1 Porter, Roy, London: A Social History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 87Google ScholarPubMed. As Porter notes, some of these buildings were razed not by the Fire itself but by city officials in their attempts to create fire breaks.

2 Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn: Vol. III, 6 vols., ed. E.S. De Beer (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 461.

3 Dryden, Annus Mirabilis, The Year of Wonders, 1666 (London: Printed for Henry Herringman, 1668), https://books.google.com/books?id=P6gJyGhCtMcC&pg=PA59#v=onepage&q&f=false=14496, 59–60, at stanzas 238, 233, 236.

4 Ibid., 65, at stanza 255.

5 Wall, Cynthia, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7Google Scholar.

6 Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life [vol. 1], trans. Rendall, Steven (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 93Google Scholar.

7 Solga, Kim, Hopkins, with D. J. and Orr, Shelley, “Introduction: City/Text/Performance,” Performance and the City, ed. Hopkins, Orr, and Solga (London: Palgrave, [2009] 2011), 1–9Google Scholar, at 4. For recent uses of de Certeau's theories see Joseph-Gabriel, Annette, “Mobility and the Enunciation of Freedom in Urban Saint-Domingue,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 50.2 (2017): 213–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fuentes, Marisa J., Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bratton, Jacky, The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management, and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dillon, Janette, The Language of Space in Court Performance, 1400–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar, as well as Hopkins, City/Stage/Globe: Performance and Space in Shakespeare's London (New York: Routledge, 2008) and Solga, Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, [2009] 2013). One notable exception to the dearth of applications of de Certeau's theories to Restoration and eighteenth-century London is Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

8 Spiro Kostof writes: “The transformation of London from a medieval half-timbered warren into a Renaissance city of paved streets and brick buildings began in a baker's house on Pudding Lane at around 1 a.m. Sunday, 2 September, 1666,” when the Fire started. Kostof, The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form through History (Boston: Bulfinch–Little Brown, 1992), 245. See also Porter, 84–95; Bucholz, Robert O. and Ward, Joseph P., London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 326–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Morrissey, Lee, From the Temple to the Castle: An Architectural History of British Literature, 1660–1760 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 4–5Google Scholar.

9 Dryden, Annus Mirabilis, 63, at stanza 250.

10 The quoted phrase is from the Licensing Act of 1737 (10 Geo 11, cap. xxviii, reprinted in Statutes at Large, vol. 5, ed. J. Raithby [London: Eyre & Strahan, 1811], 266–8), though the language dated from before 1648, when a government order declared them “rogues” who could be imprisoned, fined, or flogged for plying their trade. Leacroft, Richard, The Development of the English Playhouse: An Illustrated Survey of Theatre Building in England from Medieval to Modern Times (London: Methuen, 1973), 78Google Scholar. By the 1660s this language was widespread: see Grice, Elizabeth, Rogues and Vagabonds; or, The Actors’ Road to Respectability (Lavenham, UK: Terence Dalton, 1977)Google Scholar.

11 The chronology here is not exact: in his Dedication to the Essay, Dryden claims he wrote it to amuse himself after the “violence of the last plague” (of 1665) drove him from the city; so he had at least begun the essay before the Great Fire struck. Dryden, John, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 3d ed., ed. Arnold, Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1903)Google Scholar, Hathitrust Digital Library, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011665738, 1. However, the Essay was not recorded in the Stationer's Register until 1667 (though its title page lists it as 1668), and parts of it may have been added or revised after the Great Fire, which after all was the most dramatic but by no means the only event changing conceptions of space in Restoration London.

12 Dryden, Sir Martin Mar-All, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 9 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 205–89, I.i.1, at 210.

13 Marly, Diana De, “The Architect of Dorset Garden Theatre,” Theatre Notebook 29.3 (1975): 119–24Google Scholar. See also Langhans, Edward A., “A Conjectural Reconstruction of the Dorset Garden Theatre,” Theatre Survey 13.2 (1972): 74–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tim Keenan, Restoration Staging, 1660–74 (London: Routledge, 2017), 65–8.

14 O. L. Brownstein, “New Light on the Salisbury Court Playhouse,” Educational Theatre Journal 29.2 (1977): 231–42, at 232.

15 I am indebted to Michael McKeon's more focused description of this process in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 131–75; as well as to Lawrence Manley's Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Paul Slack's The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For discussions of mobility in the literature of this period, see Kristina Straub, Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Andrew McRae, “The Peripatetic Muse: Internal Travel and the Cultural Production of Space in Pre-Revolutionary England,” in The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850, ed. Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 41–57; as well as J. Douglas Canfield, Tricksters and Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997). Derek Hughes notes that the “confusion of master–servant roles” was “a significantly prominent theme in the 1660s.” Hughes, English Drama: 1660–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 68.

