ABSTRACT
Given the phenomenally rapid growth of the metropolis in the latter half of the sixteenth century it is not surprising to find that London exercised an almost obsessive fascination for writers of every genre in the period.2 Yet, in spite of this momentous expansion – or perhaps because many saw it as a monstrous one – London was, before the very end of the 1590s, invariably portrayed as a quasimythic, monolithic entity, significant (for better or worse) in its entirety, but without the sharp differentiation of its constituent parts which, as Richard Helgerson has persuasively argued, characterizes the essential core of the chorographic enterprise.3 While the most compendious of town chronicles, such as The Great Chronicle of London, managed to combine the detail of an atlas or street plan with considerable narrative energy, these remained mostly unpublished and immured,
1 Thomas Heywood, The Four Prentices of London (London: J W[right], 1615), sig. A4v. My title invokes Theodore Leinwand’s important book The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603-1613 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).
