By the Caroline era, London’s broader theatergoing public contained within it the smaller subset of a theatrical community – those playgoers collectively invested in the cultivation of their dramatic knowledge and interpretive acuity. Chapter 4 offers a phenomenological prehistory of this community, locating its activation in the moment of performance itself. The chapter traces the formation of this theatrical community alongside the dramatic trope of impersonation, which constructed the unknown depths and vicissitudes of individual identity as a function of the bifurcated structure of the playhouse. Through readings of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors, the anonymous Look About You, John Fletcher’s Love’s Cure, and Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, this chapter argues that the formation of spatially relational identities in impersonation plots extended from the stage to the amphitheater: constituted as a series of mirror images only partially revealed, London’s theatrical community was produced by spectators’ mutual recognition of their uncertainty about one another.

Irregular in its rhythms, inventive in diction, and rebarbatively directed against some hapless target, tough talk flourishes in verse satires of the period before making its way onto the stage, enjoying special prominence in Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour and John Marston’s Malcontent. In these plays no less than in the poems that precede them, tough talk remedies the alienation of public life in a crucial respect: Through its insistently corporeal language, tough talk gives a virtual body to a public that, as an imaginary entity, necessarily has none of its own. Because it compels vicarious identification by attacking people for their absurdities of comportment, tough talk is a style, but it is also the denuded expression of that judgment we recognize as taste. The vicarious relationship that tough talk, as judgment and style, coordinates between absent witness and present speaker finds its surprising culmination in the figure of the celebrity, a figure of taste whose insistent embodiment likewise invites vicarious identification from a bodiless public, often through pointedly antagonistic means. Early modernity’s great emblem of celebrity is Mary “Moll” Frith, the outspoken, cross-dressing pickpocket who found herself depicted as the outspoken protagonist of The Roaring Girl.