The City Wit
Critical Introduction1Brome’s early comedy The City Wit is funny, politically edgy, dramaturgically assured and very fast paced. The City Wit demonstrates that, from very early on in his playwriting, Brome was capable of accomplished and theatrically intelligent writing; however, the theatrical strengths of this play mean that it needs to be read with performance in mind. A scene such as the beating of Sir Andrew Ticket while he dangles from a rope in mid air (5.1.) is always going to be far more effective in performance than on the page. And while The City Wit avoids literary sophistication, complex characterisation, lyrical poetry and elegant phrasing, what it offers instead is a plentiful supply of robust comic business, classic gags, and roller-coaster plotting. Brome’s city farce delivers many laughs across four centuries, while it belts out jokes targetting Caroline politics, and it deploys cartoonish characters in a staggering display of convoluted plotting, counter-plotting and witty theatrical citation.2The panache of Brome’s dramaturgy in The City Wit can be seen in the very opening scene. The stage population statistics are impressive: eleven major characters are effectively and efficiently introduced in this scene. By the end of the first act, the audience can feel they have a good grasp of what is going on and Crasy has been flagged as the central character, the character who will speak to the audience and with whom they will travel through the play. This skilfully sets up the slight of hand that lies behind the play’s coup de theatre in its closing moments: the audience are completely misled into keeping their eyes on Crasy and not watching what Crasy’s rather put-upon apprentice, Jeremy is getting up to.3The cleverness of the multiple plot lines is appropriate for a play declaring its interest in wit in its title. Wit is a central issue and most characters are over-confident that they are wittier, cleverer, cannier, better at plotting, and better at play acting than the other characters onstage. In the Caroline period ‘wit’ could encompass a variety of meanings: cleverness; intelligence; genuine intellectual ability; wisdom; cunning; the ability to perpetrate practical jokes or scams; and the ability to produce a telling turn of phrase. The fact that the word also features in several play titles of the period (for example, Wit at Several Weapons;n11146 No Wit No Help Like a Woman’s; and Brome’s own lost play Wit in a Madness)n11148 suggests that self-aware wittiness was marketable. According to Martin Butler, two main brands of wit, Fletcherian and Middletonian, can be seen to be operating in Caroline drama:Fletcher’s city comedies begin to deal more obviously with London’s leisured classes and develop an interest in ‘wit’ as a social value (‘accomplishment’ or ‘breeding’) as opposed to the ‘wit’ of Middleton’s heroes which represents their capacity to swindle.n111494The particular interest in rapacious or swindling wittiness, wit with a hard, brilliant edge to it, is certainly one of the aspects of The City Wit that evokes Middleton.5The City Wit also deploys wit in negotiating with its audience: the prologue (probably Sarpego) indicates that he thinks he is the eponymous hero, the character who is The City Wit; he comments that it is ‘I that bear its title’ although, in fact, Sarpego is the very first character to be outwitted by Crasy in disguise in 2.1.. However, the prologue also strategically flatters the audience: he assumes they have wit and will judge the play appropriately: ‘And exercise your judgement with your wit,/ On this our comedy’. Having softened the audience up by complimenting them, The City Wit then plays a game of wits with the audience which is only resolved when Jeremy reveals his identity at the end of the play.6All the characters are judged according to what appears to be their level of wittiness or otherwise. Thus Crasy is initially despised by most other characters because of his lack of wit or foolishness in lending out money without sufficient security, that is, acting with generosity rather than with caution. Crasy is advised, very explicitly, by his brother-in-law, Toby, that he should ‘Purchase wit, get wit, look you, wit’ [CW 1.1.speech110]. Crasy then demonstrates his real wittiness by conning money out of everyone and he claims the title of ‘city wit’ for himself: ‘Gentlemen, if any of you want money, gentlemen, here stands a city wit that has it. I have it, if you want any’ [CW 5.1.speech939]. Here Crasy systematically throws back at each character, in turn, their lack of generosity towards him at the beginning of the play, often indeed quoting their very words of rejection back at them. Crasy’s claim to the title of ‘city wit’, however, is made just moments before Jeremy proves he can outdo Crasy in wittiness, and astounds everyone, including Crasy (and probably quite a few members of the audience) by the revelation that he has been playing the role of Widow Tryman.7Other characters also delude themselves into thinking they have wit. Pyannet judges she is being witty when she thinks she is about to outwit and deceive people (especially the mysterious duke, ‘His Grace’, who supposedly wants to buy jewels from Crasy) but when things begin to go wrong she declares ‘my wit begins to be out of countenance’ [CW 4.1.speech554]. Even Josina, Crasy’s wife, might be seen as a contender in The City Wit stakes; she certainly gains more than most from the shenanigans of the plot, despite being exposed as attempting multiple adultery (three assignations in quick succession in one night). At the beginning of the play Josina is married to a failure, a bankrupt who is despised by everyone. By the end she has found out she is actually married to someone who has wit, who can roleplay with great skill, who can improvise, and who can woo her in many guises. And Josina’s response to being caught perilously close to in flagrante delicto is a classic witty response: she simply tells her husband she knew it was him all the time and was playing along with his games.8Wit is a subject under comical scrutiny in other Brome plays but the play which links up particularly with The City Wit over this subject is The Court Beggar. This play not only displays a variety of different kinds of wittiness in its action, but underscores this by naming a group of characters, Master Courtwit, Master Swaynwit and Master Citwit. But it is important to note that The City Wit also discerns that wit can be a ‘poison’ [CW 5.1.speech828], which, as Crasy comments, ‘feeds me’; this suggests not only that wit can become contaminating morally, but it might also include an addictive element. And in the closing moments of the play as Crasy outwits everyone, and then Jeremy outwits Crasy, there is a competitive element, a crowing over the victims, even if the victims do not end up losing their money, which is a long way from the generosity that supposedly got Crasy into trouble in the first place. Richard Cave comments that The City Wit reveals Crasy as someone whose ‘generosity lays him open to cynical manipulation by the people he thinks he is helping. He recovers his lost fortune only by being a “wit”, that is by robbing his former “friends”’ and, like The Antipodes, the play uses ‘strategic inversion’ ‘where generosity is equated with folly and wit with sly cunning as a commentary on the worldly ways of early Caroline London’.n11161 What is left open is the extent to which Crasy is wiser by the end of the play, or more morally compromised. At the beginning of the play Crasy delivers a diatribe against composition [CW 1.1.speech23] or coming to an agreement by means of negotiating, bargaining, conceding (moral) ground. His lofty moral stance in 1.1. seems a long way from his position at the end of the play, when he hardly even rebukes his wife for her attempted adulteries, and when the audience have seen him carry out so many scams; this opens up the possibility that Crasy has in fact been contaminated by wit.9One important aspect of wit in The City Wit is that the witty are streetwise, able to survive in the tough environment of sharks and sharp practice that is the City of London. Darryl Grantley comments that ‘central to the notions of “wit” that were becoming prominent in the theatre’s preoccupations [in the Caroline period] was the representation of London as the essential locus for the culture in which [wit] flourished’.n11162 However, the brand of wit that is needed to survive in the city also