Networking with Middleton and Jonson: Theater, Law, and Social Documents[Note 1. I have benefitted greatly from the instruction and conversation ...]

This essay examines the intersection of legal networks, theater performance, and social spaces in Jacobean London. Thomas Middleton's The Phoenix (1604) and Michaelmas Term (1604‐06) along with Ben Jonson's The Devil Is an Ass (1616) are replete with references to legal documents and their circulation, as well as with men of the law and legal business. This analysis re‐thinks Middleton's plays’ apparent reviling of law and legal characters and considers a new social space opened up by the refutation of hierarchical and judicial authority in The Devil Is an Ass . Using Bruno Latour's Actor‐Network Theory, the essay uses the staging of legal documents in circulation to reveal social networks in the plays’ imagined Londons. The virtual London on stage comes about through the mapping of a city of social and legal interactions. The actor‐network analysis can provide new ways of seeing the plays’ challenges to everyday urban practices, their questioning of the stabilization of social expectations, and their proposals for change. In the plays’ stripped down and recreated versions of urban collectives, the characters and their paper trails make visible the ways that networks allow for the manipulation and reorganization of social exchanges. In so doing, the plays question the relative vacuity of a system based on land and material wealth and forward the importance of wit and reason as markers of social authority.