London in literature is more than a stage set on which characters act out their lives; it is a character that interacts with its readers. The city can express our identity: as Carol Ann Duffy observes about Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, the writer shows us ‘that where we live is one of the ways of understanding who we are’ (Woolf 2000, p. xiii). London enacts conflicts and revelations — as if the power of the capital city jolts writers into capturing moments of recognition.
London plays the leading role in early modern drama — specifically Eastcheap in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 (1596–98), and Blackfriars in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610). The city’s population grew from 50,000 in 1550 to 200,000 in 1600 and playwrights exploited the appetite of these new Londoners to see the energy and chaos of their own hustling lives acted out on stage.
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