| Combining philosophical and cultural materialist analyses, this dissertation examines the skeptical energies of Ben Jonson's and Thomas Middleton's city comedies. These comedies turn on epistemological issues, such as the relations between desire, knowledge, power and commerce, and consequently generate skeptical critiques of modes of social perception and structures of knowledge within a specifically urban reality. For both playwrights, the rapidly expanding world of Jacobean London was a world of appearances. For Middleton this world of appearances constitutes a field of conflict shaped by commodity forms and commercial mentalities. For Jonson the world of appearances is more tightly circumscribed and intense but always situated within an exchange economy that threatens the possibility of a world overrun by appearances, utterly ungrounded in being. Middleton's plays derive their dramatic energy from time and contingency, parameters of performativity that Middleton manipulates to skeptical effect. Time and contingency are central elements in Jonson's dramaturgy, but so too is space, including the space of the theater, which serves as a paradigm for Jonson's explorations of the various malleable epistemological spaces at the heart of his plays: Volpone's bedchambers, the fashionable world of London's West End, Subtle's alchemical laboratory, and Bartholomew Fair. Both playwrights are also concerned with self-fashioning through commodification, most notably in Volpone and Michaelmas Term, in which the commodification of self restructures perception, memory, and even historical knowledge. The ad hoc nature of the plays' skepticism works on the edges of specific, ideologically freighted discourses, reproducing their forms to expose their functionality, critiquing their production as knowledge through performance and power. Volpone deconstructs Plato's idea of a utopian society. Michaelmas Term delegitimates the notion of birth on which ideologies of social hierarchy were founded. Epicoene, a seemingly trivial play, explores the function of humanist learning in a status-oriented world. A Trick to Catch the Old One dramatizes the hollowness of conventional moral paradigms. Alchemy, apocalypse, romance and theater are the targets of The Alchemist. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside works within patriarchal ideology to tease out its paradoxes. Bartholomew Fair stages the perverse dynamics and impossible epistemological projects of various ideologies of nationhood. |