16 Harold Love, “Dryden's London,” Cambridge Companion to John Dryden, ed. Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 113–30, at 116.

17 Marion Jones, “Actors and Repertory,” in The Revels History of Drama in English, vol. 5: 1660–1750, ed. John Loftis et al. (London: Methuen, 1976), 119–57, at 131. Most who have described the Restoration audience as a small aristocratic coterie have followed Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Restoration Drama: 1660–1700, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928). For more recent challenges to this view see Aparna Dharwadker, “Restoration Drama and Social Class,” in A Companion to Restoration Drama, ed. Susan J. Owen (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 140–60; Arthur H. Scouten and Robert D. Hume, “‘Restoration Comedy’ and Its Audiences, 1660–1776,” Yearbook of English Studies 10 (1980): 45–69; and Harold Love, “Who Were the Restoration Audience?” Yearbook of English Studies 10 (1980): 21–44; and Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has recently pointed out, the spectators who had seen a play—in full or in part—at this time may well have been a much larger and more diverse group than those who paid for admission. Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), esp. Introduction and chap. 2.

18 Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1 January 1668), vol. 9, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 2.

19 Love, “Dryden's London,” 113.

20 John Loftis, “Commentary on Sir Martin Mar-All,” in Works of John Dryden, 352–75, at 362.

21 Loftis, “Dryden's Comedies,” in John Dryden, ed. Earl Miner (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1972), 27–57, at 30. See also Hume's description of the play as part of a group of London comedies that “are markedly low in tone” (Development of English Drama, 265).

22 James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 185. Frank Harper Moore also discusses the relationship between Dryden's theories and Sir Martin Mar-All in The Nobler Pleasure: Dryden's Comedy in Theory and Practice (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 60–3.

23 Quoted in Loftis, “Commentary,” 352.

24 Pepys, Diary (22 May 1668), vol. 9, ed. Latham and Matthews, 209.

25 Dryden draws several plot points from Phillipe Quinault's L'Amant indiscret (1654) and Moliere's L’Étourdi (1655). See Loftis, “Commentary,” 354–67; L. A. Beaurline and Fred Bowers, “Sir Martin Mar-All,” in John Dryden: Four Comedies, ed. Beaurline and Bowers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 101–5, at 102; and Moore, 53–63.

26 Keenan notes the use of stagehands to change the scenes (88–9), but there is some archival evidence that furniture and props were often carried on and offstage by lesser actors in the company. A promptbook for Dryden's tragicomedy An Evening's Love, dated 1691, includes the note “/6/ Servants / another D[oor] to / carry off S:Table / & move Large,” suggesting that in some cases actors dressed as servants would often enter between scenes in which they had no speaking part in order to move props on or off the stage. Thomas Newman, Promptbook for “An Evening's Love,” Clark Library PR 3417.K1 1691, copy 2 (1691), 29.

27 W. W. Wroth and C. E. Challis, “Harris, Henry,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2008) https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/12391.

28 Dryden, Sir Martin Mar-All, I.i.1–9, at 210.

29 Canfield, 66; Dryden, Sir Martin Mar-All, I.i.179, at 216. A gentleman owning a small plot of land still occupied a very different class status than a nobleman with a title; but as James M. Rosenheim has argued, the primary division between what he terms the “ruling order” and the middle and lower classes was the ownership of land, and this division was growing more significant in these years. Rosenheim, The Emergence of a Ruling Order: English Landed Society, 1650–1750 (London: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998); as well as Manley, chaps. 4 and 5.

30 The dramatis personae names Sir Martin's paramour Mrs. Millisent, though the line that introduces her (“here is the young Heiress you expect, and with her he who is to marry her,” I.i.119, at 214) makes it clear that she is unmarried when the play begins.

31 Dryden, Sir Martin Mar-All, IV.i.240, at 256.

32 Ibid., V.ii.123–5, at 288.

33 Canfield, 67.

34 Dryden, Sir Martin Mar-all, I.i.143–4, at 214.

35 As Keenan has noted (119–21), this scene involves Dryden's virtuosic use and understanding of stage space and his interest in utilizing the full range of the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre's technologies.

36 Dryden, Sir Martin Mar-All, V.i.285–6, at 276.

37 Ibid., V.i.312–14, at 277.

38 Ibid., III.i.91, at 239.

39 Henry S. Turner, English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts: 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 21.

40 David Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 86.

41 Quoted in Dharwadker, 143.

42 Canfield, 1. Loftis, too, argues that Dryden's “two-plot tragicomedies, his rhymed heroic plays, his tragedies, his operas, as well as such of his nondramatic poems as ‘To My Honored Friend, Dr. Charleton,’ reveal a reverence for an anointed king.” Loftis, “Political and Social Thought in the Drama,” The London Theatre World, 1660–1800, ed. Robert D. Hume (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 253–85, at 258.

