City Powd’ring

This chapter examines how Thomas Middleton’s Michaelmas Term positions the cloth trade as pivotal to the construction of sexuality and sexual relations in the city. Circulating with cloth in the play is queer urban sexual knowledge. Antitheatricalists feared that the theater was a site of sexual pedagogy and initiation in the early modern period. Michaelmas Term subtly embraces that role for the city comedy, and the chapter draws on queer theories of materiality to demonstrate that the play’s relentless focus on the materiality of selfhood is pertinent in querying the limits of biological determinism and essentialism that characterize mainstream politics around sexuality today. The play can prompt us to consider how alternate forms of queer ontogenesis derived from the past have affordances for the production of queer culture in the present.

Introduction

This chapter outlines how sartorial extravagance might be thought of as a kind of queer worldmaking in early modern city comedy. It offers an overview of the book’s application of disability theory and new materialism to the forms of superficial embodiment and queer eroticism that extravagant clothing facilitated on the early modern stage. It argues that more flexible historical methodologies based on queer theories of temporality can move the field of early modern studies beyond the false choice between historicism and presentism. It situates the book in current scholarship on the early modern period and queer theory and previews the remaining chapters of the book.

Mammon in the Market; or, How Ben Jonson Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Capitalism

I will argue that the “middle comedies” of Ben Jonson, specifically The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, address concerns that are not only social and economic but also political in nature. Or, to put it another way, the economic issues that these plays address are also political. As the economic landscape shapes social life in city comedy, so too do political concerns exert an important, if perhaps less apparent, influence over the plays that I will examine here. In The Alchemist, Sir Epicure Mammon fantasizes about relocating to a “free state” so that he may enjoy the pleasures that his newly acquired capital can afford him without drawing the ire and suspicion of the monarch (4.1.156). In Bartholomew Fair, Justice Overdo proclaims that he acts on behalf of king and commonwealth when trying to regulate the capitalistic chaos of the local fair. The prevalence of the language of politics (of commonwealth, monarchy, republicanism) in these plays suggests that their economic concerns have significant political implications. Each play offers a resolution to this conflict in accordance with dramatic propriety, what is appropriate given the circumstances. The justice that is done and the order that is achieved at the conclusion of each play is not carried out by politicians or magistrates but rather shaped by the market society in which the characters operate. The characters who try to regulate the market or expose its corruption fail miserably, while the characters who triumph at the end of each play work the system and manipulate the circumstances to their advantage.

Introduction: Strangers and Aliens in London ca 1605 -- Is Anyone Stranger than a London Gallant?

This special issue on John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan illustrates the various tensions in London at the start of James I's reign. This city comedy deploys satire to urge its audience to see the anxiety and fears caused by misogyny, xenophobia, religious dissent, and contact with European foreigners, all of which create an alien environment infecting those who live in it. Each of the ten essays that make up the issue touches on these anxieties, or at least elements of strangeness that need arguing away or accepting as unresolvable in Marston's view of human nature.

‘La bella Franceschina’ and Other Foreign Names in Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan

John Marston’s play, The Dutch Courtesan, presents characters with remarkably polyglot names for action set in England. My essay examines this naming practice, attending in particular to the Italian name and background of the 'Dutch' courtesan, Franceschina, familiar to theatre-goers as a traditional character in commedia dell’arte troupes and scenarios. Overall, the essay argues that Marston’s deployment of foreign and polyglot names plays out and extends the ambivalences criticism has identified in the play, and in the genre of city comedy, towards hybridizations springing up in England in response to contemporary mercantile and cross-cultural relations.

Shakespeare, Arden of Faversham, and Four Forgotten Playwrights

This essay attempts to identify the primary author of Arden of Faversham, a play published anonymously in 1592, widely regarded as the first, and perhaps the best, domestic tragedy in English. Although many scholars now believe that Shakespeare wrote a small part of this play, there is no consensus about the authorship of most of it. This essay focuses on four Elizabethan playwrights whose extant work does not contain any securely identified single-author plays: Thomas Achelley, Michael Drayton, Richard Hathwaye, and Thomas Watson. It surveys the documentary evidence of their careers and reputations, and closely examines the literary style, originality, and variety of their extant work. This survey decisively rules out the first three, and provides strong and consistent evidence for Watson’s authorship. It identifies a new source for the play (Ovid’s Remedia Amoris), demonstrates its close connections to the 1591 royal entertainment at Elvetham, links the ahistorical role of Protector Somerset to Watson’s relationship with the Earl of Hertford, and argues that the play combines the earliest extant domestic tragedy with the earliest extant city comedy.

Sour Beer at the Boar’s Head: Salvaging Shakespeare’s Alewife, Mistress Quickly

Using William Shakespeare’s character Mistress Nell Quickly as an example, this article contends that familiarity with both the literary tradition of alewives and the historical conditions in which said literary tradition brewed aids in revising our interpretation of working-class women on the early modern stage. Mistress Quickly, the multi-faceted comic character in three history plays and a city-comedy, resembles closely those women with whom Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have lived and worked in their day-to-day lives. Rather than dismissing her role as minor or merely comic, as previous criticism largely has, scholarship can embrace this character type and her narrative as an example to complicate teleological progressions for women.