Urban Citizens in Early Modern Drama

Citizenship in Shakespeare’s England was not attached to nationality but rather to one’s city and employment. In this study of urban citizenship, William Casey Caldwell explores the range of economic relationships which existed through a range of dramatic texts.

Revealing how citizenship was defined along urban lines and controlled by early forms of corporations, Caldwell argues that playwrights at the time used this context to imagine new opportunities for non-citizens. By returning us to its commercial and urban bases, Urban Citizenship in Early Modern Drama exposes how playwrights such as Shakespeare, Francis Beaumont, and William Haughton used extant and emergent financial instruments and relationships to rethink the economic foundations of citizenship in London. From Shylock’s bid to make a debt bond to procreate with a citizen in The Merchant of Venice to the monetized form of toleration directed towards a Portuguese denizen’s daughters in Englishmen for My Money, this book explores how plays provided their audience - many of whom would not have been citizens either - with critical and performative forms of citizenship defined by the intersection of job and city.