43 Deborah Payne Fisk, “‘Betwixt two Ages cast’: Theatrical Dryden,” Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden, ed. Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and Los Angeles: UCLA/Clark, 2004), 226–43, at 226, 231.

44 Richard Southern, Changeable Scenery: Its Origin and Development in the British Theatre (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), 151.

45 Juan A. Prieto-Pablos has recently cautioned against the “common … assumption that scenekeeping was a mechanical rather than a creative task” and that scenekeepers were always hired from the lower echelons of society; “Antonio Brunati, King's Company Scenekeeper (1664–65),” Theatre Notebook 71.2 (2017): 94–110, at 94–5. However, he notes, the later “conflation of scenekeeper, machinist and carpenter in late seventeenth-century documents suggests that … their work might have been mechanical rather than creative” (96)—a process had already begun by the 1670s, when Dorset Garden opened (95). Keenan points out that scene changes in his models of Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre during the 1660s would have required “a team of handlers” (88–9) many of whom would have been machinists or so-called house servants (a category that included ushers, payment collectors, house managers, and other minor workers at the front of the house). See Philip H. Highfill Jr., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, vol. 1 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 21. It is likely, in other words, that many of the stagehands were considered “Workmen,” as an English translation of François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac, described them in 1684 (quoted in Keenan, 89).

46 Keenan, 187–8.

47 Some have mistaken Davenant's references to scenes that “move by greater Engines,” in The Siege of Rhodes, to indicate that the scenes moved automatically. Southern cautions, however, that we should read the word “engine” as suggesting ingenuity, not automation (122). Langhans confirms that, “At Dorset Garden this scenery was probably moved manually,” and stagehands were certainly employed to bring on and off the stage the sparse furniture (tables, chairs, divans) that the stage directions often require (78; see also Keenan, 88–9). It may be true, however, that machines were used to move scenery at Dorset Garden after 1673; see Colin Visser, “Scenery and Technical Design,” London Theatre World, ed. Hume, 66–118, at 77.

48 Southern, 17.

49 Blair Hoxby, “Dryden's Baroque Dramaturgy: The Case of Aureng-Zebe,” Enchanted Ground, ed. Lewis and Novak, 244–72, at 253.

50 Keenan, 34–5.

51 Robbins, Bruce, The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

52 Much of the discussions of actors’ and actresses’ ambiguous class status at this time have been explored through the lens of their ambiguous gender status; see Bush-Bailey, Gilli, Treading the Bawds: Actresses and Playwrights on the Late Stuart Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas A. King's discussion of the actor Colley Cibber in The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, vol. 1: The English Phallus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 53–4 and 250–5; and, focusing on a slightly later period, Straub, Kristina, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Gender Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. I have written at length about the actor's ambiguous class status and bid for respectability in Fawcett, Julia H., Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696–1801 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Henke, Robert, “Representations of Poverty in the Commedia dell'Arte,” Theatre Survey 48.2 (2007), 229–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 229.

54 These identifications were first proposed by Edmund Malone in The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden, vol. I, pt. ii (London: Printed for T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1800). They are generally accepted by modern scholars, though they have not gone entirely unchallenged. See Huntley, Frank Livingstone, “On the Persons in Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” Modern Language Notes 63.2 (1948), 88–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Archer, Stanley, “The Persons in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” Papers on Language and Literature 2.4 (1966): 305–14Google Scholar. Scholars such as Thomas Reinert (“Theater and Civility in Dryden's Essay,” ELH 65.4 [1998]: 857–76) read Dryden's use of the dialogue format as an attempt to give equal or near-equal credence to all four viewpoints. I agree with Howard Weinbrot, however, in reading Neander's views as most aligned with “Dryden's dramatic orientation in 1668” and the Essay as “an attempt to stress the limits of southern hegemony in a northern world.” Weinbrot, Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 151, 153–4.

55 Dryden, Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 48. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.

56 Dryden, Sir Martin Mar-all, V.ii.45–8, at 286.

57 Ibid., 286.

58 Ibid., V.ii.61–4, at 286.

59 Dryden, Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 17.

60 Dryden, Sir Martin Mar-all, V.i.536–40, at 284.

61 Canfield, 67. The exception here is Hughes, who argues that, “the ruse which allows the heroine to marry the unsuspecting Warner reduces the idea of exalted station to an absurd literalness, the dupes being persuaded to immobilize themselves by standing on high stools in ‘the Frolick of the Altitudes’” (67).