Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (review)

Jean Howard’s introduction to Theater of a City paints a vivid portrait of sixteenth-century London as a growing, diverse, international capital struggling to maintain its sense of history while embracing modernization. Howard sets out to prove that issues regarding social change and dislocation were actively addressed in London’s commercial theatre between 1598 and 1642. To prove her thesis, she focuses on “London comedies,” which she defines as a subgenre of “city comedies” like those written by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. Like city comedies, London comedies are based on Roman New Comedy, use London as their setting, and deal with the unnoble characters that populate the city. However, plays in this subgenre are specifically set in known locations in London and explore the pressing issues of demographic change, a growing population of foreigners, new ways of making and losing money, changes in gender roles, and the rise of a town culture.

In the first chapter, Howard explores the importance of London’s Royal Exchange and how this international market became a setting for comedies addressing issues of the anxiety caused by increasing urban development. She provides a fascinating, detailed description of the exchange in terms of its importance for the economy of England, and how the architectural and social constructs of this market reflected the economic ambitions of London as a world power. It also acted as a microcosm of the city by defining the social status and gender roles of market-users. As an example, she examines William Haughton’s 1598 comedy Englishmen for My Money, a play set in the exchange featuring a Portuguese merchant who wants his half-English daughters to marry foreign suitors in an effort to keep his wealth out of English hands. Ultimately, the patriotic daughters refuse to marry anyone other than Englishmen. This comedy patronized xenophobic Londoners, who feared that foreigners would not only take away English wealth, but their daughters as well. Howard also discusses the anonymous, adamantly anti-Spanish play Alarum for London (1602) and its portrayal of Spanish soldiers as rapists, murderers, and torturers. The play warned London audiences of their own self-indulgence at the exchange, where men spending their newly acquired wealth on worldly goods might grow too fat to defend themselves against invaders.

Howard then explores plays set in debtors’ prisons, which dramatized the connection between growing consumerism and the corresponding increase in personal debt. She suggests that dramatists were obsessed with these prisons as a location to dramatize the dichotomy between the massive amounts of consumer goods available and the large population shut out of the market. In these plays, Londoners witnessed characters of little means spending borrowed money for goods they ultimately cannot afford, eventually ending up in prison and living on the charity of strangers. Howard discusses several other plays that illustrate the variety of viewpoints on issues of charity, usury, and personal debt during this period.

Chapter 3 discusses plays set in whorehouses. While one might expect these works to illustrate the social downfall and abjection of women, Howard contrarily points out that a number of these plays used whorehouses as a location to show that “sexual status determines female worth,” creating comedies that valued “women’s financial acumen or cultural sophistication over [their] chastity” (114). While she does not believe that these plays reflected the reality of London life for women, she does believe they demonstrate a capitalistic appreciation of the prostitute as a mirror of the larger market forces in London. In these plays, the prostitute also reflected Londoners’ xenophobia—whores bedding foreigners could transfer strange diseases to natives, after all. On the other hand, these plays not only portray English prostitutes, but also Italian courtesans, who provide a business model for their English counterparts to emulate and who also become teachers to up-and-coming merchants. So while some plays condemned contact with foreigners, others argued (even if ironically) that interaction with aliens...