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. …
Londinopolis: essays in the cultural and social history of early modern London
Preface Abbreviations List of tables and figures Introduction 1. Ian Archer 'Popular politics in 16th and early 17th century London' 2. Michael Berlin, 'Reordering ritual: the parish and ceremony in London, 1520-1640' 3. Tim Wales, 'Thief-takers and their clients in London, c.1670-1720' 4. Faramerz Dabhoiwala, 'The pattern of sexual immorality in seventeenth and eigthteenth-century London' 5. Maragret R. Hunt, 'London wives and marital 'rights' in the Court of Exchequer in the early eighteenth century' 6. Laura Gowing, '"The freedom of the streets": women and social space in London, 1560-1640' 7. Margaret Pelling, 'Skirting the city? Disease, social change and divided huoseholds in the seventeenth-century metropolis' 8. Paul Griffiths, '"Uniformity" in the Goldsmiths' Row: visualizing order in early Stuart Cheapside' 9. Jeremy Boulton, 'The poor among the rich: a long-term view of pauperism in London's West End' 10. Sara Pennell, '"Great quantities of gooseberry pye and baked clod of beef": victualling and eating out in early modern London' 11. Mark Jenner, 'From conduit community to commercial network? Water in London, 1500-1725'
PLEASURE, POWER, AND THE PURSUIT OF COMMUNISM: SOVIET YOUTH AND STATE-SPONSORED POPULAR CULTURE DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR, 1945-1968
art, with certain students accused of “showing political immaturity, failing to understand the Party’s positions on art.” This episode constituted part of a broader crackdown on abstract art by the Khrushchev administration from late 1962, precipitated the the Soviet leader’s derision of such art forms in December 1962 at the Manege exhibit. Such instances demonstrate the limitations of the top-level promotion of youth grassroots initiative, as the Khrushchev leadership reigned in youth autonomy when it threatened to go beyond the boundaries of the permissible. The dates cited above have particular resonance, since both 1957-58 and 1962-63 represent two periods when those at the top of the Party hierarchy moved away from pursuing a more pluralistic, tolerant policy course, due to anxiety inspired by both sharpening Cold War hostilities and domestic developments. In these periods, official rhetoric censured what it labeled as 639 TsAOPIM, f. 635, op. 13, d. 546, ll. 56-57. This is likely related to criticism of the Party associated with the fallout from the Secret Speech and the Hungary invasion. For more, see Polly Jones, “From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin: Real and Ideal Responses to De-Stalinization,” in Jones ed., The Dilemmas, 41-63. 640 TsAOPIM, f. 6083, op. 1, d. 52, ll. 166-67. 641 Susan E. Reid, “In the Name of the People: The Manege Affair Revisited,” Kritika 6.4 (Fall 2005): 673716. 642 On these anxieties, see Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 156-88.