1st Edition

Parsing the City Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, and City Comedy's London as Language

By Heather Easterling Copyright 2006
    210 Pages
    by Routledge

    210 Pages
    by Routledge

    Parsing the City updates our understanding of Jacobean city comedy’s discursive role in its London society. Working with three major plays by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, this book develops an updated reading of Jacobean city comedy as a dramatic subgenre whose engagement with early modern London was centrally linguistic and semiotic-- its plays staging and interrogating the city as a series of languages and language problems.

    Table of Contents

     

    Acknowledgments

    Preface

    Introduction

    Chapter One: "Noise of a Thousand Sounds": Anxious Plenty, Language, and London

    Chapter Two: Epicoene, Women, and the Language of the City

    Chapter Three: Double-Talk and the Canting Cure: The Roaring Girl’s

    Moll Cutpurse as the City

    Chapter Four: Fair Game: Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, Language, and Play

    Conclusion

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    Biography

    Easterling, Heather