ABSTRACT
The simplest definition of the popular subgenre of early seventeenth-century drama that critics have variously identified as “city comedy,” “citizen comedy,” or “London comedy”—or at least the one aspect that most critics can agree on-is that they are plays set in the contemporary London of their audiences. Beyond that, the definition of the genre becomes more vexed; are city comedies characteristically satirical or celebratory? Do they champion one social class or another?1 More important for my purposes is the question of the genre’s role in Jonson’s self-construction as author. I argue that Jonson found in city comedy, in the processes of transforming stage space into urban space and vice versa, the means to explore the potential of dramatic authorship. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s Theseus famously claims that the poet “gives to aery nothing / A local habitation and a name” (5.1.16-17), but city comedy begins not with aery nothing, but with local habitations that already have names, with London places that are already laden with meaning. Jonson’s city comedies are often centrally about London as a stage, and as a corollary, about the playwright’s ability to shape the meanings of familiar space and the audience’s perception thereof. They expose London, the London inhabited by Jonson and his audience alike, as inherently dramatic. Theater is shown to be how their city works, and the playwright thereby takes on an immediate presence, whether through representation as an author figure within the dramatic fiction, or as an implied physical presence in the playhouse or its surroundings at the moment of performance. Throughout Jonson’s career, he used London city comedy as a demonstration and a celebration of the playwright’s power to shape communal urban consciousness.
