Mapping city comedy: Topographies of London and the anomalous woman, 1599--1625 (England, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, Lording Barry)

In this dissertation, I argue that the genre of city comedy attempts to define what writers at the turn of the seventeenth-century perceived as an increasingly ambiguous London. It does so by "mapping" the city, both literally and figuratively. The plays trace London's topography both within the City's jurisdiction (the incorporated area largely within the City walls) and without, staging and alluding to specific streets, buildings, churches and markets, in an attempt to create a coherent city out of what writers of the period perceived as increasingly disparate areas. Beyond this literal mapping, however, the plays also figuratively map the city onto the bodies of "anomalous" women---the roaring girl; the honest whore; the cosmeticized, fashionable woman---characters who challenge traditional categories of women. Early modern literature had long personified the city as a woman: topographers figured the City as a contained, orderly matron; satirists associated the unruly suburbs with the excesses of the whore. The anomalous woman, however, did not fit these traditional categories of identity, and I argue that it was this lack of definition which made her a useful figure to playwrights of city comedy in their attempts to imagine a London which they also perceived as no longer fitting traditional expectations regarding what a city should look like, or how it should function. Chapter One examines Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday; Chapter Two analyzes Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl; Chapter Three examines a series of plays by Dekker, Middleton and Lording Barry which feature the figure of the honest whore; and Chapter Four analyzes Ben Jonson's Epicoene. While these plays present widely differing accounts of London, I argue that what they have in common is their "mapping" of London, a "mapping" which attempts to make the city readable and knowable to their audience, even as it admits to the impossibility of that project.