What are the historical elements that identify the settings within Jonson's The Alchemist and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar?

The historical elements that identify the settings within
Ben Jonson's The Alchemist and William Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar are numerous. The setting is important in each play
for various reasons. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, the Roman setting is of course highly
appropriate to a play about some of the major figures, and one of the most important
events, in ancient Roman history. In Jonson’s play, a specific setting would seem to be
less dictated by the plot than in Shakespeare’s text, but Jonson definitely wanted to
imply that chicanery and foolishness were alive in contemporary London. For these
reasons, both playwrights are careful to provide details that call constant attention to
specific locales (Rome and London, respectively).

Consider,
for example, the first several hundred words of each play (which can be searched
electronically). Thus, in the opening portion of Julius Caesar,
characters mention such details as the
following:

• Rome (multiple
  references)


• chariot-wheels


• Pompey


• the
  Tiber river


• the Roman
  gods


• the Capitol


• the feast
  of Lupercal


• Caesar’s
  trophies


• Caesar
  himself

All these references occur within the
first 76 lines of the play, and often the references are multiple references.
Shakespeare obviously wanted to emphasize a point that would already have been clear
from the play’s title: that this is a play about Rome (although, of course, with
implications for other places and other periods in
history).

In Jonson’s The Alchemist,
the London setting is not emphasized immediately, but it isn’t long before passages such
as the following begin to appear:

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FACE. Not of this, I think it.
But I
shall put you in mind, sir; -- at Pie-corner,
Taking your meal of steam in,
from cooks' stalls,
Where, like the father of hunger, you did
walk
Piteously costive, with your pinch'd-horn-nose,
And your
complexion of the Roman wash,
Stuck full of black and melancholic
worms,
Like powder corns shot at the
artillery-yard.

The
references here to “Pie-corner” and to “the artillery-yard” would have indicated quite
clearly to contemporary audiences that the play was set in London. So would later
references to “Paul’s” (that is, St. Paul Cathedral, the biggest church in London) and
to “a Puritan in Blackfriars” (that is, an extreme Protestant in a well-known London
neighborhood). Very soon into the play, London audiences would have realized that London
itself was the setting of the play and that London’s citizens and mores would be chief
objects of its satire.