Taking Liberties

The \u27place\u27 scholars have assigned to the stage in early modern London is as much a reflection of the procedures of contemporary literary criticism as a reflection of the cultural function of popular drama in the early modern period. Modern critics are often not engaged in re-examining available data, preferring instead to rest on a conjectural paradigm or heuristic that has hardened, over the past couple of decades, into a New Historicist version of \u27fact\u27. Critics have collapsed boundaries and important distinctions in London jurisdiction and geography in the interest of a unified critical narrative that characterizes the theatre as a culturally marginal phenomenon. This article questions the \u27marginal\u27 model of popular theatre by revising the current critical notion of the term \u27liberties\u27 and by re-examining jurisdiction and city authority in early modern London