Recent criticism has cast the suburban playhouses of Early Modern London as marginalised institutions, in at least a topographic if not a symbolic sense. This thesis will contend that marginality is a relative term, and that for the inhabitants of the suburb, of Clerkenwell, the salient social function of the Red Bull theatre was not to serve the City as a site for licence, but to provide a neighbourhood space in which bonds of community could be formed. Arguing that theatres were built in particular locations not just to escape City prohibitions, but to draw on proximate audiences, I provide a brief history of Clerkenwell and place the Red Bull in its local context. By figuring the Red Bull, both in terms of its standard repertoire and its audience, as a prototypical "community theatre," I develop a sociology of dramatic production which understands this Early Modern theatre as a crucial nexus of local solidarity.

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