ABSTRACT
Brian Gibbons’s study of Jacobean city comedy appropriately begins with a quotation from The Alchemist in which Ben Jonson has the Prologue point out that ‘Our scene is London, ’cause we would make known, / No country’s mirth is better than our own’.1 In Jonson’s Prologue, this patriotic statement is immediately explained by a list of characters or types ‘Whose manners, now called humours, feed the stage’ and thus serve to prove his point: ‘whore, / Bawd, squire, imposter’ and ‘many persons more’ provide the subject matter for ‘comic writers’. Mirth, as it is understood here, arises from satire; it serves to sugar the pill whose main ingredient is the author’s ‘keen analysis in moral terms’.2 Not for nothing does Gibbons compare Ben Jonson with Brecht.3 Jonson’s view of mirth, however, is by no means the only one to be held with regard to possible subject matter for the comic writer. ‘Mirth’ and ‘matter’ are linked quite differently, for example, by Polixenes in The Winter's Tale, who, when asked about his son, exclaims: ‘He’s all my exercise, my mirth, my matter’ (1.2.166). This non-satirical kind of mirth does not preclude a keen analysis in moral terms, but is shown to be a quality connected with or even emanating from a person such as young Florizel rather than the reaction to examples of folly or vice. This form of mirth as a kind of power may even be personified, as in Chaucer’s Myrthe, whose face is as round as an apple, who is handsome and young and ‘mery of thought’.4 It is in this tradition that a link between the twentieth-century stage and the seventeenth-century one may be found which is perhaps less obvious than that between Brecht and Jonson but, in its very own way, quite as telling, providing a comment on city comedy’s prevalent themes
1 Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy. A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton (London, 1968), 15. See Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, The New Mermaids, ed. Elizabeth Cook, 2nd ed. (London, 1991), Prologue. 2 Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy, 29. 3 Ibidem, 19-21. 4 The Romaunt of the Rose, 835; quoted from The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1979).