helps emphasise another major dynamic in the play: the town versus country dynamic, something which many Caroline Londoners knew about from personal experience. The really witty characters can move between lifestyles: Jeremy-as-Tryman plays a Cornish widow as well as a London whore. But Pyannet wants to shake off her country origins (her husband Sneakup was until recently a grazier [CW 1.1.speech44]) and, having moved to London only three years ago [CW 1.1.speech46], Pyannet is eager to move close to the centre of operations, the Court. The scene in which she instructs her husband on how to behave at court takes the audience in, room by room, to that inner sanctum of court, the King’s Presence Chamber. While no real life Pyannet or Sneakup could make this journey with the degree of ease imagined here, there is bizarre comedy as the arriviste Pyannet enacts journeying closer and closer to the royal holy of holies. The fact that Pyannet’s countrified origins are still obvious is something that is used to insult her in the row between her and the urban Lady Ticket, and Sarpego’s prologue to the Lady Luxury play in 5.1., not entirely tactfully, addresses, and thus marks out, the countrified Pyannet and courtly Lady Ticket: ‘right country dame and courtly lady’ [CW 5.1.speech916]. Tryman insults her newlywed husband Toby by calling him a country gentleman [CW 5.1.speech921] but earlier, when Tryman was more Cornish widow than brawling London whore, she had it put about that she was ‘removed from the country into the city to avoid the multiplicity of country gentlemen that were her suitors’ [CW 2.3.speech239]. In performance this tension might additionally be marked by the use of accents, gesture and deportment. Martin Butler comments ‘In several Caroline plays, the country is [… ] ridiculed in a figure who has come to London and failed to reproduce society’s good manners’ and the main point of satire is to ridicule the character in question ‘not for his rusticity but for his lowness and his attempt to clamber into a higher rank than he deserves’.n11163 However, in The City Wit, the country is indubitably somewhere everyone is leaving behind: even Crasy’s sojourn to the country to recuperate his fortunes is a myth, a cover for his entirely London-based series of scams. At the same time London is hardly realised in convincing detail in this play. ‘Place realism’ is something that has attracted critical commentary in relation to Brome but such realism is vestigial in The City Wit:n11164 Brome may throw in a few real place names but he does not worry about creating much of a sense of London. Indeed most scenes are indoors and there is no precision in the use of location: for example, 4.1. shifts anti-realistically from street to indoors without missing a beat. The one location that is evoked with care, ‘The Presence’ (that is, the Presence Chamber at Whitehall), is summoned up in terms that for the original audience would have seemed slightly surreal, as they would have been only too aware that personages such as Sneakup and Sarpego would not be able to wander into this chamber.n1116510What is perhaps most confrontationally anti-realistic about the ‘Presence’ sequence is that, outrageously, the assertive, talkative and unruly woman, Mistress Pyannet, here impersonates the King, Charles I. It is difficult for modern audience to access the sheer audacity (as well as silliness) of what is going on here in the way that the original audiences would have done and the political loading for audiences for the revival in c.1637 would have been even more marked. Women could not act professionally at the time, let alone impersonate the reigning monarch. Pyannet’s taboo-breaking performance here helps indicate why the character is one of the star parts of the play. The way Pyannet dominates the stage whenever she is on it, and the sheer fun involved in witnessing her let rip (rather than being on the receiving end of one of her tirades) is phenomenal, although, of course, the joke is misogynist.n11166 The subtitle of the play, ‘The Woman wears the Breeches’ indicates where much of the comic energy is coming from: both Pyannet and Tryman are fun to be with but are misogynist: a talkative woman (and mother-in-law) is a joke per se and the most interesting ‘woman’ in town is actually a boy. While identity politics in relation to gender in The City Wit are not enlightened by today’s standards, however, there are, at least, plenty of opportunities in the play to think about the constructed nature of gender, and the fact that Tryman is a boy dressed up as a woman, reflects on the original performances of all the female parts by males. At the end of the play the talkative magpie woman who has worn the breeches in the Sneakup marriage submits fulsomely to her usually silenced husband. Patriarchal norms appear to be enforced; however, the moment might also permit some reflection on how this marriage works because Sneakup does not grasp the opportunity to assert his mastery, and, as it were, seize the breeches with both hands. He may, of course, be silenced by his happiness at Pyannet’s submission but in this play of versatile roleplay it possible that Brome might be glancing at the possibility that a married couple can work together with an arrangement of dominance and submission that subverts the patriarchal desideratum of husband dominating wife. The fact that a central ‘female’ character in The City Wit is also called ‘Tryman’ really raises the stakes in terms of gender debates: what is a man or manly behaviour, how can this be tried or tested, and is all gender merely performed? Without turning Brome into a proto Judith Butler, it is reasonable to suggest that the revelation of Tryman’s true gender is not merely a narrative and visual coup de theatre but also a confrontation of gender stereotyping: everyone who has fallen for, and been convinced by, the performance of Tryman is invited to review their gender (tunnel) vision. This theatrical effect would be difficult to achieve in a modern performance, where different norms on casting according to gender operate compared with those operating in the Caroline playhouse; however, a Brechtian production or one that cross cast gender in a seemingly arbitrary way, enabling an audience to accept the convention that gender was being performed artificially, could work. The theatrical environments that the play would struggle to work in are Realism and Naturalism.11One advantage that Jeremy has in playing Widow Tryman is that, possibly through his brother Crack’s acquaintance with the players [CW 3.3.speech459], he has the right costume. A great deal of Tryman’s appearance would consist of her costume, which could cover up a great deal of her body, enabling the masculine to appear feminine. Jeremy has a reasonable gap between his exit in 1.2. and his appearance as Tryman in 3.1. and if he gets into a widow’s costume, particularly a demure, countrified (Cornish) old fashioned, all-covering outfit, with wig and headdress, then he has less work to do to carry off the role of widow. The other character who uses costume effectively is Crasy who has a series of quite spectacular changes of costume (lame soldier, Doctor Pulse-Feel, Master Holywater, Footwell), some of which are very fast. Because in the Caroline period costume could say a lot, quite precisely, about a character in a way that it does not now, particularly in terms of class, realistic impersonation might not have been so critical as getting the costume signifying correctly. However, Crasy’s initial costume is also important, and has to be registered by the audience as appropriate to a jeweller, a citizen, but one in straitened circumstances, because not only does Crasy then abandon that costume for most of the play, until his final entrance, but the same costume must be at least half plausibly adopted by Sneakup when he disguises himself as Crasy to go to court. Wearing roughly the same outfit, but crucially wearing the right signifiers such as the citizen’s flat cap would be very important here. Crasy’s costume as Doctor Pulse-Feel also has to be assumed by Rufflit in 5.1. enabling Josina and Bridget to believe he is Pulse-Feel and to beat him. Matthew Steggle comments on The City Wit’s ‘obsession with the arbitrariness of costuming and disguising’ but much of this would have worked more effectively in the first performances where the audience were used to dealing with sumptuary laws and reading costume as precise indicators of social status