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Sexual Disguise and Social Mobility in Jacobean City Comedy

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Sexual Disguise and Social Mobility in Jacobean City Comedy 2 Sexual Disguise and Social Mobility in Jacobean City Comedy In its representation oflove and sexuality, Elizabethan romantic comedy is not concerned with the problematic enactment of social and sexual roles in the institution of marriage. Rather, it concen­ trates on the complexities of eras, dramatized as sexual desire seek­ ing and finding fulfillment in the heroes' successful resolution of the process of courtship. In contrast, Jacobean city comedy brings into the light of representation precisely those dissociations and contradictions in English Renaissance sexual ideology which ro­ mantic comedy evokes but seeks to reconcile and contain. 1 Jaco­ bean satire, or city comedy, is a genre designed to dramatize the complex process of conducting economic and social relations in a newly forming urban environment. As is well known, city com­ edy as such began in the late 1590s with Ben Jonson's humor plays, achieved recognizable generic conventions by about 1605, and thrived during, roughly, the first decade of the seventeenth cen­ tury, when dramatists perceived the city of London as the setting in which those conflicts caused by the political, religious, and eco­ nomic upheavals that transformed Renaissance England were being enacted most intensely.2 I. See Louis Adrian Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture, " Representations, 1 (Spring 1983), 61-94; and Jonathan Dollimore, "Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression: The Jacobean Connection," Renaissance Drama, N.S. 17 (1986), 53-81. 2. Brian Gibbon, Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, 43 The Expense of Sp irit Historians have demonstrated that from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, extraordinary demographic growth and price inflation, the opening of the land market that resulted from the dissolution of the monasteries at the Reformation, the increase in litigation, foreign trade, and other commercial ac­ tivities, and the expansion of education combined to create new problems of severe poverty and uprootedness forthe lower orders and, at the same time, unheard-of opportunities for social mobility among the middle and upper classes. By 1600 both the victims of change and the protagonists of opportunity were drawn to the metropolis. Developing during this peak period of social upheaval, city comedy explores the struggle for survival and preeminence among the inhabitants of a society in which economic potential and definitions of social class and status are suddenly perceived as provocatively fluid.3 Although the population of London increased more rapidly than that of the country at large during the sixteenth century, the over­ whelming majority of English people remained living in the rural sections of the country. According to historians, Tudor and Stuart perceptions of the rapidly changing social order reveal an ideologi- Marston, and Middleton (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 2; Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973); Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1980), pp. 3-24. 3. See Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), as well as his "Social Mobility in England, l 500-1700, " Past and Present, 33 (1966), 16-55, in which he explores both the upward and downward mobility of the middle and upper classes. David Cressy, in "Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England," Literature and History, 3 (March 1976), 29-44, revises some of Stone's breakdown of the status hierarchy, including his separation of the peerage from the rest of the upper gentry. Cressy believes (p. 36) that subdivisions in the category of "gentleman" are not helpful: "Even contemporaries confessed difficulty dis­ tinguishing the status grades in practice." The evidence fromJonson 's Ep i­ coene, however, supports Stone's emphasis on the importance of status grada­ tions among the upper classes, precisely because boundaries within their ranks were conceived of as fluid. Also see Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580- 1680 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982), pp. 17-38; Leggatt, pp. 3-4; Gibbon; and Peter Laslett, The World We Ha ve Lost: England before the Industrial Age (New York: Scribner's, 1965), pp. 22-52. 44 Disguise and Social Mobility in Jacobean Comedy cal disjunction within "a society whose legal system and status system were based on possession of land at a time when non­ landed skills, wealth and power were increasingly significant. "4 Though city comedy has been treated exclusively as a searing satir­ ic indictment of emerging urban economic values and social strug­ gles, recent scholarship has perceived a greater flexibility in the genre's depiction of social change. 