Under the Skin: A Neighbourhood Ethnography of Early Modern Drama

This talk will take as its premise geocriticism's central tenet that in order to really understand place the ethnographer works from the specific neighbourhood outwards. That is to say that as critics, not least of drama as a cultural and geographical form, we must start from place rather than just journey to it.

What does this idea mean in detailed application to early modern drama? Using just one particular neighbourhood, the Southwark liberty that surrounded the first open air commercial playhouses in London, my talk will consider the relevance of one particular craft neighbourhood and its community of workers in the shaping of place and space in plays created for those same theatres.

Exploring the cultural commodity of leather as it was produced by the Bankside tanneries and which would have provided the everyday sensory landscape of Southwark, the talk will trace the presence of leather as a knowledge-making object on the stage. Focus plays will include the Edward IV plays by Thomas Heywood and Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday. Attempting, quite literally, to get under the skin of one neighbourhood, this talk seeks to demonstrate how material and playing cultures can be combined to produce a literary geography.

Professor Julie Sanders is Chair of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham and currently Vice Provost of its Ningbo China campus. Her monograph The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama 1620-1650 (CUP, 2011) won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay prize for international women's scholarship in 2012 and she recently published The Cambridge Introduction to Early Modern Drama, 1576-1642  (CUP, 2014) and (with James Loxley and Anna Groundwater) Ben Jonson’s Walk to Scotland (CUP, 2015). She is co-editor with Garrett A Sullivan Jr of the new Oxford University Press commissioning series Early Modern Literary Geographies: in 2016 they will convene an international conference on the subject for the Huntington Library in California.