Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City

by Julia H. Fawcett

Overview

In September 1666, a fire sparked in a bakery on Pudding Lane grew until it had destroyed four-fifths of central London. The rebuilding efforts that followed not only launched the careers of some of London’s most famous architects, but also transformed Londoners’ relationship to their city by underscoring the ways that people could shape a city’s spaces—and the ways that a city’s spaces could shape its people. Movable Londons looks to the Restoration theater to understand how the dispossessed made London into a modern city after the Great Fire of 1666 and how the introduction of changeable scenery in theaters altered how Londoners conceptualized the city. Fawcett makes a claim for the centrality of unplanned spaces and the role of the Restoration theater in articulating those spaces as the modern city emerged and argues that movable scenery revolutionized London’s public theaters, inviting audiences to observe how the performers—many of them hailing from the same communities as their characters—navigated the stage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472905218
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	09/04/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Julia H. Fawcett is Associate Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696–1801.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter One: Plotting (Dryden’s Servants)

Chapter Two: Personal Space (Behn’s Women)

Chapter Three: Nonconformity (Vanbrugh’s Puritans)

Chapter Four: Migration (Farquhar’s Irish)

Chapter Five: Cosmopolitanism (Wycherley’s Dancing-Master, Bickerstaffe’s Mungo, and the Legacies of Restoration London)

Epilogue: London Moving

Notes

Bibliography

Index

What People are Saying About This

Cynthia Wall

“Movable Londons is a compellingly original, deeply researched, and beautifully written study of the performance of (and performances in) urban space, invaluable for the history of drama, London history, Restoration and eighteenth-century studies, and women’s studies. One of Fawcett’s greatest strengths is rendering the supposedly unrenderable: performance itself.”

D.J. Hopkins

“Movable Londons makes a compelling argument that focuses on the intersection of theatrical and urban practices in one particular time and place, though with an impact that reverberates in later eras and (eventually) across a global geographical range. Fawcett's book is a remarkable achievement: engaging to read, well argued, and deeply researched.”

Editorial Reviews

“Movable Londons is a compellingly original, deeply researched, and beautifully written study of the performance of (and performances in) urban space, invaluable for the history of drama, London history, Restoration and eighteenth-century studies, and women’s studies. One of Fawcett’s greatest strengths is rendering the supposedly unrenderable: performance itself.”— Cynthia Wall, University of Virginia

“Movable Londons makes a compelling argument that focuses on the intersection of theatrical and urban practices in one particular time and place, though with an impact that reverberates in later eras and (eventually) across a global geographical range. Fawcett's book is a remarkable achievement: engaging to read, well argued, and deeply researched.”— D.J. Hopkins, San Diego State University

From the Publisher