Laborless London: Comic Form and the Space of the Town in Caroline Covent Garden
Richard Brome's 1632 comedy The Weeding of Covent Garden opens with one of the early modern stage's most densely layered descriptions of a city scene. The play begins with Cockbrain, a neighborhood constable, and Rooksbill, a wealthy builder, looking out over a half-finished construction site and introducing the audience to the shape and significance of a piazza-to-be:COCKBRAIN. Marry Sir! This is something like! These appear like Buildings! Here's Architecture exprest indeed! It is a most sightly scituation, and fit for Gentry and Nobility.ROOKSBILL. When it is all finished, doubtlesse it will be handsome.COCKBRAIN. It will be glorious: and yond magnificent Peece, the Piazza, will excel that at Venice, by hearsay, (I nee're travell'd). A hearty blessing on their braines, honours, and wealths, that are Projectors, Furtherers, and Performers of such great works. And now I come to you Mr. Rookesbill: I like your Rowe of houses most incomparably. Your money never shone so on your Counting-boards, as in those Structures.ROOKSBILL. I have pil'd up a Leash of thousand pounds in walls and windows there.COCKBRAIN. It will all come again with large increase ... You cannot think how I am taken with that Rowe! How even and straight they are! And so are all indeed. The Surveyor (what e're he was) has manifested himself the Master of his great Art. How he has wedded strength to beauty; state to uniformity; commodiousnesse with perspicuity! All, all as't should be! (1.1,pp. 1-2).1Between Rooksbill's nervous musings and Cockbrain's effusive description, an architectural and ideological comedy ends before The Weeding of Covent Garden even really begins. Under the precise eye of a Master Surveyor, strength, state, and commodiousness are "wedded" in a triple marriage to beauty, uniformity, and perspicuity: "all" is "as't should be" in a Covent Garden devoid of conflict. Using this happy marriage as an opportunity to reflect on the social, economic, and political potential of the piazza, Cockbrain predicts that the neighborhood will fill with the cream of London society, that the vast sum of money temporarily locked up in the illiquid form of "walls and windows" will regenerate itself and increase, and that the "great works" of Rooksbill and his fellow builder-financiers will transform London into a city that rivals Venice, the capital of Mediterranean commerce.In order to understand how Covent Garden the historical space might have been able to bear the weight of Cockbrain's overdetermined version of Covent Garden the comic space, it is necessary to look in some detail at the history of the land's development and at the politics of urban expansion in early modern London.2 But before I do so, I wish to stress two points that suggest the broader significance of what will be a rather localized discussion. First, as a radically new kind of space in London, Caroline Covent Garden offers an ideal site from which to think through the emergence of the link between social and topographical distinction in the nascent metropolis. By the eighteenth century, the divisions between good and bad London neighborhoods would be completely commonsense, as city sites and class status entered into the mutually reinforcing dialectic that we still know today. This relationship was only beginning to be forged in the 1630s. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the city's neighborhoods tended to be organized around the structures of parish or ward and the convenience of commercial associations. Though there were, of course, inconsistencies within the larger pattern, for the most part fishmongers lived near other fishmongers, goldsmiths near goldsmiths, shoemakers near shoemakers.3 By the 1630s, however, as more and more of the rural gentry were drawn to the markets and entertainments of the city, and as successful citizens and merchants began to lease out their homes and shops to escape the crowded medieval streets and alleys within London's walls, a new kind of urban scene became possible. …
A "Birthright into a New World": Representing the Town on Brome's Stage
England in the 1630s witnessed increasing hostilities between Puritans and Royalists as different religious and political groups competed to shape the way the English conceptualized the newly constructed town locales. During this period, sites such as Covent Garden, Asparagus Garden in Lambeth across from Whitehall, and the New Exchange in the Strand at Westminster, among others, emerged as contested spaces among the court, the city, and the country. (1) Most critics characterize the dramatist Richard Brome as siding with the town gentry and depicting these upscale districts in his plays as oppositional hotbeds to Charles's increasingly autocratic rule. While R. J. Kaufmann, Julie Sanders, Martin Butler, and, more recently, Matthew Steggle and Adam Zucker emphasize the setting in Brome's plays, they largely overlook the way these suburban developments were imagined as colonial ventures. (2) This essay examines how the establishment of the town, as represented in Brome's plays, is framed by European models of both internal colonialism and New World expansion. (3) Although my essay treats mainly Carolinian drama, I also discuss Ben Jonson's plays, in order to contextualize the ways in which Brome brings together two seemingly different functions of Jacobean drama: to familiarize recent arrivals to London to their fast-changing milieu and to marginalize an English underclass that cannot assimilate into the competitive marketplace of these new urban spaces. Teasing out the tensions of these two representational models, Brome identifies how elite speculators and the state collude as they attempted to increase profit margins and solidify their control of these expanding districts. By dramatizing how developers incorporate foreign architecture, install foreign workers in the town, and construct the town as an overseas territory, Brome lays bare an urban topography that upends traditional social relationships grounded in land ownership among the underclass, "middling sort," and aristocracy. (4) In the first section of the essay, I analyze Ben Jonson's The Entertainment at Britain's Burse (1609), which registers the bewilderment of Londoners who have trouble comprehending the transformation of the western suburbs, as formerly remote green spaces became integrated into a global network of commerce. In this masque, which was performed before James I at the inaugural ceremony of the New Exchange in the Strand at Westminster, Jonson depicts this high-end shopping center as an initial foray into the town by developers who intended to displace the area's inhabitants. The New Exchange, one of the main developments of the West End, along with Hyde Park, Tottenham Court, and Covent Garden, specializes in luxury consumer items from the Far East--products from a region of the world that testified to Dutch trading supremacy. As I will demonstrate, because the Netherlands permeates the way the English conceive of the town, these sites come to be characterized as extensions of Dutch commercial activities, alienating the English from their homeland. (5) I then consider the construction of London's suburbs as a New World plantation that must "weed" undesirable elements in order to form a community fit for the nobility in Brome's topographical comedy, or "placerealism" play, The Weeding of Covent Garden (1633). Alternately called a "forest" and a "lawless" precinct inhabited by "Amazonian trulls" and "tribe[s]" of men and women, (6) Covent Garden contains an underclass thriving on the disorder inherent in this new suburb. Primarily, developers of the suburbs introduced foreign architecture to draw the city's elite to the area to maximize profits; in his study of this play, Zucker points out that the "building of the Covent Garden piazza signaled the consolidation of the city's first neighborhood based on wealth." (7) As contemporary pamphlets demonstrate, this gentrification was disguised as a colonial venture--an inducement to nonlocals to settle in the area, but only if they strictly conform to the builders' image of the development as an exclusive setting designed for a new merchant elite. …
Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948
The World War II era represented the golden age of radio as a broadcast medium in the United States; it also witnessed a rise in African-American activism against racial segregation and discrimination, especially as they were practised by the federal government itself. In this study, the author links these cultural and political forces by showing how African-American activists, public officials, intellectuals, and artists sought to access and use radio to influence a national debate about racial inequality. Drawing on a body of national public affairs programming about African-Americans and race relations, the author uses these radio shows to demonstrate the emergence of a new national discourse about race and ethnicity, racial hatred and injustice, and the contribution of racial and immigrant populations to the development of the United States. These programmes, Savage contends, challenged the nation to reconcile its professed egalitarian ideals with its unjust treatment of black Americans and other minorities. This examination of radio's treatment of race as a national political issue also provides important evidence that the campaigns for racial justice in the 1940s served as an essential, and still overlooked, precursor to the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, Savage argues. The next battleground would be in the South, and on television.