ABSTRACT
Brian Gibbons began the first draft of what was to become his book, Jacobean City Comedy, in 1964.1 As Douglas Bruster has pointed out, he was not the first to identify the term ‘city comedy’,2 but his was the first study totally devoted to this newly emerging Renaissance sub-genre, giving it recognition and status. Gibbons focused on the satirical drama of Jonson, Marston, and Middleton as a new kind of comedy by playwrights ‘scornfully excluding romantic, magical or marvellous elements which figure so strongly in other kinds of Elizabethan comedy, such as The Old Wives' T a le f He traced the emergence of the genre and addressed the way the word ‘realism’ could be applied to city comedy, suggesting that, ‘As critical realists Jonson and Middleton seek to shape character and incident in order to bring alive the underlying social and moral issues through the specific and local experience.’4
