Comedy
Big Willy Shakespeare may have put English comedy on the map but, Ben Jonson is famous for being one of the younger 16th-17th Century playwrights who came along and helped reshaped the genre into something new and different.
Rather than write old school romantic comedies with happy endings about people who lived in faraway places (like, say, Twelfth Night), Jonson was into whipping up satiric comedies that poked fun of contemporary London society.
These days, scholars usually call plays like The Alchemist "city comedies" or "citizen comedies."
What exactly is a "city comedy" you ask? And does Broad City count as one?
Well, literary critics (like Alexander Leggatt and Brian Gibbons) have written entire books on the subject and scholars are always bickering about how to define it so, we've broken it down into a nifty list of things that seem most characteristic of the genre. [Sources: Alexander Leggatt's Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (1973) and Brian Gibbons' Jacobean City Comedy (1968)]
City Comedy Checklist
Written at the end of Queen Elizabeth I's or the beginning of King James I's reigns:
So, no: Broad City doesn't count. But The Alchemist definitely does. Jonson wrote The Alchemist in 1610 during the reign of King James I (a.k.a. the Jacobean era). But he was already writing city comedy toward the end of the Elizabethan era. (Around 1598 or 1599, he wrote a play called Every Man Out of his Humour.
Set in—you guessed it—the city of London:
City comedies are set in the kinds of streets, shops, and homes that would have been familiar to Jonson's original audiences. This entire play goes down at a house in the Blackfriars district of London. By the way, we're pretty sure Jonson's original audiences loved this because that's the same neighborhood where the play was first staged in 1610. (More on this in "Setting.")
Satiric and mocking tone:
Why was it so important for Jonson to set the play in contemporary London? So he could bag on everyone living in the city at the time, of course.
In other words, The Alchemist is all about poking fun at contemporary London society. Most of the characters in this play are greedy, hypocritical, immoral, and/or just plain foolish. (We talk about this a whole lot more in "Tone" so head over there if you want to think about this some more.)
Depicts lives of ordinary middle class or lower class folks:
You did notice that the stars of our show are a servant, a prostitute, and a poor conman trying to make a few bucks off of people who have extra money to spend, right? No kings or dukes to be found here.
Many of this play's victims are middle class folks like Dapper (a law clerk) and Drugger (a shop owner). Sometimes city comedies like to pit lower or middle class characters against aristocrats. In The Alchemist, Subtle, Face, and Doll seem to have the most fun when they punk Sir Epicure Mammon, who's a knight.
So, why does this matter? Because a lot of popular 16th and 17th Century stage plays (like Shakespeare's Hamlet) are all about the lives of aristocrats, royalty, etc. Sure, there might be some lower class figures in these plays but they're mostly minor characters. In other words, Jonson was trying to do something new.
Money makes the world go round:
So, in 1610 England's social and economic structures were changing pretty quickly—capitalism was emerging and Europe saw the rise of what we now call the middle class.
Unlike aristocrats who inherited all their wealth and land, members of the middle-class worked for a living and were mostly merchants and businessmen in commerce and maritime trade—and they were making pretty good money at it.
According to city comedy writers like Ben Jonson, the social and financial structures of capitalism are the perfect breeding ground for greed and corruption. Like we said, in The Alchemist, our three shady con artists are out to make a few bucks off of greedy characters— they're especially interested in ripping off rich widows like Dame Pliant and greedy dudes like Mammon.
Lots and Lots of Sex:
City Comedies tend to be pretty bawdy. (If you don't believe us, go read what we have to say about this play's "Steaminess Rating.")