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.

Contents

Acknowledgments. Preface. Introduction 1. 'Noise of a Thousand Sounds': Anxious Plenty, Language, and London 2. Epicoene, Women, and the Language of the City 3. Double-Talk and the Canting Cure: The Roaring Girl’s Moll Cutpurse as the City 4. Fair Game: Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, Language, and Play Conclusion. Notes. Bibliography. Index