This chapter will argue that the unnoticed presence behind the attacks on the so-called Cockney School of poets which emanated from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was the parallel growth and assertiveness of Cockneys both as fictional characters and as Londoners spectating and acting on the capital’s increasingly fragmented range of stages. These were the young Londoners, legal scribes, apprentices, shopmen and women who paid to act at private theatres such as the one Keats himself visited in 1818. London’s urban private theatres, the descendants of the spouting clubs, were fundamentally transforming the relationship between actors and audiences. Beyond the authority of the patent houses or Lord Chamberlain, a newly emerging class of Londoner was taking to the stage. To Ann Catherine Holbrook, an older provincial actress writing her Memoirs of the Stage in 1809, they were part of an increasing groundswell of ‘Spouting Clubs, and Private Theatres’ who threatened her livelihood, seeming to ’spring’ ‘from behind the Counter, from off the Shop-board.’449 Ten years after Keats’s death, London could even support The Acting Manager; or, The Minor Spy. A Weekly Review of the Public and Private Stage with its notices of the Shakespeare’s Pavilion private theatre in the working-class Hoxton Old Town (on Richard III, ‘Mr. Green seems to know as much about Shakespeare as a monkey knows about philosophy’).450