This book combines theater and life in an attempt to consider how people interacted in face-to-face situations in early-modern England, and to examine the wider implications of those relationships for social organization. The research draws on mid-Tudor comedies, the City comedies, and early-Stuart plays.

In this book, an attempt is made to understand the relationships between different social groups and social categories with the spaces and places they inhabited and moved through.

Postles examines how the religious failed to fulfill both their obligations and the expectations of them, so that the affective relation between the enclosed religious and the laity was eclipsed by the early 14th century.

The City comedies in early-modern England repeated social tropes and paradigms from which we can deduce much about social attitudes. Although literature is often assumed to belong to the sphere of representation rather than constituting an accurate reflection of social reality, early-modern English drama can tell us much about social attitudes in the early Seventeenth century. The City comedies were, in particular, composed by authors who were embedded in the mundane social existence of London, in its quotidian transactions and exchanges, in its less salubrious contexts of debt, drinking,...