A London Life in the Brazen Age

Book excerpt: Francis Langley was a man on the make if there ever was one. He is the entrepreneur who built the Swan Theater and, until now, this meager fact is nearly all there has been to know about him. Yet, William Ingram suggests, "this is like thinking of Henry Clay Folger or Henry E. Huntington only as the founders of libraries. His life was multifarious, and the Swan was but one part of it; to understand the man, we must know what else was on his mind." This book is a rich account of Langley's role in the development of the Elizabethan theater, and a substantial contribution to the social and the economic history of Elizabethan London. Langley, an arrogant, ruthless, violent man of deals and usury, serves as the index to the London of his times. He was, Ingram assures us, imbued "with that spirit of enthusiasm and expansion...of ostentation and aggrandizement, that lent itself so readily to the pens of the social satirists of the period."