City Comedy Flashcards
(39 cards)
In the years…
1599-1615
Key characteristics
Portrayed citizens from a variety of ranks; based in London; often involving merchants; satirising merchants and stock characters such as gossips/cuckolds/the rich
Key works
Middleton - chaste maid
Dekker - shoemaker’s holiday
Jonson - epicene, volpone, The Alchemist.
Ideas
Significance of names - “yellowhammer”, “lacy”, “Hammond”, “Allwit”; use of asides; caricaturing ‘types’
Thomas Dekker
D.1632
Londoner
Dutch ancestry?
Dekker key works
The shoemaker’s holiday (earliest record of performance 1600) and the roaring girl (cross dressing)
Shoemaker’s holiday critics
Jonathan Gil Harris: (Dekker very interested in street language and good command of Dutch; likes “socially marginal or unconventional characters”; play has an “economic unconscious”; “subtly dramatises the change from an old code of communal fellowship to a new capitalist one”)
Dutton; play “romanticises and celebrates London and its merchant classes” where a chaste maid doesn’t.
Key themes - shoemaker’s holiday
Dress/clothing; love; economic wellbeing; social status; fellowship/brotherhood; women as commodities/meat; speech and manners reflecting status, commercial society
Thomas Middleton
D.1627.
Prolific writer of masques/pageants
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside; also revenge tragedy The Changeling
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside - critics
Dutton - blend of intrigue and popular comedy. A different blend of “urban affairs, a world of unstable money, of social and sexual aspiration, of competitive and individualist psychology”. “More complex and multi-vocal work than any of its immediate models”. Set in Lent but “the characters still pursue the flesh, both literally and metaphorically” (link Moll and Touchwood Jnr’s resurrection; sir W Whorehound’s spiritual awakening)
A Chaste Maid - key themes
London life, cuckoldry, economic in/dependence, deception, education/ignorance, women as goods/food, parent/child relationships and gender, elite classes, productivity, religious insincerity, death device. Triple plot, all interconnected by Whorehound.
Shoemaker’s holiday - key characters
Simon Eyre (master shoemaker) Margery (his wife) Firk, hodge (journeymen) Lacy/Hans (nobleman in disguise as Dutch shoemaker) Rose (daughter of Mayor of London) Oatley (her father and LM) Lincoln (lady's uncle) Ralph (newlywed to) Jane (courted by) Hammond
Shoemaker’s holiday - key quotes - lacy/Rose plot
Lincoln “I would not have you cast an amorous eye/upon so mean a project as the love/ of a gay, wanton, painted citizen”
Rose bribing Sibyl - commercial nature of life - “Do this, and I will give thee for thy pains/ my cambric apron, and my romish gloves”
Lacy - “How many shapes have Gods and Kings devised” (to see loves)
HAMMON wooing Rose (hunt) “a deer more dear is found within this place” Sybil “what kind of hart is that dear heart you seek?” (punning)
Lacy, to Rose, “thou payest sweet interest to my hopes” “bold-faced debtor”
King: “Shall I divorce them, then?” “Dost thou not know that love respects no blood,/ cares not for difference of birth or state?”
Shoemaker’s holiday - key quotes Ralph/jane plot (hammon)
Ralph: “thou knowst our trade makes rings for women’s heels” “stitched by my fellow firk, seamed by myself”
Hammond to Jane: “only one look hath seemed as rich to me/as a king’s crown, such is love’s lunacy.”
Jane, to Hammond “my hands are not to be sold” “though he be dead,/ my love for him shall not be buried”
Ralph: “Hammon, dost thou think a shoemaker’s so base to be a bawd to his own wife for a commodity?”
Shoemakers holiday - key quotes Eyre and shoemakers plot.
Repeated phrases - Eyre: “By the lord of Ludgate” and Margery “but let that pass”
Eyre - “fat midriff-swag-belly whores” TO “lady Madgy”
Lacy in disguise: “Yaw, yaw, ick bin den skomaker” (phonetic spelling significant)
hierarchy - Firk “I being the elder journeyman”
Firk “no point. Shall I betray my brother?” (to Oatley/Lincoln) Oatley “base crafty varlet” (firk) “no crafty neither, but of the gentle craft”
“Sim Eyre knows how to speak to a Pope… to Tamberlaine an’ he were here”
A Chaste Maid - key characters
Moll Yellowhammer (daughter of Mr and Maudline Yellowhammer, in love with)
Touchwood Jnr (younger brother of)
Touchwood Snr (married, fertile, and aid to)
Lord and Lady Kix (infertile, money to pass to)
Sir Walter Whorehound (seeing the Welsh Lady, and cuckolding)
Allwit (married to Mrs Allwit and satisfied with life)
A Chaste Maid - key quotes Moll plot
Maudline to Moll “a husband./ Had not such a piece of flesh been ordained,/ what would us wives be good for? - to make salads”
Ring engravement: “Love that’s wise/ blinds parents eyes”
YellowH “I will lock up this baggage/as carefully as my gold” (women as commodities/marriage market)
“Oh! She’s gone forever!/ That letter broke her heart!”
“hands join now, but hearts forever,/ which no parent’s mood will sever”
“if your logic cannot prove me honest,/ there’s a thing called marriage, and that makes me honest” (welshwoman)
A Chaste Maid - key quotes Allwit plot
Allwit - pun on “Wittol” (knowing cuckold) - “I am like a man/finding a table furnished to his hand” “pray, am I not your master? O, you are but/ our mistress’s husband”
“These women have no consciences at sweetmeats” (hypocritical puritan gossips)
Whorehound repenting after duelling with T. jnr. and almost dying: “if ever eyes were open, these are they:/ Gamesters, farewell, I have nothing left to play.”
A Chaste Maid - key quotes Touch. snr/Kixes plot
T snr. on illegitimate child “piece of flesh/in this strict time of lent” (Promoters) “You know he bought the whole Lent together” (corruption) “thou art nothing of a woman” (for barrenness) T snr. “yours must be taken lying”
Ben Jonson - about
d.1637, well educated, contemporary of Shakespeare, varied life with much debauchery/excitement (killed a man in a duel)
Ben Jonson - critics
Greenblatt: c16 England “increasing self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process”. Expressions of social ideas/rules. Texts are part of the larger social world of self-fashioning.
Campbell: morals insisted on in prefaces “are not always readily apparent in the plays themselves”
Greene: Mosca = Jonson’s most flexible character. The home is an “inadequate fortress open to invasion and adultery” in his work.
Jonson - city comedies
Volpone (1606) Epicene (1609, printed 1616) The Alchemist (1610)
Volpone - key themes
- COMEDY! Deception - powerful rhetoric; changeablility of character (physical and mental); middleman; greed; lust; morals. Beast fable style. Set in Venice.
Volpone - key characters
Volpone (rich old man, waited on by)
Mosca (his parasite)
Nano, Androgino, Castrone (Volpone’s entertainers)
Voltore (Lawyer, seeking Volpone’s wealth, as is)
Corbaccio (avaricious old miser, father to)
Bonario (who rescues Celia from rape, but is accused of falsehood in trial)
Corvino (merchant, married to)
Celia (Volpone desires)
Sir Politic Would-Be (and Lady)
