Urban plots: Jacobean City comedy

Abstract

THIS THESIS EXPLORES the proposition that Renaissance city comedy contributed to the legitimisation of an emergent market society. It begins with a discussion of different conceptions of urban space in relation to the theatre and theatrical representations. It contrasts a topographical model of the cityscape as ritually inscribed space, with a model of a new 'transactional' space of modernity resulting from the saturation of social relations by commodity exchange. Contemporary commentary on London suggests that the temporal and spatial co-ordinates of the market economy, rather than the older ceremonial 'rhetoric of space', was definitive of urban experience. Early seventeenth century London theatre also offered new ways of representing the time/space of market society. The psychology of the urban market 'process', and not the ascribed identities of the ritualised order, became the primary issue for representational systems, and was most clearly articulated in the plots of city comedy. Earlier critical models of city comedy argued that the playwrights, particularly Ben Jonson, were or ought to be deeply nostalgic for pre-capitalist forms of society. More recent critical accounts of city comedy differ in that they value an ambivalence in the playwrights' attitudes toward market relations and are interested in tracing the dramatists' immersion in and dependence on the commercial world they satirise. They argue that city comedy articulates social identities and relationships not derived from traditional structures, instead devising new cultural practices for urban gentlemen based on an opportunistic and discursive emplotment of the productive market spaces of the modem city. The drama validates market relations in this conception of socially prudent and beneficial masculine conduct. City comedy was not merely a superficial effect of or commentary upon social change, but it made an (admittedly ambivalent) contribution to the legitimisation of social change. The thesis concludes with an extended reading of Eastward Ho, a city comedy that has received little critical attention, in order to test the persuasiveness of this new critical approach to city comedy.