City comedy, also called Citizen Comedy, is a common genre of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline comedy on the London stage from the last years of the 16th century to the closing of the theaters in 1642. Some usual meanings of the term include:
- Any English comedy, typically written during the reign of James I (1603-24) set in London and depicting ordinary London life.
- London comedies that are specifically satirical in nature, depicting London as a hotbed of vice and folly; in particular, some of the comedies of Ben Jonson (Volpone, Epicoene), Thomas Middleton (A Trick to Catch the Old One, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside) and John Marston (The Dutch Courtesan').
Among the earliest City Comedies are Ben Jonson's "Every Man Out of His Humour" and Thomas Dekker's "The Shoemaker's Holiday," both dating from 1598. . The genre soon became very popular; the intricately plotted romantic comedies of Shakespeare and John Lyly that had been in vogue on the public and private stages until this point were largely superseded by plays which were set in a recognizable contemporary London, and which dealt with, in Ben Jonson's words, "deeds and language such as men do use" (Prologue to Every Man in his Humour).
Other notable examples of the genre are Chapman, Marston and Jonson's "Eastward Ho!," Dekker's "The Honest Whore, Parts 1 and 2," and Massinger's "A New Way to Pay Old Debts."
The city comedy can be considered a forerunner of the comedy of manners.
Famous quotes containing the words city and/or comedy:
“I don’t wanna live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.
Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“The difference between tragedy and comedy is the difference between experience and intuition. In the experience we strive against every condition of our animal life: against death, against the frustration of ambition, against the instability of human love. In the intuition we trust the arduous eccentricities we’re born to, and see the oddness of a creature who has never got acclimatized to being created.”
—Christopher Fry (b. 1907)