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COPYRIGHT 2005 Indiana University Press
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 Piazzo, 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). (1)
Between 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. The building of the Covent Garden piazza signalled the consolidation of the city's first neighborhood based on wealth.
The emergence of this new kind of urban space was not a unitary or self-enclosed event. As Cockbrain's introductory vision begins to suggest, a diverse network of social, economic, and political forces contributed to the historical processes that led to the building of the piazza. In order to account for this multiplicity, I'll examine the ways in which this early, deeply contested, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at civic engineering took place: in legal forms, such as the Privy Council orders and building contracts that were to regulate the social and physical tenor of the piazza; in architectural forms, including the balcony, an exotic and much-discussed element of the piazza's then unfamiliar aesthetic; and, most importantly, in the comic forms of the plays I'll be discussing here: The Weeding of Covent Garden and Thomas Nabbes's Covent Garden, which also first appeared in 1632. This leads me to the second point I'd like to emphasize, a point of methodology, more than of history. Frederic Jameson has argued that literary form "is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right," and that refashioned forms in "different social and cultural contexts" bring older "socio-symbolic message[s]" to bear on emergent historical problems." (4) The Covent Garden plays might serve as local examples of the social work that theatrical forms could do in the shifting contexts of early modern England. The resources of dramatic comedy that had been used in Elizabethan plays to stage and (tendentiously) resolve sexual, political, and patrimonial conflicts in fantastic settings, and that in Jacobean comedy had helped make sense of the social place of people and commodities in London's increasingly placeless market, were being put to use in Caroline England in ways that invoked those older interests, but that now looked to a new set of historically and topographically specific problems. (5) Many playwrights of the 1630s--such as James Shirley in Hyde Park (1632), Nabbes in Tottenham Court (1635), and Brome in The Spargus Garden (1634), for example--took up older narrative paradigms of comedy to create a locationally specific kind of play that would influence the theater's urban perspective for decades to come. In the case of the Covent Garden plays, comic form provided Caroline audiences with a conceptual structure that could in some fashion make sense of the fractious and diverse relationships that produced and were shaped by the material space of the piazza itself. I'll show in the second half of this essay how the conventions of the early modern stage--conventions both textual and technological--reimagined the coercive processes molding the social and physical urban world as the stuff of comedy, bringing to the stage a Covent Garden neighborhood in which a laborless space for London's elite effortlessly, impossibly, but believably came into being. (6)
The early decades of the seventeenth century saw the codification of the familiar behaviors that would come to dominate the practices and representations of fashionable London society for years to come. It was during these years that the notion of a London season began to develop, as wealthy families drawn by increasingly centralized markets for land, marriage, legal services, and luxury goods started to spend the winter and early spring months in and around the rapidly expanding city. (7) Because of their proximity to the court at Westminster, the suburbs to the west of London's walls were particularly popular with this moneyed community, which began to refer to itself and to the changing set of physical sites it inhabited as "the Town." Along with an interest in the diverse goods and services available in London to those who could afford them, occupants of the space of the Town were fascinated both by the effortless expressions of cultural competence that fell under the broad heading of "wit," and by a range of leisurely pursuits that helped calcify social boundaries between those wealthy enough to waste time in the city, and those who did not have the luxury to do so. Even at its most refined, the Town (as the work of Martin Butler and Julie Sanders has shown) was never truly disengaged from the economic and political life of London and the nation at large. (8) But, relying on an early version of the social logic of taste and distinction made familiar by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Town culture imagined itself (and was repeatedly imagined on stage) in contrast to the drab marketplace realities of London life? Like the increasingly popular Hyde and St. James parks, Covent Garden was a space that reflected and furthered this trend by serving as a site upon which urban fantasies of ease might be projected. With its balconies and windows facing inwards, toward the presumably placid walks of a square and away from the reticulated hive of streets and alleyways growing around it, the Covent Garden piazza tried to turn its back on work.
Francis Russell, the fourth Earl of Bedford and the primary developer of Covent Garden famously promised in his request to the crown for a building license that his Italianate housing project would provide "fitt habitacion for gentlemen and men of ability." (10) But as the well-documented local history of Covent Garden suggests, this was not an easy promise to keep. (11) Cockbrain's effusive optimism aside, it took a great deal of legal maneuvering to control even partially the interrelated social and material contours of the new buildings around the piazza. This was in part the result of the variegated construction that had already taken place around the area that would become the square. What was once a literal forty-acre garden for the Convent of St. Peter's Westminster had become by 1630 a plot of land divided into two sections by the Russell family, which had been granted the estate by Henry VIII and Edward VI. The roughly rectangular inner portion of the land was walled off and remained an open field until it became the site of the piazza proper. The outer fringe, however, had been since the early seventeenth century slowly leased out and built over with structures of varying quality, from fairly tony residences to ramshackle stables and sheds. (12) This scattered hodge-podge made up the first wave of development in Covent Garden under the Russell family. The structures were far from elegant, and almost all of them were built contrary to a series of royal proclamations restricting construction on new foundations in and around London.
The building proclamations Elizabeth, Charles, and especially James issued over the course of their reigns were some of the most obvious influences on the shape and style of the later wave of construction in Covent Garden in the 1630s. These erratically enforced laws responded to a wide range of social and economic pressures in London and in England more generally, including fears that dense, poorly constructed housing might lead to outbreaks of plague,...
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