies Shakespeare differs from many of his contemporaries in his emphases.

• 17  I believe that he had experimented with this form of Italianate comedy in the unconventional and “ (...)

18The strong impulse to politicize comedy, that is, its purpose to condemn vices by presenting biting satires of human weakness, is developed in the direction of political and cultural critique by Marlowe in his innovative The Jew of Malta. The play which represents the first dramatic instance of sustained black comedy and satire, springs from the matrix of Italianate city comedy,17 and is a play that is deeply embedded in Elizabethan mercantile culture and politico-religious conflicts. The population of a merchant city is reflected in its sheer range of characters; people of different nationalities and creeds (Italians, Spanish, Turks, and Jews; Catholics, Moslems, and Judaists); and, most importantly, members of many social groups and trades (aristocrats, burghers, knights, soldiers, friars, nuns, servants, workers, slaves, prostitutes, and pimps). In other words, Marlowe’s Malta is a community not dissimilar in structure to that of European city states or merchant republics, that had grown in population, complexity, economic diversity, and wealth due to the inclusion of persons originally foreign to the locality. Such a range of characters is rare in Shakespeare who seems to have been less engaged by or involved with the city as a market in his art, although he had entrepreneurial skills, invested in property, and lived with economically successful Huguenots. To my mind the main exception in the oeuvre is The Merchant of Venice, in which the Law rather than the Market propels the conflict and there is no prominent use of the green world, the Shakespearean antidote to the city.

• 18  Honan observes that the contemporary views about London differed greatly, being either gloatingly (...)

22One wonders whether the dramatist who bought the Old Gatehouse at Blackfriars was merely making a shrewd long-term investment in real estate, or whether he at a deeper level chose the particular location of the gateway, to shut out the monstrous city around him and retreat to the expensive neighbourhood of Blackfriars as a personal variant of the hortus conclusus. Perhaps the answer is both, and in the second instance at least symbolically. Whatever the correct answer may be, and we may never find confirmation, his plays and their many vague urban settings occupy a liminal zone between the pulsating and repulsive city that is so eminently present in the plays of Dekker, Jonson, Marston and Middleton, and the conceptual city and mind-set that the playwright had brought with him from Warwickshire.18 That mind-set, be it finessed and reworked throughout his career, is embedded in the attitudes to both architecture and the city in his very first play, Two Gentlemen of Verona, one of four plays set in the Veneto.

• 19  Stanley Wells, Shakespeare: A Dramatic Life. 1994; London: Methuen, 1997, p. 89.

23In the opening speech of the play, Valentine, sets up a contrast between “the wonders of the world abroad” and “shapeless idleness” of home, that is, an opposition that challenges the preferences of a small-town audience, like that of Stratford, where the play may have been penned and first acted.19

• 21  Stanley Wells, Shakespeare for All Time. London: MacMillan, 2002, p. 17.
• 22  Roger Warren suggests that the play, “with its poetic accomplishment, but arguably primitive drama (...)
• 23  E.A.J. Honigmann proposes 1587 for a probable date of composition of the play; Shakespeare’s Impac (...)
• 24  Samuel Schoenbaum first noted the existence of a local theatre company at Stratford who were paid (...)

27Stanley Wells proposes that “Julia’s words form a metatheatrical comment on the action,”21 which I believe is sound because it also draws attention to the self-referentiality so typical of Shakespeare’s early plays.22 A local audience would no doubt have appreciated hearing the city contrasted unfavourably with the wooded landscape around their own home town. It is highly probable that The Two Gentlemen is the first surviving play by Shakespeare,23 and that he started out as actor and supplier of material for a local company, like that of a certain “Davy” whose company performed plays at Stratford.24