Performances ‘in No Other City Possible’: Mountebanks and Theatrical Vagrancy in Seventeenth-Century London

Abstract

The English word ‘mountebank’, borrowed from the Italian montimbanco to describe a performing quack doctor, crucially defines its subject in terms of motion in space: the motion of ascending a stage. In fact, the early modern mountebank in London was a player known for many kinds of motion—geographical itinerancy, rhetorical circumlocution, and even appropriative journeys from bank to theatre to print. This article articulates the mountebank’s license to roam physically and representationally across London as a kind of theatrical vagrancy, one that begs the question not only of where theatre can exist in urban space, but how—how a physically and rhetorically unfixed performance can still be recognised by an audience as a performance. Playing with and across space, as this article argues, is perhaps one of the most crucial of the mountebank’s many ‘impossible’ feats.