or profession.n11167 Only actors were legally allowed to wear clothes that were different from those appropriate to their precise social standing.12One area where costume would have been particularly important in the original performances is as an indication of class status and this helps to point to another major dynamic in the play, class hostility. This is particularly noticeable in the relationship between Crasy and the courtiers Rufflit and Ticket. One question likely be posed by modern actors looking at the role of Crasy is why exactly did he lend out all that money, especially to two so self-evidently untrustworthy scoundrels as the courtiers Rufflit and Ticket? The answer might simply be that the narrative requires it; or that Crasy is truly generous, a Timon at the beginning of Timon of Athens, although such a Timonesque desire to lend, and to give, borders on what post-Freudian psychology would term compulsive. But when Crasy-as-Footwell questions the courtiers individually about how they feel about Crasy, some naked class hatred is expressed: Rufflit says [CW 5.1.speech809] ‘And he were not a citizen I could pity him’, grounding his lack of sympathy for Crasy indisputably in class. Ticket, in a brief soliloquy at the end of 4.1. [CW 4.1.speech654], says of Crasy:He would invite courtiers, stand bare, say grace, make legs, kiss his hand, serve us in perfumed linen, and lend us money upon out words, our bare words.13Ticket’s problem with Crasy seems to be his envy of Crasy’s (then) financial resources combined with his lower (than Ticket’s) class status: Crasy is in some ways humble and other ways presumptuous, an unsettling mixture for a courtier with no money like Ticket, who appears insecure in his own class identity. Alongside Crasy’s showiness in the, for example, ‘perfumed linen’ that aggravated Ticket, there is also the interesting issue of the costuming of Crasy’s wife, Josina. Ticket and Rufflit both attest to Crasy’s eagerness to dress up his wife as a fashionable creature, something which, according to the courtiers, is one reason they are so keen to pursue Josina: they feel her husband has put her on offer by dressing her as he does. Crasy, according to Rufflit [CW 4.1.speech620] kept Josina ‘always exquisitely neat, temptingly gallant, and, as a protested cuckold should do, above his degree and means sumptuously proud’. Crasy is described here as an active agent in the dressing up of Josina as an emblem of his wealth and class aspirations, and this carries a challenge to a low level courtier such as Rufflit. While, for Alfred Harbage, Josina is attempting ‘to employ her own husband (disguised) as pimp and paramour’, Crasy has been asking for trouble by costuming and displaying Josina as an object of sexual desire to passing gallants.n1116814The self-conscious deployment, and discussion, of costuming in The City Wit is one thread in a much larger motif running through the play: metatheatricality. It is hard to find a play by Brome that does not have an entertaining, thoughtful and revealing moment of metatheatre, an episode shedding light on playhouse practice alongside a sometimes surreal spin on the craft of creating theatre. The City Wit offers a meditation on theatre by means of its use of the themes of counterfeiting and performance; the discrepancy between appearance and reality especially in relation to costume and disguise, plus several demonstrations on, for example, how easy it is to whip on and off a stage beard.n11169 The most overtly metatheatrical moment in The City Wit comes in the Lady Luxury play in 5.1., where, from the vantage point of the ending of the play, the audience can appreciate that Lady Luxury is played by a boy actor playing an apprentice (Jeremy), playing a London prostitute (Doll), playing a Cornish widow (Widow Tryman), playing a London whore and playing the role with such gusto that some in the audience are forced to reconsider their whole understanding of theatre. Pyannet protests to Tryman, ‘Methinks you overdo it too much [CW 5.1.speech922]; and Toby is worried ‘I am afraid she’ll play the whore better than I shall act the fool’ [CW 5.1.speech918]. The Lady Luxury play is an odd mixture: there is a element of an old-fashioned morality play, with characters named Lady Luxury, the Prodigal and the Fool; there’s a hint of commedia dell’Arte (‘it should be done after the fashion of Italy, by ourselves, only the plot premeditated to what our aim must tend. Marry the speeches must be extempore’ [CW 5.1.speech879]; and private theatricals (a woman is playing a role, something which happened in Italy, and in aristocratic households, but not on the public stage in England at the time). The play morphs into ‘reality’ as Crasy, dressed as ‘the Prodigal’, enters and halts the play-acting by revealing all, only to discover that he does not know all there is to reveal. However, The City Wit in general suggests, if nothing else, that a lot of characters (like people) are play-acting a lot of the time; and that performance is not only part of everyday life, but that it can be disturbingly addictive, like the ‘poison’ of wit that Crasy detects in 5.1. [CW 5.1.speech799]. When Crasy applauds Jeremy for his acting, and his demonstration that an apprentice jewel merchant can ‘pass’ as a rich middle-aged widow (and even get married), he does so in very odd terms: ‘Well, give me thy hand, I will love thee as long as there is swiftness in meditation, smoothness in flattery or constancy in malice’ [CW 5.1.speech963]. The praise here suggests the skill Jeremy has displayed is morally unsettling and, of course, Jeremy’s deception does strike to the heart of what made critics of the playhouse nervous; he shows that is possible for appearances in relation to class, age, wealth and gender to be completely deceptive. It seems significant that in the flurry of happy endings stitched together in the final moments of the play (Bridget and Crack have not even been seen together by the audience so their impending nuptial comes as a real surprise) there is no attempt to contain Jeremy by a happy-ever-after ending. Sarpego may be promised marriage and ‘a fitter match’ [CW 5.1.speech970] than Bridget, but Jeremy is left unassimilated, technically still a free and radical agent, still calling Crasy ‘sir’ [CW 5.1.speech 969] as if he is still his apprentice although it is impossible to imagine him returning to a career as a trainee jewel merchant. Meanwhile Josina and Crasy are left in a marriage which is not represented realistically but which could suggest that a marriage might work well even if it is based not on morality, or fidelity, but rather on role play, on dressing up in different costumes, on performing.Provenance and dating15Most commentators place the first performance of The City Wit as between 1629 and 1631. G.E. Bentley’s hypotheses have been widely accepted and so it is worth looking at these in some detail. Bentley argues that the second half of the prologue indicates thatthe performance is a revival on the authority, not of the players, as was usual, but of the author. Such a distinction implies that the original performance was not given by this company. The last two lines indicate that the original performance was given in the boyhood of the prologue actor, and that they might be interpreted to mean that the performance had taken place in this same theatre. The line about the approval of Ben indicates that the play was written before Jonson died, in August 1637, and it would seem to imply that Jonson was dead at the time of the revival.n1117016Bentley also argues that The City Wit was a boys’ company play:The unusually large number of characters who are boys or women -eight- and the importance of their roles suggest that the comedy was written for a boy company, since adult companies presumably would not have had enough competent boys for the parts.17So Bentley’s hypothesis is:The City Wit was one of Brome’s earlier compositions for the King’s Revels company at Salisbury Court, a theatre which they first occupied in 1629[…] In this case, the revival would have been a production of Queen Henrietta’s men, who performed at the Salisbury Court with Brome as their poet 1637-9.n1117118Some years after the publication of his monumental The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, Bentley looked at the Salisbury Court and its company in more detail.n11172 Citing documents that indicate the company around 1629-32 was functioning as a boys’ troupe and a training ground