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  • Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy
  • Leeds Barroll
Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein, eds. Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004. xii + 236 pp. index. bibl. $79.95. ISBN: 0–7546–4097–3.

This excellent collection — a presentation to Brian Gibbons by his friends, colleagues, and former students — is the most recent in the Ashgate series of studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama, five volumes of which have already appeared under the general editorship of Helen Ostovitch. The volume in hand consists of twelve essays followed by a detailed bibliography of primary and secondary works, itself an extremely useful tool for bringing the reader up to date on recent scholarship in non-Shakespearean drama, as well as new work that positions Shakespeare within the "city comedy" context.

Angela Stock and Anne-Julia Zwierlein, two of the editors, offer an introduction which serves both as an astute summation of the theatrical and cultural significance of Jacobean comedy in London and as a rationale for the division of the twelve essays into symmetrical pairs. The aim of the volume, as Stock and Zwierlein define it, is to revaluate the idea of "city comedy" as elaborated several decades ago by Brian Gibbons in terms of recent developments in cultural and political history and in generic criticism. Thus the volume's six parts: "Bourgeois Domestic Drama," featuring contributions by Alan Brissenden and Matthias Bauer, examines subtle adaptations of dramatic conventions to a new genre that critiques urban corruptions; "The Culture of Credit" takes up issues of early modern capitalist exchange that impact the theater in essays by Richard Waswo and Anne-Julia Zwierlein; "Playhouse Politics," which includes essays by Andrew Gurr and David Crane, reexamines the imbrication of the theater itself in its meta-commentary on the commercial city; and "Civic Religion" offers a revisionist view of the theatrical re-formation of religious structures and conventions inessays by Angela Stock and Alizon Brunning. The final two pairings deal with Shakespeare. In "City Comedy and Shakespeare," Dieter Mehl and Ruth Morse reconsider, respectively, Shakespeare's own investment in city comedy, and the complex tensions between Shakespeare's work and that of Jonson. "Shakespearean City Comedy Today," featuring essays by Robyn Bolam and Deborah Cartmell, ends the collection, fittingly, with an examination of the appeal of city-based comedy — broadly defined — to modern audiences of stage and screen.

Although in general the individual essays are of high quality, I wish to focus here briefly on those of the editors, which may be said to be representative of the whole. In her study of the Lord Mayors' pageants as a kind of raw material for trenchant political satire on the London stage, Angela Stock connects elite and popular theatrical forms in an illuminating new perspective, one that is admirably documented with historical detail (see "'Something Done in Honor of the City': Ritual, Theatre and Satire in Jacobean Civic Pageantry"). Similarly, Anne Julia Zwierlein's essay, "Shipwrecks in the City," argues for a new view of urban commodification that connects investments in intangible prospects — such as [End Page 1050] payoffs from expeditions to unknown places, from moneylending, from roguery and gulling — to the specter of "shipwrecks" that are not only commercial, but also social, a central motif in The Merchant of Venice. And in an interesting essay on the participation of the King's Men in the subgenre of "Prodigal Son Comedy," Dieter Mehl adroitly exposes the satiric inversion of this sentimental tradition in "The London Prodigal," a play Shakespeare himself may have written. In thus offering fresh views on controversial issues, the volume's editors set a high standard that is manifest throughout the essays in this important collection.

Leeds Barroll
Folger Shakespeare Library
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