Places

Clerkenwell is the earliest known specific location in London for the performance of plays. This is to understand "London" in an anachronistic sense, however, since Clerkenwell was not within the City of London at the time of the first recorded performance there. It lay outside the old city wall (Dillon 115-116). Legal documents show that such areas as Turnmill or Turnbull Street were so shameful that suggesting a neighbor move there provoked actions for defamation (Turner 135).

Suburbs filed the area between the Thames and High Holborn as far west as Westminster Abbey and St. Giles Church. Beyond lay open country, except for St. James's Palace. Within the Bars, which marked city jurisdiction, and clustered along the fetid Fleet's west bank, were densely crowded houses. Southwest from the Temple Bar, buildings had long since spread down the Strand to Charing Cross and Westminster. The crossroads at Charing, where the road turns to Westminster, was enclosed with buildings (McMains 26). The only places about which we can be certain that they hosted performances of drolls and sketches are the Red Bull theatre, the precincts of Aldgate during Bartholomew fair and public spaces or taverns at Charing Cross and Lincolns-Inn Fields. The last two of these are only connected with these activities through Kirkman’s mention of them on the front-piece of the 1673 edition (Škrobánková 21-22).

Dramatists and balladers poked fun at Bridewell, but they also imagined it as a bleak place packed to the brim with vagrants and whores. Mortified by the malicious glee of loose gossip, prisoners and their friends spoke of the shame of Bridewell. It was chartered by the crown in 1553, and it very soon became a keyweapon in the drive to contain what was felt to be a rising tide of crime from getting rapidly out of control. It became the main lockup in London for vice crimes, rootless vagrants, street crime, domestic disorders, and other 'petty' antsocial acts (Griffiths 286).