for the King’s Men, Bentley’s work indicates that, if The City Wit were written for boys to perform, then the Salisbury Court theatre is the likely venue of its premiere.19Some areas of Bentley’s argument, however, stand up less well than others. The number of women’s and boys’ roles, for example, could be counted as: Pyannet, Josina, Bridget, Lady Ticket, Jeremy/ Tryman, and Crack, all of whom appear in the final scene and so cannot be doubled. However, the other two female roles, the keeping women, Joan and Isabel, who only appear to attend on Tryman in her supposed illness in 3.1., could easily be doubled. Bridget, Lady Ticket and Crack do not appear in 3.1. and any of the boy players in these roles could play the keeping women. This means six, not eight, boy players are needed. Bentley also argues that ‘The large number of songs written for the part of Crack suggests that Brome has an unusually good singing-boy in mind when he wrote the play’.n11173 While Crack might well be written for a virtuoso boy, it is also worth noting that a really good singer, belting out show-stopping numbers, would hold up the farcical plot of The City Wit and work against the fast pacing that is needed in much of the play. An instructive comparison can also be made here with The Northern Lass, a play very close in date to The City Wit. The female characters in this play are: Audrey Fitchow, Constance (the eponymous Northern Lass), Trainwell, Constance Holdup, and Flaps, and four of these are meaty roles.n11174 A good singer is needed for the role of the Northern Lass, Constance, and the play seems in many ways comparable to The City Wit. But this play, according to its title page, was performed by an adult company, the King’s Men at the Globe and Blackfriars.20Bentley has many followers as far as dating and provenance are concerned. Kaufmann is one follower although he refines the date to ‘between early 1630 and December, 1631’;n11175 he also argues that ‘several comic allusions to size, dignity, etc. [… ] suggest boy actors’.n11176 The main butts in terms of the references to size are Sarpego, who does not need to be played by a boy actor, merely someone who is short of stature, and Crack, who would be played by a boy anyway (although a boy who can credibly get married to Bridget at the end of the play).n11177 More recently Martin Butler has taken the same tack as Bentley, adding that ‘It is easy to see this kind of play as an attractive component in the repertoire of a lively boys’ troupe’ and he picks out as particularly suitable for boy players the play’s ‘loosely episodic construction’ which ‘show-cases a series of comic turns’ and the fact that ‘there is a part with eleven songs for a witty singing boy’ (Crack).n11178 Crack, however, is an extremely whimsical character: not every song he is given to sing needs to be warbled beautifully. Indeed, some of his songs might be delivered as rather offhand, even as proto-Brechtian, and his bawdier songs seem unlikely to offer moments of lyrical beauty.n1117921One suggestion about dating that Bentley rejects is Fleay’s idea that 1629 might be the year of The City Wit’s first performance ‘on the evidence of a ballad entitled ‘The Woman would wear the Breeches’ which was entered in the Stationer’s Register, 26 November 1629’. The ballad is lost and Bentley comments ‘since the title is proverbial, the ballad and the play may be unrelated’.n11180 The title is indeed proverbial, as Tilley indicates, but Tilley’s listings all circle around the notion of a woman/ wife wearing breeches in a marriage; not that many of Tilley’s examples come as close to The City Wit’s subtitle as the title of the lost ballad does.n11182 1629 is also a significant date in Katherine Wilkinson’s discussion of The City Wit’s explicit reference to Robert Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit [CW 1.1.speech9], a text that was reprinted in 1629.n1118122Healthy scepticism over the generally accepted dating and provenance of The City Wit is expressed by Matthew Steggle and he, in my view very reasonably, points out that:Given that the other three of the four plays known to have been written by Brome about this date - The Love-Sick Maid, The Northern Lass, and The Novella - were all certainly King’s Men plays, one should perhaps be reluctant to assign [The City Wit] to another company without good reason.n1118323If The City Wit were written for the King’s Men then Brome would have had a mix of adult and boy players in mind and there is certainly nothing in the play to suggest that a mixed company could not perform the play. On the question of dating, Anton-Ranieri Parra has also bucked the dominant trend and argued for 1632.n1118424There has also been some discussion of the possibility that The City Wit was revised for the (undocumented) revival in the late 1630s. Catherine Shaw argues that ‘Similarities between The City Wit and The Damoiselle (and also The Court Beggar, which followed in 1640) suggest that the play was not only revived by the author in the late 1630s but also revised’.n11185 In reality the only section of text which can firmly be linked to this period is the Prologue, on account of the reference to Jonson which seems to postdate his death in 1637.Sources25Discussion of sources can, of course, contribute to arguments about dating, as the date of the source material may help narrow the range of dates available. However, the problem with The City Wit is that it has so many possible sources: in some ways the play functions as a dramatic anthology of the best stage gags of the last thirty years, a clever patchwork of jokes, and a trip down memory lane for the audience. This has resulted in some writers finding evidence of Brome’s lack of inventiveness in the play, but Brome displays great wit in The City Wit in reanimating comic dramatic moments from previous theatrical successes, and, as it were, remixing them. For those who knew their Jonson, a moment such as the sudden revelation of Tryman's true gender could actually work better if the audience recognises, and laughs at, the allusion to Epicoene. The skill with which the play cites / quotes from / revisits earlier plays, especially plays by Jonson, taps into the kind of humour that is commonplace in the witty citations of post-modernism, but which, when ‘originality’ is taken to be the (unexamined) gold standard, can of course seem to be wanting.26Jonson’s plays in general are clearly a source for The City Wit and Brome would have known Jonson’s plays extremely well. The most obvious Jonsonian source is The Alchemist and, as Crasy, Tryman and Crack agree to work together, The Alchemist is overtly referenced [CW 3.1.speech394]: they will work ‘By venture tripartite and’t please you, like Subtle, Doll, and Face’.n11186 Another Jonsonian echo in 3.1. is Tryman’s sickbed, which evokes Volpone with its legacy hunters and fake illnesses.n11187 The Devil is an Ass, especially in terms of the device of a young man impersonating a woman, might also be seen to be part of the Jonson remix. The fact that Jeremy shares his name with Face/ Jeremy in The Alchemist is important but, as a stock witty servant figure, he looks back to Brainworm in Every Man In His Humour as well as to the witty servants of commedia dell’Arte and the servus of Roman comedy.n11188 Richard Cave comments of Brome’s evocations of Jonson that ‘Brome’s intertextual referencing is both a gesture of respect for his mentor and a way of drawing attention to his working a variation on a proven comic device’; after all, if Brome were ‘plagiarising’, or trying (to use modern terms) to get away with stealing intellectual property, why would he refer explicitly to The Alchemist?n1118927Jonson might also be a source for The City Wit in a less conventional sense in that he was the master and Brome was his ‘man’, and the most significant relationship in The City Wit is between the master and the man, Crasy and Jeremy.n11190 In the poem Jonson contributed to the 1632 edition of The Northern Lass he speaks of his relation with Brome in terms of an apprenticeship: Brome has gained ‘good applause’ By observation of those comic laws
Which I, your master, first did teach the age.
You learned it well, and for it served your time
A prenticeship, which few do nowadays.28The apprentice Brome, like Jeremy, outwits his master in the marketplace of wit that is theatre-making, and Alexander Brome’s verses for A Jovial Crew indicate that Jonson felt rattled:Thy luck to please so well: who could faster?
