Review of Periodicals (70.2)

Bowling Alleys and Other Playing Spaces

In a work of largely architectural research, Callan Davies proposes a connection between early-modern London bowling alleys and the playhouses that were often built in their vicinity, or even over their foundations. These city diversionary sites, frequently roofed and housed, unlike rural bowling greens, attracted the particular scorn of early-modern moralists, who reasonably lumped them in with a variety of disdained public “sports” patronized by unsavory customers. These folks crowded together unwholesomely, cutting each other’s purse-strings, while dicing, card-playing, drabbing, drinking, witnessing bearbaiting, and, of course, playgoing (you may go so far). Not only did the venues in which these entertainments flourished stand in close proximity to one another, the varieties of fun to be had in each tended to overlap. One could eat, dice, and/or succumb to a prostitute’s charms while attending a play or a bear-baiting, and one could drink while gambling on the outcome of bowling matches. Thus, as the Elizabethan urban commentator John Stow wrote, bowling, like other sports, “engenders extreme quarrels over trivial matters.” Certainly this sort of behavior was a subject of city comedy, a genre famous for reflecting the characters in its audience and their immediate physical environment just outside – even inside – the playhouses. Davies provides some interesting evidence that theaters like the Curtain not only took over the spaces formerly used for bowling, but absorbed their clientele. He quotes Gina Bloom to argue that the “gaming culture of early modern London eased…