ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on a selection of conventional plays which sought to please the audience for city comedy in the Coterie theatres. These plays show how a conventional playwright went to work in writing for the genre's enthusiasts, what elements he thought it best to emphasize, what struck him as typical. The more conventional plays of 1604-7 showed how deficient art diluted the atmosphere created in such plays as The Dutch Courtezan or Michaelmas Term, so that the London setting of Westward Ho was not much more convincing than that in a Coney-Catching pamphlet by Greene. It might be noted that precisely this point is made by the three intelligent collaborative authors of the splendid parody Eastward Ho, who emphasize the crudity of their targets by ironic iteration of hoary cliches in plot and character and also moral-didactic comment.