Versions of contemporary London staged in Westward Ho (1604), Eastward Ho (1605), and Northward Ho (1605)

My thesis researches, for the first time, the dialectical relationships between a cluster of plays performed at indoor playhouses in London immediately following the 1603-04 plague, in a capital radically impacted by population loss. These relationships are examined through an analysis of how the plays produce different versions of contemporary London and the degrees to which these are unlicensed or regulated. Building on the theoretical writings of de Certeau and the anthropologist Tim Ingold, I identify how versions of London are produced through the scope and significance of characters’ movements, through phenomenological and topographical excess, and through opportunities and agency afforded to women. In uncovering the playwrights’ responses to successive comedies I identify that these responses were increasingly a reaction to state surveillance. Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho, performed at Paul’s, stages an innovative version of an open, unregulated London. A contextual analysis explains how the drama is grounded in a metatheatrical meshwork of theatregrams and tropes from plays performed from 1598-1603 set in modern London, yet produces a startlingly new version in which women are afforded unlicensed agency to create new situations and opportunities. I argue that Chapman, Jonson and Marston’s Eastward Ho at Blackfriars stands in antithetical opposition to Westward Ho. Eastward Ho, through satirising and parodying key elements of the first play, seeks to restore regulated civic and mercantile values. Dekker and Webster’s Northward Ho presents London life as a theatrical composition, where all is, potentially, a brand new play, circumventing authoritarian censorship and repression through a knowing metatheatrical artfulness. A final chapter considers how John Day’s The Isle of Gulls, 1606, follows the Ho plays, and engages with and satirises London’s new political scene by locating the drama in a foreign setting and, in a second distancing manoeuvre, turning back to pre-1598 generic conventions.