2. Sexual Disguise and Social Mobility in Jacobean City Comedy

Abstract

In its representation of love and sexuality, Elizabethan romantic comedy is not concerned with the problematic enactment of social and sexual roles in the institution of marriage. Rather, it concen­ trates on the complexities of eras, dramatized as sexual desire seek­ ing and finding fulfillment in the heroes ' successful resolution of the process of courtship. In contrast, Jacobean city comedy brings into the light of representation precisely those dissociations and contradictions in English Renaissance sexual ideology which ro­ mantic comedy evokes but seeks to reconcile and contain . 1 Jaco­ bean satire, or city comedy, is a genre designed to dramatize the complex process of conducting economic and social relations in a newly forming urban environment. As is well known, city com­ edy as such began in the late 1 590s with Ben Jonson's humor plays, achieved recognizable generic conventions by about 1 605 , and thrived during, roughly, the first decade of the seventeenth cen­ tury, when dramatists perceived the city of London as the setting in which those conflicts caused by the political, religious, and eco­ nomic upheavals that transformed Renaissance England were being enacted most intensely. 2