ABSTRACT

Since Brian Gibbons first identified city comedy as a distinct dramatic form, critics have explored in detail the ways in which this genre responded to the influences of the city in early modern England, revealing how New Comedy’s traditional familial and community relationships were challenged and increasingly destabilized by ‘the urban swirl of competing individuals’.1 In particular, Gibbons’s model has been added to by critics who see the emerging genre of city comedy as a response to the social forces that came to characterize English life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as the ways in which urban growth destabilized England’s traditional economic and social hierarchies, and led to city comedy’s preoccupation with the moral ambiguities of commerce.2 Where the plots found in more traditional dramatic forms, such as New Comedy, are largely predicated on the conventions of the genre, the modes and perspectives of city comedy are located instead in the economic turbulence and pedestrian intrigues of Jacobean London. It is no surprise, then, that we find in the urban world of Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters (1608), a host of marginalized characters employing forms of deception and trickery to negotiate the social architecture of their domestic and urban communities. By levelling the social playing field, alterations in identity and appearance provide characters, such as Dick Follywit and Frank Gullman, with a means of subverting economic and gender barriers that restrict their independence. In this way characters employ disguise to create a prosthetic persona through which they reclaim the

1 Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of the Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968), 29.