Introduction §1 So full of japes is The Dutch Courtesan that it is unclear whether Marston meant his audience to take any part of it seriously. Relying on quick entrances and exits, plus a number of costume changes, Marston has Cocledemoy dress variously as a barber, a French pedlar, a servingman, a bellman, and a […]
Category: Research Essays
City Comedy and Material Life: Things in The Dutch Courtesan
§1 Take a moment to imagine yourself amongst the audience for this play at the Blackfriars theatre, a few years into the reign of James I. You might be a wealthy merchant playgoer, dealing in the commodities on which London’s prosperity was based and sensitive to the value of things. The city outside the theatre […]
Northern barbers and fallen women: The Dutch Courtesan and the 1604-5 repertoire
§1 James Shapiro’s engaging study 1599 encouraged us to think about a single year as a moment in early modern experience that we might zoom in on and unpack in specific ways. If we apply these ideas to a repertoire as opposed to a year, a repertoire stretching across the years of 1604-5, to which […]
City Comedy across the Channel. Commerce, Charity and Carnival in the Comedies of Bredero
§1 City comedy is often viewed as inextricably bound to the dizzying growth and transformation of London in the later sixteenth century. Yet elsewhere in Europe, too, urbanization, immigration and the development of a capitalist market economy produced an intense fascination with the city in all its colourful complexity. The Spanish Brabanter (1617), a comedy […]
‘Go your ways for an Apostata’: religion and inconstancy in The Dutch Courtesan
§1 In Act two, scene two of Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, a distraught Franceschina turns on her bawd, Mary Faugh, exclaiming: ‘God’s sacrament, ten tousand divels take you! You ha’ brought mine love, mine honour, mine body, all to noting!’ (2.2.6-8). For the audience, Franceschina’s distress is undercut by Freevill’s pre-emptive mocking: in the preceding […]
Imagining Marston, or, If Shakespeare is the Beatles, Marston is the Kinks
As Horace, Lucilius, Iuuenall, Persius & Lucullus are the best for Satyre among the Latines: so with vs in the same faculty these are chiefe, Piers Plowman, Lodge, Hall of Imanuel Colledge in Cambridge; the Authour of Pigmalions Image, and certaine Satyrs; the Author of Skialetheia. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia §1 Francis Meres’s book Palladis […]