Abstract
City comedy is frequently described as “Jacobean City Comedy” and so the reign of James I (1603–25) may be considered to provide a set of temporal boundaries for the genre. Although some city comedies were written before the accession of James,1 most of the major city comedies were written in the “long decade” between 1600 and 1613. The term “Jacobean” in this context is often used to describe a mood as much as a historical period. This mood is prevailingly dark and satirical and its content is dominated by sexual obsession, financial rapaciousness, social mobility, and exploitation.
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Selective guide to further reading and resources
Editions of city comedy
Beaumont, Francis. The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Ed. Sheldon P. Zitner. Revels. Manchester: Manchester University Press 2004.
Dekker, Thomas. The Honest Whore Part I and II. London: Routledge, 1999.
Jonson, Ben. The Alchemist. New Mermaids. London: A. and C. Black, Andrew Brodie Publications, 2004.
—. The Alchemist and Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2004; includes Volpone and Epicene.
—. Bartholomew Fair. Ed. Suzanne Gossett. Revels. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
—. The Devil is an Ass. Ed. Peter Happé. Revels. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.
—. Every Man In His Humour. Ed. Robert N. Watson. New Mermaids. London: A. and C. Black, 2003.
—. Every Man Out of His Humour. Ed. Martin Seymour Smith. New Mermaids. London: Ernest Benn, 1988.
—. Every Man Out of His Humour, Cynthia’s Revels and The Poetaster: The Works of Ben Jonson Part Two. Montana: Kessinger, 2004.
—. Volpone. Ed. Robert Watson. New Mermaids. London: A. and C. Black, 2003.
—, George Chapman, John Marston. Eastward Ho. Ed. R. W. van Fossen. Revels. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.
Marston, John. The Dutch Courtesan. Ed. David Crane. New Mermaids. London: A. and C. Black, 1997.
Middleton, Thomas. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Ed. Alan Brissenden. New Mermaids. London: A. and C. Black, 2002.
—. A Mad World My Masters and other Plays. Ed. Michael Taylor. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1998; includes A Trick to Catch the Old One and Michaelmas Term.
Bibliography
Bliss, Lee. The World’s Perspective: John Webster and the Jacobean Drama. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983.
Bruster, Douglas. Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Chakravorty, Swapan. Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996.
Covatta, Anthony. Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1973.
Gibbons, Brian. Jacobean City Comedy. London: Methuen, 1968.
Griswold, Wendy. Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre 1576–1980. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986.
Heinemann, Margot. Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Oppositional Drama under the Early Stuarts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Knights, L. C. Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson. London: Chatto and Windus, 1937.
Leggatt, Alexander. Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973.
Leinwald, Theodore. The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy 1603–1613. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.
Levin, Harry. “Notes Towards a Definition of City Comedy.” Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Lewalski. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Mehl, Dieter, et al. Plotting Early Modern London. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.
Paster, Gail Kern. The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.
Salgādo, Gamīnī. Four Jacobean City Comedies. Baltimore and Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
Sullivan, Ceri. The Rhetoric of Credit: Mercantile Texts and City Comedy. London: Association of University Presses, 2002.
Wayne, Don E. “Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: an Alternative View.” Renaissance Drama 13 (1982): 103–30.
Further reading
Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: the Market and the Theater in Anglo American Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Barber, C. L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: a Study of Dramatic Form in Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.
Berry, Edward. Shakespeare’s Comic Rites. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Bristol, Michael D. Carnival and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority. New York: Methuen, 1985.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Laroque, François. Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage. Trans. J. Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Pollard, Arthur. Satire. Critical Idiom. London: Methuen, 1970.
Rowe, George E., Jr. Thomas Middleton and the New Comedy Tradition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979.
Slights, William. “The Incarnations of Comedy.” University of Toronto Quarterly 51, 1 (Fall 1981): 13–27.
—. “Unfashioning the Man of Mode: Comic Countergenre in Marston, Jonson and Middleton.” Renaissance Drama ns 15 (1984): 69–80.
Smith, David, et al. The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London 1576–1649. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Stallybrass, Peter, and White, Allon. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen, 1986.
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© 2007 Alizon Brunning
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Brunning, A. (2007). City Comedy. In: Hiscock, A., Hopkins, L. (eds) Teaching Shakespeare and Early Modern Dramatists. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593206_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593206_10
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