Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare by Alexander Leggatt (review)

REVIEWS Alexander Leggatt. Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare. Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 1973. Pp. ix + 167. $10.00. Comedies written between 1585 and 1625 which, set in a predomi­ nantly middle-class social milieu, deal with "social relations in their most material form-sex and marriage, money and property" (p. 151 )-such are the boundaries established by Alexander Leggatt in Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare. Quite consciously he intends to expand the concept which (as used by such critics as Arthur Brown, M. C. Brad­ brook, and Brian Gibbons) has described a relatively small group of plays either anatomizing urban knavery or inculcating the virtues of civic pride, national patriotism,, and good manners among the lower and middle classes. It is a large order, especially for such a slender volume, and on too many pages meaningful analysis gives place to a catalog of titles, character types, and themes. Individual chapters deal with the citizen hero and the citizen villain (conventionally a usurer) , the prodi­ gal, the theme of material acquisition (money and land) , the proper authority in marriage, the chaste young lady and the prostitute, and the theme of adultery. Mr. Leggatt wisely avoids any attempt at chronology within these chapters. Instead his concern is to describe the wide diversity of attitudes toward a particular theme or a particular type of character in the come­ dies under consideration. At the same time he attempts, at least sporadi­ cally, to evaluate the degree of success with which the playwright has achieved the wedding of comic form with serious moral or social com­ ment. In his chapter on "Comedy of Intrigue: Money and Land," for example, he divides the plays into those dealing with the theme amoral­ ly, those invoking a stern moral judgment, and those depicting .a kind of compromise position which treats the matter comically, yet achieves a significant moral comment. Both Middleton's A Trick to Catch the Old One (Paul's, ca. 1605) and David, Lord Barry's Ram Alley (King's Revels, ca. 1608) provoke an amoral response which disrupts conven­ tional values. Middleton's comedy depends upon simple and uninhibited delight in the skill of the trickster and the discomfiture of the victim. Witgood engages our sympathies as wastrel, victim, and finally as clever rogue, while the miserly Lucre and Hoard are more cantakerous than destructive. Ram Alley, developing a similar theme but with more pungent satire, arouses responses beyond a sporting appreciation of the game. The prodigal William Small-shanks, who is both knave and lecher, confronts a corrupt world on its own terms; his knavery, in fact, is de264 Reviews 265 picted as a philosophy in its own right. The reaction which the play evokes, as Mr. Leggatt remarks, is "entirely amoral: our sympathy is enlisted for a hero who, instead of battling the vices of society, uses those vices for his own ends. There are few plays of the period in which moral considerations are so successfully excluded; a codified, gentle­ manly immorality becomes the norm of judgment" (p. 65). Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts (Red Bull, 1621) , on the other hand, utilizes the same basic plot line, but the morality has be­ come oppressive and leads to a strange contradiction in terms. Wellborn, a prodigal gentleman who has been duped by Overreach prior to the action of the play, refuses like Witgood to acknowledge his roguery. Thus, when he unashamedly uses Overreach's man Marrall to recover his land by the same vicious means the usurer himself would employ, he comes "dangerously close to hypocrisy" (p. 68). "The problem is not so much whether an intrigue comedy can bear a weight of commentary..,..­ Ram Alley shows that it can-but what kind of commentary it can bear. A satiric vision of the knavery of the world is easy enough to accommo­ date, but the desire to assert serious moral standards does not· sit well with the essentially amoral premises of the intrigue plot" (p. 70). The stage piece which best illustrates the successful accommodation of the intrigue plot to such moral standards is Jonson's The Alchemist (King's, 1610) . Face, Subtle, and...