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.

The popular eighteenth-century genre of criminal biography is recognised today for its contribution to the development of the English novel, but its impact on Irish literature has not been explored to the same extent. However, criminal biographies were common fare for Irish readers in the 1700–1780 period. This chapter situates the criminal narrative, a form combining biographical and fictional content and drawing on the picaresque tradition, as an important subtext for the first Irish novels. It surveys the consumption of these texts in Ireland and their treatment of Irish settings and characters. Close readings are offered of a late-seventeenth-century fiction, The Irish Rogue (1690), and a mid-eighteenth-century collection of biographies, John Cosgrave’s A Genuine History of the Lives and Actions of the Most Notorious Irish Highwaymen, Tories and Rapparees (1747). Both can be singled out for their representations of nationality and travel, which enable them to undercut conventional associations between the Irish and criminality. Such rogue tales, it is argued, expanded the repertoire of Irish fiction, establishing characteristic strategies of plotting and characterisation which paved the way for later novels.