The Prison as World—The World as Prison

Chapter 1 deals with two types of metaphors: those that liken the prison to the (or a) world, seeing the prison as a microcosm, and those that project an inverse scenario, in which the world is metaphorically depicted as a prison. After pointing out how prison, as a heterotopia (like hell) is conceived both as lying outside the world and as sharing numerous structural features with it, Section 1.2 moves on to a consideration of early modern similitudes in the ‘character’ literature of Overbury, Dekker, Mynshul, and Fennor. An analysis of two city comedies, Eastward Ho (1605) and The City Gallant (1614) illustrates how prisons were perceived to mirror early modern society. From these instances of the PRISON AS WORLD metaphor, the chapter turns to the WORLD AS PRISON trope, which is exemplified by The Beggar’s Opera as well as in Samuel Beckett’s prose and Edward Bond’s play Olly’s Prison.

“Welcome to the Heart of the City”: Mappings of London in Early City Comedies

This essay looks at the ways in which the evolving early modern urban space of London was re-presented to early modern Londoners. It focuses on aspects of how the sprawling city was culturally and literally mapped out in theatrical and other performances. It discusses in particular Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist as plays that commented respectively on the Cheapside as a luxury market and on Blackfriars as an up-and-coming quarter boasting a new and successful theatrical venue. The area between the city and Westminster is also discussed, as is the spatial particularity of Windsor described and performed in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and in contemporary chorography.

Conclusion: ‘Fools, they are the only nation’: Rereading the Interlude and Beyond

This concluding chapter re-examines Jonson’s thinking of metempsychosis based on the previous discussion of Volpone’s bastards. While metempsychosis is usually referred to as the transmigration of souls, the idea in Volpone can be carnivalesque and is full of slippage and deferral. Using Sontag’s concept of Camp, it argues how the interlude represents a celebration of an epicene style. Finally, this chapter discusses the idea of Jonson’s comedies as lack with other early modern city comedies and modern film comedies, with a particular focus on Middleton (for plays such as A Mad World, My Masters and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, with the comparison of cuckold and wittol for instance), and attempts to think about bastardy as a multivalent trope to discuss the city, capitalism and comedy (including modern film comedy) and jokes themselves as improper, bastard forms of utterance.

Contract and Conjugality in Early Modern England

Literary scholars have long been aware of the near saturation of English Renaissance plays with marriage plots. Many Jacobean City Comedies, for example, use marriages to contrast traditional visions of society, formed around reciprocal obligations within a status hierarchy, with a more self-interested and contractual view of social relations. This chapter highlights links between marital contracts and financial contracts and considers changes in contractual thinking in the context of unprecedented litigation over conditional bonds; the displacement of dower by jointure in marital negotiations; and the increasingly contractual nature of private marital separations (in a society where divorce in the modern sense was unavailable).

Chaste Selfhood: Ben Jonson’s Critique of Urban Chastity Tropes

This chapter considers the bourgeois subjectivity articulated in city comedy. It begins by addressing the tendency of city comedies such as Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and the anonymous The Fair Maid of the Exchange to juxtapose chaste women with desiring, fragmented male characters so as to critique an ineffectual masculinity that flounders in the urban marketplace. The chapter then turns to Ben Jonson, whose treatment of chastity—and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and commerce more generally—has been underexplored. Jonson satirizes conventional deployments of chastity in Epicoene, rendering chaste integrity impossible in early capitalist environments and rejecting the queer implications of a model of male subjectivity that defines itself through theatrical chastity. Bartholomew Fair, by contrast, invokes chastity’s commodity status in order to present—and largely embrace—a queer, contingent form of early capitalist subjectivity. Furthermore, Jonson applies this model of commoditised subjectivity to the condition of the commercial playwright, indicating that his own agency as an author lies in the ability to negotiate the strictures of the commodity markets to which he is subjected.

‘Caviare to the General’?: Taste, Hearing and Genre in Hamlet

This chapter turns to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, an early modern play deeply interested in, and highly self-consciously about, hearing. Possibly a revision of an earlier revenge tragedy, Hamlet is vitally shaped by the formal contests emerging at the turn of the century. Hamlet himself articulates a Jonsonian model of selective and tasteful theatrical reception, but his own hearing trouble frequently, tragically, undermines his ability to perform such audition. The Prince’s longing for complete and absolute control over his body’s sonic circulation is juxtaposed against Horatio’s more measured, partial reception; it is only in the play’s final moments that the dying Hamlet is released from this doomed, tortured struggle. Hamlet recuperates revenge from charges of embarrassing obsolescence by suggesting that all sounds can be processed thoughtfully, consciously, and carefully -- that no one dramatic sound or form forces its audiences to hear it so unthinkingly, or so violently. The chapter closes by examining Hamlet’s influence on the sound and structure of a handful of Jacobean revenge tragedies and city comedies, with particular attention to the highly sophisticated, generically self-aware The Revenger’s Tragedy.

Listening for Form at the Cockpit Theatre

This chapter focuses on the repertoire of a single West End playhouse, the Cockpit, during the final decade of the early modern theatre’s existence. In this somewhat seedy rival to the more fashionable Blackfriars, new revenge tragedies and city comedies continued to be written and performed, but the two forms were becoming increasingly hybridized, their sonic and auditory investments less distinct. A set of supra-generic conventions, each deeply attentive to sound and space, began to emerge across the plays performed within this playhouse; collectively, these helped to a shape a kind of Cockpit brand. Combining a survey of the Cockpit’s 1630s repertoire with focused attention to two representatively hybrid plays (James Shirley’s revenge-comedy The Ball and John Ford’s urban tragedy, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore), the chapter asks how this playhouse’s scrutiny of formal and sonic contests participated in the development of early modern theatre as a cultural institution.