ABSTRACT
Eastward Ho is most recognizable as the kind of play Shakespeare didn’t write. Composed in triple collaboration by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, the plot features a master and apprentices, marriage plots that turn on status and social advancement, and a failed Virginia venture that is also a double-crossing cuckoldry attempt gone awry. Above all, it vividly represents early modern London: from the shopkeeper’s cry, “What do ye lack, sir?” in the opening scene, to Slitgut’s narration of the shipwrecked travelers scattered at various points along the Thames from his perch above the river, to the final lines that compare the audience in the theater to a crowd of citizens eagerly waiting for the annual civic pageant on the Lord Mayor’s Day. The genre is city comedy, popular in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, a kind of play that idealized and satirized London life. City comedies depict the excitement of new economic possibilities and speculative risk, explore the mutual disdain of impoverished spendthrift aristocrats and prosperous hardworking citizens, and dramatize labor and hierarchy in the pecking order of the city’s guilds. Eastward Ho is poised between documentary and sitcom as it self-reflexively celebrates and mocks the social world outside—and also inside—the theater.
