ABSTRACT
City defenses, or the lack of them, were on London’s mind in the 1590s. London was awash in jingoistic and alarmist literature celebrating the Armada victory, decrying the cruelty of Spanish armies on the continent and in the New World, urging vigilance and readiness, and cautioning London as to its lack of preparedness. City defenses were on William Shakespeare’s mind when he moved from Stratford to London and began writing plays sometime in the early 1590s. By associating contemptuous citizens overconfident in their crude defenses with spectators in a theater, the play confronts its London audience with an image of its own “unfenced desolation.” At the heart of the anti-fortification discourse, as Touchstone’s comparison of “a wall’d town” and a “village” suggests, is the positioning of people over stone walls as England’s best defense. Even as Shakespeare emerges as sympathetic to that position, his plays register concerns the idea of community organized around defense.
