ABSTRACT
With the publication of Brian Gibbons’s Jacobean City Comedy in 1968 these plays, in the words of Douglas Bruster, attained their ‘official status as a Renaissance subgenre’, distinct by their farcical humour and ironic tone from ‘citizen comedy’ or ‘London drama’ more generally.5 This retrospective genrebuilding has proved immensely fruitful in the study of early modem English drama over the last thirty-five years. It has allowed critics to assess in far greater detail the scope and variety of generic interrelations, the making of playhouse clienteles and the thrust of playwright polemics - even to the extent of detecting clear-cut dramatic boundaries and confirmed theatrical enmities where it would be better to speak of constantly changing formations of dramatic competition, consumer tastes and commercial pressures.
