Superficial, Ambitious, and Un-English

Resumo

This article identifies a recurring character archetype in early Stuart dialogic writing, the
architectural aficionado, within wider debates about public engagement with architecture in
seventeenth-century England. Building on scholarship that has traced the rise of non-professional
observers of the built environment, it argues that dialogic texts offer something those sources
do not: they show how less-enthusiastic contemporaries received such enthusiasm. In plays
and dialogues ranging from Norden’s Surveyor’s Dialogue (1607) through Benvenuto Italiano’s
The Passenger (1612) to Caroline comedies set in Covent Garden, characters who delight in
‘new erections,’ orderly rows, and Italianate importations are placed opposite less-enthusiastic
or more conservative speakers. Read together, these portrayals amount to a polemic against
increased architectural appreciation, launched on three related grounds. Primarily, the aficionado
is stereotyped as superficial, content with façades, lengthened fronts, and ocular pleasure. Secondly,
the aficionado is ambitious, using architectural talk to align with projecting, social ascent, and the
tastes of ‘Gentry and Nobility.’ Thirdly, the aficionado is un-English, favouring foreign models
that threaten an imagined Protestant and domestic architectural vernacular. Whether or not such
characters mirror historical individuals, their repetition records real anxieties about new tastes,
new titles, and new buildings, and shows that vocal admiration of architecture in early Stuart
England was not an action without a reaction.