“Not to come near our person by ten mile”: London, plague and spatial relations in 2 Henry IV

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Shakespeare rarely set his plays in London and those of his plays that are partially set in the capital do not seem particularly interested in their location. Consequently studies of early modern London in Renaissance drama have tended to focus on the city comedies, or on those of Shakespeare’s plays where another city (Rome, Athens, Venice and so on), might be argued to “stand in” for or shadow early modern London and its concerns. Shakespeare’s histories, therefore, have not featured as prominently in discussions of dramatic presentations of early modern London as they deserve to. This article suggests that 2 Henry IV is deeply concerned with what Henri Lefebvre termed “the production of space”, but that it is not in its location of scenes in Eastcheap or Westminster that this play reveals its immersion in the early modern London of its production, but in its discourse of disease, its imagery of boundaries and containment and its repeated evocation of fluid and equivocal spaces, including the tavern, the battlefield and the crown itself. It reads the play’s imagery of contradictory, ambiguous and transformative spaces and of boundaries being set up and broken, as implicitly engaged with contemporary preoccupations with London’s shifting cultural and geographical identity, the growth and character of the suburbs and particularly with fears about plague and its transmission across city spaces. It concludes that the fluid nature of urban space and the artificial nature of boundaries are brought into focus by crises such as plague and that the play’s discourse of contagion can be read as an illuminating backdrop to its emphasis on changeable and disorienting spaces. This article is published as part of a collection to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.