Chapter 5 - City comedies

Summary

Genre can, as this study has set out to prove, be an immensely insightful tool to work with; it can guide us to the ways in which playwrights worked within established parameters and conventions when creating their work for the commercial stages but also to the ways in which they may have set out deliberately to challenge those conventions or to shape them anew. For this reason then we almost always begin to slip away from a rigid categorisation of any text by genre almost as soon as we have defined it. Bearing all this in mind, there has been a significant body of work on the creation of an entirely new subset or genre of drama that came out of this particular ‘moment’ in the early modern theatre and that is now known by the general title of ‘city comedy’. It is well worth our while paying attention to the ways in which this mode of writing and of dramaturgy was both a reflection of new urban formations at the time – London increased massively both in terms of human population and in terms of national and international activity through acts of trade and diplomacy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries – and a direct agent in the shaping of those new cultural and economic formations.

In looking at a series of texts that are known as city comedies, and at the playwrights most associated with experimenting and innovating in this context – for example, Middleton, Jonson and later the Caroline dramatist Richard Brome – we will also find ourselves referencing backwards and across to genres we have already begun to analyse and unpack, not least domestic tragedy, chronicle history and indeed comical satire. This kind of slippage is all part and parcel of gauging the sense of experiment and excitement that commercial theatre generated at this time and an understanding of a cluster of writers, often working in collaboration with each other, who were constantly pushing at the edges of the forms that were available to them.