Neighbourly Relationships in Early Modern Drama: Staged Communities

The book offers the first sustained examination of neighbourly relationships in early modern English drama, situating the close analyses of the selected plays within contemporary prescriptive literature (such as sermons and conduct books), letters, diaries, pamphlets, ballads, wills, proverbs, as well as the lived realities of early modern neighbourhoods as glimpsed in the historical and legal archives. The originality of the book lies in its topic, in the plays chosen for analysis, including Gammer Gurton’s Needle, written in the 1550s and believed to be the first printed vernacular English comedy, and in the revisionist close readings on offer. The plays span the period between 1550s and 1620s, belong to different genres, and were aimed at different audiences and written for different kinds of playhouses, allowing for conclusions to be drawn about the way genre shapes the treatment of neighbourly relationships, as well as revealing continuities and changes in this treatment over the period under study.