City comedy explained

City comedy, also known as citizen comedy, is a genre of comedy in the English early modern theatre.

Definition

Emerging from Ben Jonson's late-Elizabethan comedies of humours (1598–1599), the conventions of city comedy developed rapidly in the first decade of the Jacobean era, as one playwright's innovations were soon adopted by others, such that by about 1605 the new genre was fully established.[1] Its principal playwrights were Jonson himself, Thomas Middleton, and John Marston, though many others also contributed to its development, including Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, and John Webster.[2] Once the companies of boy players—the Children of Paul's and the Children of the Chapel—had resumed public performances from 1600 onwards, most of their plays were city comedies.[3] The closest that William Shakespeare's plays come to the genre is the slightly earlier The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597), which is his only play set entirely in England; it avoids the caustic satire of city comedy, however, in preference for a more bourgeois mode (with its dual romantic plots governed by socio-economics not love or sex), while its setting, Windsor, is a town rather than a city.[4]

In contrast to the adventurous chronicles of Elizabethan comedy, such as Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599) or George Peele's The Old Wives' Tale (c. 1590), or the intricately plotted romantic comedies of Shakespeare and John Lyly, city comedy was more realistic (excluding magical or marvellous elements) and sharp and satirical in tone.[5] It portrayed a broad range of characters from different ranks (often focused on citizens), employing "deeds and language such as men do use", as Jonson put it, and was usually set in London.[6]

During the Tudor period the Reformation had produced a gradual shift to Protestantism and much of London passed from church to private ownership.[7] The Royal Exchange was founded in this period.[8] Mercantilism grew, and monopoly trading companies such as the East India Company were established, with trade expanding to the New World. London became the principal North Sea port, with migrants arriving from England and abroad. The population rose from an estimated 50,000 in 1530 to about 225,000 in 1605.[7] City comedies depict London as a hotbed of vice and folly; in particular, Jonson's Epicoene, Middleton's A Trick to Catch the Old One and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and Marston's The Dutch Courtesan.

Verna Foster has argued that John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (c. 1629–1633) re-works many of the features of city comedy within a tragic drama.[9]

List of city comedies

See also

Sources

Notes and References

  1. Gibbon (1980, 1–2). Gibbon's book, the first full-length study of the genre, was first published in 1968 and was substantially revised, to address a broader audience and to update its conclusions in relation to subsequent scholarship, in a second edition that was published in 1980; see Gibbons (1980, Preface). The genre had been described and defined in earlier, broader surveys; see, for example, M. C. Bradbrook's The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (1955), chapter nine (1955, 138–164).
  2. Gibbon (1980, 2, et passim).
  3. Gibbon (1980, 1).
  4. Orlin (2008, 160); see also, Howard (2001).
  5. Gibbons (1980, 1).
  6. Ben Jonson, Preface to Every Man in his Humour (1598).
  7. Pevsner (1962, 48).
  8. Burgon and Wilson (1839).
  9. Foster (1988).

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