The introduction posits the centrality of local environments, and specifically precise London neighborhoods, on a confluence of English writers in the 1590s, including Thomas Nashe, John Donne, John Manningham, and John Marston. In the process, it asserts the importance of these urban localities to the genesis of the metaphysical style of writing, a style not normally associated with the city nor with nonpoetic writing. The methodological emphasis on local environment foregrounds the importance of everyday experience to the creation of literature, picking up on recent work in early modern literary studies in historical phenomenology and affect theory. The introduction also details the profound infleunce of skepticism on this group of writers and intellectuals working in and around the Inns of Court in the 1590s. It argues for the centrality of a specific community of disaffected and privileged young men coming to London in the 1590s to the advent of a particular way of seeing the city and a particular style of writing that we now identify as the metaphysical.

Chapter 1 shows how stationers’ strategies directed the publication of early commercial history plays and the reputation of early playing troupes. It concentrates on printer-publisher Thomas Creede and argues that his publishing strategies helped to create a print identity for Queen Elizabeth’s Men as a company that promoted Protestant and Tudor sympathies. While previous studies have tended to assume a correlation between performance and print repertories, this chapter argues that the company’s reputation for specializing in history plays could be a consequence of the publication process. Through a contrastive analysis of his non-dramatic output alongside plays such as The True Tragedy of Richard III, Selimus, and The Famous Victories of Henry V, this chapter suggests that, for Creede, the purpose of ‘history’ (broadly conceived) was to provide exemplary and counter-exemplary models for readers, that could be used to promote England’s and Elizabeth I’s interests. Looking beyond Creede’s output, this chapter argues that the history play occupied a central position in the development of a market for commercial playbooks – especially during a pivotal year, 1594.