At first to be the Envy of the Master [i.e., Jonson].29When Brome puts a servant at the heart of his plotting in The City Wit, as Matthew Steggle comments, his playwriting becomes ‘unusual for his class perspective, since very few early modern writers represent servants from a position of first-hand experience’.n11191 Steggle also argues that Brome’s servant figures often ‘provide, in a sense, a moral centre to the plays’; Jeremy is hardly a moral centre in The City Wit, but his decision to exact comic revenge on those who abused his master’s kindness is portrayed as a positive.n1119230The City Wit has also been seen as looking back to the city comedies of Thomas Middleton: R.J.Kaufmann describes it as ‘a good London comedy in the Middletonian manner’.n11193 Certainly a play such as A Mad World My Masters shares common ground with The City Wit: for example, the dramatic device of a man dressing as a woman; a feigned sickness scene; a courtesan figure tricking rich men out of money and seeking a marriage. Clarence Edward Andrews compares Widow Tryman and the courtesan in A Trick to Catch the Old One:n11194 plot devices common to both plays include a hero beset with debts; an unchaste woman posing as a rich widow and being pursued by suitors; the extortion of money from an eager bridegroom on the grounds of a previous pre-contract to someone else. This might just indicate that The City Wit, like many of Middleton’s comedies, is part of the sub-genre of citizen comedy that was so very popular in the early modern period, but Joe Lee Davis argues for a very specifically Middletonian ancestry for Crasy:Crasy is obviously straight out of Middleton, suggesting Master Easy of Michaelmas Term, Witgood of A Trick to Catch the Old One, and Follywit of A Mad World My Masters.n11195 31The City Wit also shares Middleton’s particularly mordant take on the obsession with cash that both drives characters and ruins them (often morally if not financially). In addition the Shakespeare play that The City Wit is most often linked to is the play many now accept Shakespeare wrote with Middleton, Timon of Athens. Echoes of Timon include fairly precise verbal echoes, such as [CW 4.1.speech618]; the predicament of the hero who has given out money so generously that he has bankrupted himself; and an overall obsession with money and material things.32Another play frequently cited as a source for The City Wit is Westward Ho! by Thomas Dekker and John Webster.n11196 Dekker contributed a commendatory poem to the 1632 quarto publication of The Northern Lass and in this poem describes Brome as ‘my Son and Friend’, with the term ‘Son’ suggesting an acknowledged influence by Dekker on Brome’s writing. Westward Ho!, like The City Wit, centres on a London merchant, Justiano, with financial problems, and a wife who has lovers in the offing. Justiano announces he is leaving London (for Germany) but actually stays in London, assumes a series of disguises and keeps an eye on his wife and her associates. He also at one stage dresses up as his wife. Another citizen comedy source might be William Haughton’s late 1590s play, Englishmen for My Money, or A Woman Will Have Her Will. The sub-title is much in sympathy with that of The City Wit, and the play shares with The City Wit the device of a man disguised as a woman, a city of London location, and a comic hoisting incident (one character is suspended mid air in a basket as a punishment for his presumption in wooing). Then again, The Duchess of Malfi is clearly a source for Josina’s byplay with her handkerchief at the end of 1.1., when she is attempting to seduce Jeremy, but the change of context from a Duchess wooing her steward with the intention of marrying him, to a merchant’s wife seeking casual adulterous sex with her husband’s apprentice is bathetic and comic. This is a joke, not an attempt to use someone else’s work without anyone noticing. Perhaps what is most interesting about the long list of plays that have been offered up as sources for The City Wit is that many of them belong to a much earlier period, twenty to thirty years previously, and while some of these plays continued to be played in the 1620s, some of them would have become almost historical.33The impressive gallery of plays that might be seen to be sources for The City Wit undoubtedly, for some time, encouraged the discounting of Brome as a dramatist: instead of admiring the wit with which Brome puts a new spin on old scenarios, some commentators worried about the derivative nature of his work. Clarence Edward Andrews comments that Brome ‘succeeded purely by imitation’ and while conducting something of a defence of Brome risks damning him with faint praise when he suggests he should be ‘ranked second or third in the third period, the decadent period of Elizabethan drama’, even though succeeding ‘by imitation’ could be turned around and seen as witty citation.n11197 After listing a whole range of possible (and a few unconvincing) debts to Jonson, Edwards concludes:Brome’s imitation is not a completely servile copying. His plays are the work of a man who learned playwriting by being apprenticed to it as a trade, just as he might have learned carpentry. He followed his master’s methods, and applied them to his own pieces of work with much skill and intelligence, but without much literal plagiarism and without any originality.34Here Edwards misses the ‘originality’, and the wit, of Brome’s remixing. But while remixing is something twenty-first century audiences are much happier with, they are less likely to have Jonsonian drama as a major point of reference.35One source that has not been discussed in enough detail in relation to The City Wit is Brome’s own work, The Northern Lass. While The Northern Lass cannot be demonstrated unequivocally to predate The City Wit, it is likely that the two plays were written close together; possibly at the same time or in quick succession. While the narratives of the two plays are very different, there are a lot of shared joke structures and, throughout his career, Brome was a great recycler of successful material. Common ground includes the interest in a mature woman who talks, according to her culture, too much and who wants dominance over men or to wear the breeches: Pyannet and in The Northern Lass, Fitchew also want very much to rise socially, are obsessed with titles, and think it odd that women should take their husband’s name. Fitchew and Pyannet both scheme outrageously but are defeated by men’s machinations and patriarchal order is restored: in the meantime, however, both these characters are very entertaining.n11206 The City Wit and The Northern Lass both present prostitutes as perfectly acceptable helpers when scheming to obtain a happy ending, and helpers who deserve a reward for their trouble plus sympathy for wanting to leave a career in prostitution behind. The whore in The Northern Lass, the false Constance, also has to be a fine actor and has to do lots of very virtuoso accent work: she ranges across Cornwall, northern England, and also London, which is close to Jeremy’s range in The City Wit. The town versus country dynamic is very obvious in both plays as is an interest in presenting Cornishness. Both plays have a marriage which is regretted as soon as it is legal, which is not consummated, and which ends in happy divorce. The marriages in question are celebrated by a masque performed by people who have a vested interest in the wedding not working out. Both plays have fun with the device of the foolish man and his tutor/ mentor (Toby and Sarpego in The City Wit; Widgeon and Anvil in The Northern Lass). Toby and Widgeon are both stupid young men conned into marrying a ‘whore’ when they are desperate to marry someone rich. Sarpego is a pedant and Anvil is a miles gloriosus and while they are different stock characters, boasting or showing off is very much something both characters do; both use extravagant language, both are cowards and both help out in the wedding masque. Servants are strong and engaging characters in both plays; there are a fair number of characters impersonating other characters (in The City Wit, Sneakup impersonates Crasy; Rufflit impersonates Doctor Pulse-Feel; in The Northern Lass ‘Constance’ (the prostitute) impersonates Constance The Northern Lass; one servant impersonates the doctor, another servant impersonates a gentleman usher and, indeed, impersonating doctors is a common thread). There is a lot of fun to be had in both plays at the expense of characters trying to learn how to carry on in social circumstances more elevated than those they are used to (Pyannet instructing Sneakup; Toby instructing Linsy-Wolsey in The City Wit; in The Northern Lass lessons in being a gentleman usher or how to ‘hand’ ‘Constance’). So much common ground might suggest Brome was writing both plays at the same time; however it is also possible that having had a success with The Northern Lass, he used his own play as a source for The City Wit.Critical History36The earliest critical responses to The City Wit are implicit in the play’s stage history: clearly the play was considered relatively successful as it was played after the Restoration, and George Powell must have found something to admire in the play in order to suggest the idea of adapting it as A Very Good Wife. The changes Powell made offer a commentary on the play in relation to the theatrical taste of 1693, the time of the adaptation, how The City Wit might appeal to this taste, and what had to be omitted or recast. