| Due to Iberian colonialist expansion, increased English efforts in established trade, and increased domestic production, commodity traffic intensified dramatically in early seventeenth-century London. This proliferation of objects and commodities may be reflected in city comedy, a genre very concerned with topical commodity. The dissertation examines three seventeenth-century plays, Thomas Middleton's tragicomedy The Witch (1613), which shows city comedy elements, Ben Jonson's city comedy Bartholomew Fair (1614) and Philip Massinger's comedy A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625), which returns to the conventions of city comely. Appeal to these plays shows an overriding concern with the social life of objects: objects are in fact more important and more agential than the characters in these plays. In The Witch, Middleton satirizes sugar and other novel imports and shows sugar to be crucially powerful as it drugs, bribes, seduces and even threatens murder. In Bartholomew Fair, Jonson satirizes urban commodity traffic but especially the traffic in clothing and narcotics like ale, beer, wine and tobacco. This flow of commodities, and the commodities themselves, are so powerful that they overwhelm and sweep along the characters in a corrupted urban maelstrom. In A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Massinger engages the entire material world, which he shows as perfectly obedient to the will of God and his aristocracy. Even the tiniest objects move themselves in the service of inherited degree. Taken together, these plays show that objects were crucially important to the early moderns, that objects signified more crucially and in more ways to the early moderns, and that these object manifestations and signifyings can be very exotic to a modern viewpoint. |
