Beyond Master Narratives: A Reassessment of the Apprentice Riot of 1592.

The relationship between London apprentices and playhouses in the Tudor period has tended to be viewed through the filter of guiding master narratives of class solidarity, local rivalry, subversive playhouses, unruly youths, or hegemonic control. In the case of William Webbe's report of a riot by apprentice feltmakers on June 11, 1592, scholars have offered many interpretations in service of one or another of these narratives. This essay offers a reassessment of the events of that day based on the history of feltmakers' apprentices and the geography of the Blackfriars in London, Bermondsey Street, the Bankside, and Newington Butts. By rewriting the events of that day based on such details, we find that the apprentices were a politically savvy group cannily using the theaters and geography of early modern London to assert their own self-advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]