ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the visibility of the figure of the female crier in the streets, legislative initiatives, and popular visual culture of early modern London. To focus solely on the visibility of the street crier during the period, however, would be to evade what is arguably their most defining feature, namely, their cries themselves. The depiction of street criers in plays staged in the commercial theaters during the period therefore represents a particularly complex instance of cultural negotiation with regard to competing definitions of work and play, and one that was deeply inflected by gender. Representations of female street cries and criers thus performed their own cultural and ideological work, as complex negotiations of the gendered divisions of labor and leisure. The street cries of early modern London were essentially fugitive articulations. Evanescent and fleeting, they were enunciated by an itinerant population of petty retailers who made their living outside or on the fringes of the formal marketplace.