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, in writing Some Account of the English Stage, John Genest commented of The City Wit: ‘this is a very good C.[omedy]’, and he believes that it is Crasy’s ‘honesty and good nature’ that have got him into trouble initially.n11207 Algernon Swinburne’s essay on Richard Brome offers a more substantial critique of the play as:well conceived, well constructed, and well sustained. The conception, if somewhat farcically extravagant in outline, is most happily and ingeniously worked out; and the process or progress of the comic action is less broken, less intermittent, more workman like and easier to follow, than in most if not in all of the author's preceding plays. Even where the comic types are far enough from original, there is something original and happy in the treatment and combination of their active or passive humours.n11208 37Swinburne is arguing for a more positive appreciation of Brome’s dramatic craftsmanship in a period when Brome’s frankness about sex (‘’Tis done in three minutes’ [CW 5.1.speech810]) and his fondness for ending comedies with divorces rather than marriages would not endear Brome to mainstream Victorian theatre audiences. However, well into the twentieth century Brome continued to be seen as a ‘Lesser’ dramatist or as a representative of ‘Dramatic Decadence’.n11209 A change of direction was signalled by Clarence Edward Andrews, writing in 1913, who was able to see The City Wit as a comedy of manners, and ‘a very good play, modeled on the type of The Alchemist’, with Pyannet as ‘a very good caricature of a shrew’.n11210 T.S. Eliot famously opined that ‘Brome deserves to be more read than he is’ but did not seem to feel that seeing the plays in the theatre might also help in reassessing Brome’s work.n11211 Later the historian, C.V. Wedgwood, writing in 1955 about Caroline comedy, argues: ‘Take away the impossible intrigues and the ingenious entanglements, and a whole society with its petty pleasures and preoccupations starts into life from the pages of these comedies’.n11212 Wedgwood mentions The City Wit specifically as an example of a play ‘written on the theme of successful dishonesty’ but leaves open the question of the moral of the story.n11213 Other writers have been less reticent and have detected both Brome’s moral stance and his politics. In 1961 R.J. Kaufmann published a monograph on Richard Brome, which includes an appreciative critical appraisal of The City Wit, but his reading of the play is very inflected by his view that Brome was a political conservative, someone lamenting change, and yearning for the good old days.n11214 Kaufmann feels confident that: ‘Brome doggedly retained a clear-headed, consistent conservatism which he employed (at times imaginatively and always competently) as an intellectual basis for selecting, organizing, and dramatically rendering his primary social protest against an emergent set of attitudes which we now recognise as the basis for the modern world’.n11215 This enables Kaufmann to see Crasy as a fairly unequivocal hero, ‘a city type who is alienated from the city’s assumptions’ (that is, the Greed-is-Good mantra) and Crasy’s dilemma is that, unlike most Londoners, he ‘has both a problem and a conscience’.n11216 For Kaufmann The City Wit is dominated by ‘a single question - how the economic dishonesty generally acquiesced in is to be reconciled with personal responsibility’ and this ‘is the organizing principle of the action as well as of the character relationships’.n11217 He is also clear that the ending is a ‘triumph’ for Crasy and that Brome demonstrates ‘his point that honesty and fair dealing are not the product of weakness but of an attitude superior to mere skill in achieving economic success which, he argues, is merely a kind of virtuosity in deception’.n11218 Kaufmann finds The City Wit ‘solid, coherent, unified, and, in a rather boisterous way, amusing’.n1121938An antidote to this view of Brome and The City Wit is suggested by the work of Martin Butler.n11220 Butler does not actually discuss The City Wit in detail in his seminal work Theatre and Crisis 1632-1642 because the play’s first performance is outside the parameters of his study; however, Butler’s construction of Brome as an oppositional playwright, the antithesis of Kaufmann’s view, enables The City Wit to be seen as a complex play that is sometimes intensely critical of Charles and his court. This view of Brome as oppositional makes sense of the scenes evoking, and making fun of, the Presence Chamber with its rules and regulations about how to behave (3.2., 3.4.)39Catherine Shaw, in her 1980 monograph on Brome, sees The City Wit as ‘one of Brome’s best social satires’, and she is confident that Crasy is the moral centre of the play, ‘the instructor of sound moral principles’.n11221 She sees the play not as ‘just another “coney-catching” drama’ but ‘more within the tradition of the moralities; in addition to mocking the wayward, it also brings the erring to judgment and reform’.n11222 However, there is very little evidence of reform in any character except for Pyannet, and, in dramatic terms, the reform of Pyannet is disappointing as it renders her (and Sneakup) far less entertaining. Given the cultural moment of Shaw’s monograph, 1980, with a new awareness of identity politics entering the mainstream of much criticism, it is disappointing to find the misogyny of the play completely uncontested; Shaw is unequivocally pro-Crasy and anti-Pyannet. Pyannet is castigated as ‘a loquacious shrew, an indiscriminate lecher, and a ruthless social climber’ (although Josina provides more evidence of lechery than Pyannet); and Crasy ‘voices generous human dealings’ while Pyannet ‘voices the self-oriented dogmas of the city climber who, though comic, can be vicious’.n11223 Shaw does not comment on Crasy’s sexual history which, given he believes Tryman’s story that they had sex about London Wall [CW 3.3.speech455], presumably includes casual sex with prostitutes. Shaw also does not comment on the possibility that Crasy might be tainted by his proficiency in perpetrating witty scams, even though he himself is worried about the lethargy he slumps into as he obtains more and more money [CW 5.1.speech799]. Shaw concludes ‘The difference between Crasie [sic] and his mother-in-law is clear - one is a healthy contributor to the human state and the other, the “maggot-pie,” an unhealthy parasite destroying the host upon which she presently feeds’.n11224 But, theatrically speaking, Pyannet is funny, full of energy, and memorable; Crasy, before he embarks on his career of witty deception, risks being rather theatrically dull. Shaw also discusses Crasy as a realistic character creation (he has ‘verisimilitude’); he is ‘Brome’s mouthpiece and the norm for human behaviour’; the ending demonstrates his enactment ‘of the principles of honesty and generosity’.n11225 This is an optimistic, covertly political reading of the play.40In the following year, 1981, Kathleen McLuskie offered a rather more acerbic and overtly politically engaged reading of The City Wit. McLuskie points to the political conservatism of the play: ‘Crasy’s frenetic activity and protean changes of disguise are directed to maintaining the status quo, to restoring by witty means what he could not retain by honest ones’.n11226 McLuskie views Crasy’s ‘moralizing over the ingratitude of his creditors’ as ‘so intrusive as to appear parody, the more so in its change from prose to verse’ [CW 5.1.speech799].n11227 Finally, the ending with its ‘un-Jonsonian geniality recalls the older public theatre traditions of Dekker and Heywood’.n1122841In 1992 Ira Clark’s Professional Playwrights included a section on Brome which found him to be a playwright with a ‘persistent concern with Caroline sociopolitics’, a ‘subversive traditionalist’.n11229 Clark finds Crasy ‘typical of Brome’s ambivalent presentations, for he proves both that gulls are not necessarily witless but perhaps generous, and he demonstrates that citizens can be selflessly forgiving’.n11230 This sentimentalised reading of the ending complements Clark’s rather heightened reading of Crasy and Josina’s marriage: Crasy is ‘Torn by his jealous love of his compliant wife’. However, this is hardly Crasy’s tone when he comments to Jeremy [CW 1.2.speech127] ‘Boy, didst never observe at the court gate that the lord was no sooner off from his horse back but the lackey got up into the saddle and rode home?’ or, indeed, when he jokes to Josina, in relation to her hopes of having sex with Ticket and Rufflit, ‘but one hand in a glove at once’ [CW 4.3.speech724].n1123142Katherine Wilkinson, in the introduction to her online edition of The City Wit, can also find a moral in the play: ‘Brome exposes the corrupt heart of society in The City Wit, at the centre of which is money. However, Brome also shows that there are other approaches, as honesty, through