Early Modern

You probably know the Tabard Inn as the Southwark drinking establishment from whence Chaucer's pilgrims started their imaginary pilgrimage. The Tabard was a real place -- just off London Bridge on the south bank of the Thames, on the route from London to Kent and Canterbury, and it persisted (in one form or another) until the mid-19th century. And you probably know Southwark as the London suburb, on the south bank across the Thames from the City of London proper, that was home to Elizabethan London's riff-raff: prostitutes, bear-baiting, and commercial theatre.

As a follow-up to the fly-through of early seventeenth-century London, I suggest the Map of Early Modern London, hosted by the University of Victoria and based on the 1560 woodcut map known as the Agas Map. You can view the map image by image, click on designated links to learn more about the different London locales, use the Encyclopedia to locate specific places, read early modern texts that describe or talk about London, and more!

What would the streets of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London looked like? What would you have seen as you walked through town? Shopfronts, vistas, church squares? How did vendors display their wares? What were the street surfaces like? Buildings? Wharves down on the river?

Many of you are curious about language change between Chaucer and Shakespeare (especially when we do early modern poetry in 2310/2350H). The theatre department at University of Kansas performed Shakespeare in the original pronunciation in 2010, and you can watch/listen to a scene from their Midsummer Night's Dream below. It won't answer all your questions about rhyme, slant rhyme, and eye rhyme, but it's a good starting point.

This is a legacy post from my old website