5 Establishing an eloquent, pro- 4. Cressy, p. 29. See also Stone, "Social Mobility in England, " pp. 20, 34, and passim; and Wrightson, pp. 24-28. On pp. 127-28, Wrightson describes the "shifting balance between the urban and rural populations of England" that ensued as the driftof the rural population toward the towns contributed to rapid urbanization. 5. The classic treatment of the genre as an indictment of acquisitiveness is L. C. Knights's Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937). Leggatt argues (pp. 150-51) that city comedy moves be­ tween poles of subversion and assertions of traditional morality. City comedy is "concerned with social relations in their most material form-sex and marriage, money and property." Whereas characters in later comedies "show a concern formore delicate social adjustments," the characters in city comedy reveal "an urgent concern forthe material side of life and little else ....[C ity comedy's] social morality is finally a morality of property and possession. Each man should keep and use what is rightfully his, whether his land or his wife: the moralizing comedies rebuke the neglect of wives and the squander­ ing of wealth in roughly similar terms." Leggatt adds interestingly that "the characters of citizen comedy are too close to the sources of their security, and too anxious about them, to have any time for . niceties. " For another traditional view of English Renaissance satire as an attack on emerging capital­ ism and "an indirect assertion of the innate fineness of the ideals of the old landed aristocrats," see Oscar James Campbell, Comical/ Satyre and Shake­ speare's "Troilus and Cressida" (San Marino, Calif. : 193 8), pp. 15-20, 43. For more recent and revisionary views of the purposes and concerns of Jacobean satiric comedy, see Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 282-301. Cohen views the attacks on bourgeois morality in Jaco­ bean satire as a defensive strategy of the aristocracy, or a sign of "aristocratic failure." See also Heinemann; and Don E. Wayne, "Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: An Alternative View, " Renaissance Drama, N.S. 13 (1982), 103-29. As his title suggests, Wayne revises Knights's views by exploring Ben Jonson's ambivalence toward the emerging bourgeois culture that nour­ ished and empowered, as well as disgusted, him. Susan Wells, in "J acobean City Comedy and the Ideology of the City," ELH, 48 (1981), 37-60, makes interesting and provocative suggestions about the origins and purposes of city comedy; see the discussion that follows in the text. 45 The Expense of Sp irit vocative connection between economics and aesthetics, Susan Wells argues that the major achievement of city comedy is to conjoin the traditional rural and festive values of the carnival (and of romantic comedy) with the emerging urban values of trade and commerce. This process allows the genre to examine and pro­ foundly criticize social processes at the same time that it avoids tragedy: "The relations of exchange and accumulation [are im­ mersed] . in the norms and customs of the fe ast, so that these relations could be either celebrated in traditional terms or called into question by their confrontation with them. When ac­ cumulation is successful ...we experience it as cleverness rather than greed." Varying its emphases fromplay to play, city comedy thus accommodates both satiric critique and fe stive celebration, severely scrutinizing commercial urban society while retaining a comic tone. 6 Scholarship continually has emphasized that the sexual discourse in city comedy, with its obligatory prostitutes and notorious adul­ teries, inhabits the critical rather than the celebratory end of this spectrum. Arguments focus on the satiric exposure of the corrupt connections between money and sex, marriage and property, lust and greed, which are viewed as a trenchant indictment of the com­ mercialization of fe eling and human relationships. 7 However, marriage as a property-based arrangement had long been a tradi­ tional value; it is the transformation and distortion of this aristocra­ tic and rural ideal to the increasingly bourgeois urban environment of London that Jacobean satire subjects to harsh and vicious scru­ tiny. 8 The plays frequentlyrely on the equation of sexuality with sin to examine the economics of marriage and the commercial exploita­ tion of eros. Yet though this focus is lively and well developed throughout the genre, it does not constitute the truly original con- 6. Wells, pp. 54, 56, and passim. 7. See, e.g., Knights, pp. 125-26; Gibbon; Leggatt, p. 151; and Richard Horwich, "Wives, Courtesans, and the Economics of Love in Jacobean City Comedy," Comparative Drama, 7, no. 4 (Winter 1973-74), 291-309. 8. See Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. l 19: "The change to fe udal order led to marriage policies designed to protect what one had, and specifically to an emerging principle of devolution based on primogeniture." Disguise and Social Mobility in Jacobean Comedy tribution that city comedy makes to the dramatic representation of sexuality.
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