the use of wit, wins’.n11232 Rather more astringently, Matthew Steggle comments of the ending of the play: ‘The courtiers have been beaten, but the system they represent […] is still very much alive’, and then, placing the play in terms of its historical context, Steggle suggests audiences might ‘conclude that the abuses depicted in the play need to be addressed by more than just the individual: they might need the attention of the monarch whose presence is conjured up, but incompletely, by the scene at the centre of the play’ (that is, 3.2.).n1123343Richard Cave also finds something unsettling in The City Wit; Crasy, ‘the naïve idealist is educated in the ways of the world’ something which ‘renders him wealthy but profoundly melancholy’.n11234 Cave finds in Crasy’s self-questioning speech, where he admits his conscience troubles him [CW 5.1.speech799], a sense of ‘moral decline’, and concludes ‘Crasy has to better the immoral at their own games, whatever the cost to his own values in the process’.n11235 Meanwhile the audience, Cave argues, ‘stand enlightened, but aware that the consequence for [Crasy] was an enervating disillusion’.n11236Stage history44As argued above (see dating), the first performance of The City Wit was probably around 1629-31; a revival possibly took place after Ben Jonson’s death in 1637. If the play was performed at the Salisbury Court theatre (see above) where the stage was not large, the significant number of crowd scenes would have been a challenge.n11237 The play requires two levels for 5.1., the beating of Ticket whilst he is suspended in mid air. It also requires a table and a bed. Most of the scene setting, however, is done by means of costume and speech.45The first recorded performance of The City Wit dates from 1661, when Anthony Wood’s diary documents two performances in July of that year, in Oxford. By 1693 The City Wit had been adapted by the actor George Powell, who published his adaptation as A Very Good Wife: John Genest fulminated ‘this is a moderate C.[omedy] by Powell - the greater part of it is taken from Brome - even the dialogue is frequently copied verbatim - the characters of Courtwitt - Mr. and Mrs. Sneaksby - Aminadab [Toby] - Jeremy - Crack and Hickman [Linsy-Wolsey] are borrowed from The City Wit’ while ‘much less’ is taken from The Court Beggar, ‘some’ from Shirley’s Hyde Park and ‘some’ from Middleton’s No Wit No Help like a Woman’s.n11238 While Powell’s adaptation does take many sections wholesale from The City Wit, he also makes significant changes. The world of the play is elevated socially; in particular, Crasy becomes Courtwitt, (Powell’s own role), who, as his name suggests, is a courtier. It is Sneaksby (Sneakup) who sells jewels, and who is merchant class, not Courtwit. Josina becomes Annabella and a wife of impeccable morals: the dramatis personae spells out that she is ‘A very vertuous Woman’. Annabella leads on several gallants, dresses as a man, and even gets engaged to a widow, but this is all done all in the name of restoring her husband’s fortunes. The revelation of Jeremy’s disguise as a woman has relatively little impact at the end of the play because the focus is so squarely on Courtwit and the virtuous Annabella (although this vision of marital harmony only serves to emphasise how absent such wedded bliss is from Brome’s play). While some robust humour is retained, such as the beating of the Ticket character, Squeezewit, the earthier jokes are not.46Like Jonson’s Epicoene, The City Wit has to be rethought for any post Restoration performance in which roles are cast according to gender: once women could perform on the English stage, the denouement of the play had to work differently. The three most recent productions of the play have all been student productions, and student theatre is one theatrical environment where unconventional gender casting is more often seen than in mainstream, commercial theatre. A production in which roles are conspicuously not cast according to gender allows the central joke to stand a chance of working, even though it cannot work quite in the way Brome would have envisaged for his all- male cast.47In 1991 the RADA graduating students presented The City Wit, directed by Gordon McDougall. Although the script was very significantly adapted by McDougall, who also added some songs, The City Wit seemed to him to be ‘the perfect play for that moment.’n11239 He comments:Every small firm in Britain was on the verge of bankruptcy - there was corruption everywhere, in industry, big business, - especially the City and the banks, parliament - Maxwell had just fallen off his yacht (used in the final song - The rule of the City’s a code we all know - Me First). Suddenly here was a play almost 400 years old which described a witty way of getting back at the sharks who foreclose on you - and offering a wonderful Face-like part for a young actor to play five characters.48In reviewing The City Wit, Michael Billington (Guardian 20 February 1992) commended the strong cast, headed by Jonathan Wrather as ‘the Protean hero’, Crasy, Luzita Pope ‘as his lascivious wife and George Beach as his cross-dressing apprentice’. For Billington the adaptation was ‘buoyant’ and The City Wit was treated ‘as the Serious Money of its day’, whilst ‘Mixing period detail with modern lyrics about the pervasive influence of “money, sex and power”’.49Director McDougall recalls:some of the students had great difficulty with the language and making the words their own. A number of them had difficulty with my way of working (having to get the show up in four weeks, I had no time for the deeply improvised Stanislavski approach they’d been trained in, and started blocking on about the third day of rehearsal - which shocked them profoundly.I think the play worked really well: it got a lot of laughs and was staged with aplomb. It had a lovely deep set which allowed a lot of eavesdropping and simultaneous action, very speedy delivery. The design style was early 17th century as interpreted by grunge. The theme music was I’m Too Sexy by Right Said Fred.50Virginia Grainger, as Pyannet, was memorable and used a light northern English accent, drawing on British sitcom archetypes such as Patricia Routledge’s Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances, or Mollie Sugden’s Mrs Slocumbe in Are You Being Served.n11240 The Tickets were played by black actors Chris Colquhoun and Grace Mattaka, while Crack was played by actress Rachel Power.51The City Wit was again performed by graduating acting students in 2007, when Kim Durban directed a production at the Academy for Performing Arts, Ballarat.n11241 This production played a reasonably full text, although it did cut the prologue. The action was set in the 1970s glam rock music business and the Presence became the equivalent of securing a backstage pass to meet one of the super-stars. The production was cross-cast in an unpredictable way and this helped the Jeremy/ Tryman joke to function well. Crack was performed by three ‘Crack girls’, who were slightly hallucinatory and slightly Cabaret meets Clockwork Orange with a dash of Brecht. This production played both to student-dominated audiences in Ballarat and an academic audience from the International Brome conference: not surprisingly, the student actors found that academics and students laughed in completely different places (with students reacting more to sight gags and contemporary jokes, disastrous fashion statements etc., while the academics laughed at the footnote jokes that were mostly ignored by the student audiences).52Later in 2007 a production of The City Wit took place at Royal Holloway, University of London which reduced the play to a running time of an hour and a quarter and swapped the play’s title and subtitle around: the play became The Woman Wears the Breeches or The City Wit. This production was in modern dress, 1980s style, but with Caroline ruffs and collars:n11242 Pyannet was dressed as Margaret Thatcher and wielded a handbag. Crack was played as slightly tipsy, a version of Johnny Depp’s creation of Jack Sparrow in The Pirates of the Caribbean. Crasy played off the audience with great verve, allowing them the pleasure of seeing the actor as well as the character.n11243 Points of reference for the students working on the production included the films The Sting and Ocean’s Eleven. The main cutting was around the Ticket and Rufflit narrative, partly because the thought of attempting to stage the beating in mid-air was so daunting. Another major cut was anything to do with the Presence, as the jokes here were considered something a contemporary student audience would not be able to access. This consideration also resulted in the prologue being cut. At the end of the play when Crasy promised to give back all the money that was not his, the victims of his scams immediately brightened up and descended on him stripping him of the gold chains and jewellery hanging around his neck. He was left onstage with nothing, whilst Jeremy and Crack stared at him in disbelief that anyone could be so stupid twice over.n11244
n11146 Wit at Several Weapons;
n11148 Wit in a Madness)
n11149 Middleton’s heroes which represents their capacity to swindle.
