Product Description: In the two hundred years from 1475 London was transformed from a medieval commune into a metropolis of half a million people, a capital city, and a leading European trading center. Lawrence Manley provides a comprehensive account of the changing image and influence of London through its literature, including lyrics, ballads, jests, plays, pageants, chronicles, and treatises; and he shows how the literature and culture of London contributed to the new structures of capitalism, the process of "behavioral urbanization," and the liberation of the individual through the city's concentrated power...read more

Product Description: London in the age of Shakespeare was one of the largest and most important cities of Europe. Poets and poetasters, rhetoricians and preachers were able to use the city as an object for displays of technical rhetoric in ballads, bawdy jests, sermons, and tales...read more