Chapter 4 - Comedy, pastoral and romantic

Summary

Comedy covers a very broad spectrum of writing, thinking and playing in the early modern theatre context; it stretches from pastoral and romantic drama, concerned with quasi-idyllic rural settings and the vicissitudes of love, to sharp-witted and frequently foul-mouthed urban drama of the streets, via biting social satire and political commentary. Towards the later part of our focus period comedy ends up as part of the heady generic mix that becomes tragicomedy. If we accept the premise of Jean Howard that dramatic genre is always in process, always ‘provisional and productive’ in the context of live event-based theatre, is there anything that we can confidently declare defines dramatic comedy or at least defines what aided early modern audiences to bring to bear those all-important frameworks of expectation?

Howard gives us a very useful platform from which to begin: focusing initially on what she terms ‘London comedy’, by which she means plays based on and representing the life of the capital city itself, she observes: ‘These city plays represent a remarkable break from the conventions of the “higher” genres such as tragedy and the national history play. Seldom dealing with monarchs and rarely with aristocrats, they pitch their social register lower.’ There are certain useful truths that Howard's definition hits on here; Jonson talks in the Prologue to Every Man In His Humour (1616 folio edition) of using ‘language such as men do use’ (Prologue, 21) in these plays and we might extend that thinking to note that many comedies written in this period reflect a world that was eminently familiar to audiences, representing back to them the streets, taverns and even prisons of the urban centre which they inhabited and where they practised daily, whatever their trade or profession, rank or gender.