n11161 ‘where generosity is equated with folly and wit with sly cunning as a commentary on the worldly ways of early Caroline London’.
n11162 ‘central to the notions of “wit” that were becoming prominent in the theatre’s preoccupations [in the Caroline period] was the representation of London as the essential locus for the culture in which [wit] flourished’.
n11163 ‘not for his rusticity but for his lowness and his attempt to clamber into a higher rank than he deserves’.
n11164 ‘Place realism’ is something that has attracted critical commentary in relation to Brome but such realism is vestigial in The City Wit:
n11165 wander into this chamber.
n11166 the joke is misogynist.
n11167 precise indicators of social status or profession.
n11168 sexual desire to passing gallants.
n11169 stage beard.
n11170 it would seem to imply that Jonson was dead at the time of the revival.
n11171 performed at the Salisbury Court with Brome as their poet 1637-9.
n11172 and its company in more detail.
n11173 ‘The large number of songs written for the part of Crack suggests that Brome has an unusually good singing-boy in mind when he wrote the play’.
n11174 meaty roles.
n11175 ‘between early 1630 and December, 1631’;
n11176 ‘several comic allusions to size, dignity, etc. [… ] suggest boy actors’.
n11177 (although a boy who can credibly get married to Bridget at the end of the play).
n11178 (Crack).
n11179 unlikely to offer moments of lyrical beauty.
n11180 ‘since the title is proverbial, the ballad and the play may be unrelated’.
n11182 the lost ballad does.
n11181 a text that was reprinted in 1629.
n11183 good reason.
n11184 also bucked the dominant trend and argued for 1632.
n11185 ‘Similarities between The City Wit and The Damoiselle (and also The Court Beggar, which followed in 1640) suggest that the play was not only revived by the author in the late 1630s but also revised’.
n11186 ‘By venture tripartite and’t please you, like Subtle, Doll, and Face’.
n11187 with its legacy hunters and fake illnesses.
n11188 Roman comedy.
n11189 The Alchemist?
n11190 Crasy and Jeremy.
n11191 ‘unusual for his class perspective, since very few early modern writers represent servants from a position of first-hand experience’.
n11192 kindness is portrayed as a positive.
n11193 ‘a good London comedy in the Middletonian manner’.
n11194 A Trick to Catch the Old One:
n11195 A Mad World My Masters.
n11196 Thomas Dekker and John Webster.
n11197 seen as witty citation.
n11206 both these characters are very entertaining.
n11207 into trouble initially.
n11208 active or passive humours.
n11209 ‘Dramatic Decadence’.
n11210 ‘a very good caricature of a shrew’.
n11211 ‘Brome deserves to be more read than he is’ but did not seem to feel that seeing the plays in the theatre might also help in reassessing Brome’s work.
n11212 ‘Take away the impossible intrigues and the ingenious entanglements, and a whole society with its petty pleasures and preoccupations starts into life from the pages of these comedies’.
n11213 Wedgwood mentions The City Wit specifically as an example of a play ‘written on the theme of successful dishonesty’ but leaves open the question of the moral of the story.
n11214 the good old days.
n11215 the modern world’.
n11216 ‘has both a problem and a conscience’.
n11217 ‘is the organizing principle of the action as well as of the character relationships’.
n11218 ‘his point that honesty and fair dealing are not the product of weakness but of an attitude superior to mere skill in achieving economic success which, he argues, is merely a kind of virtuosity in deception’.
n11219 ‘solid, coherent, unified, and, in a rather boisterous way, amusing’.
n11220 Martin Butler.
n11221 ‘the instructor of sound moral principles’.
n11222 ‘more within the tradition of the moralities; in addition to mocking the wayward, it also brings the erring to judgment and reform’.
n11223 ‘voices the self-oriented dogmas of the city climber who, though comic, can be vicious’.
n11224 ‘The difference between Crasie [sic] and his mother-in-law is clear - one is a healthy contributor to the human state and the other, the “maggot-pie,” an unhealthy parasite destroying the host upon which she presently feeds’.
n11225 ‘Brome’s mouthpiece and the norm for human behaviour’; the ending demonstrates his enactment ‘of the principles of honesty and generosity’.
n11226 ‘Crasy’s frenetic activity and protean changes of disguise are directed to maintaining the status quo, to restoring by witty means what he could not retain by honest ones’.
n11227 ‘so intrusive as to appear parody, the more so in its change from prose to verse’ [CW 5.1.speech799].
n11228 ‘un-Jonsonian geniality recalls the older public theatre traditions of Dekker and Heywood’.
n11229 ‘subversive traditionalist’.
n11230 and he demonstrates that citizens can be selflessly forgiving’.
n11231 ‘but one hand in a glove at once’ [CW 4.3.speech724].
n11232 ‘Brome exposes the corrupt heart of society in The City Wit, at the centre of which is money. However, Brome also shows that there are other approaches, as honesty, through the use of wit, wins’.
n11233 ‘conclude that the abuses depicted in the play need to be addressed by more than just the individual: they might need the attention of the monarch whose presence is conjured up, but incompletely, by the scene at the centre of the play’ (that is, 3.2.).
n11234 ‘renders him wealthy but profoundly melancholy’.
n11235 ‘Crasy has to better the immoral at their own games, whatever the cost to his own values in the process’.
n11236 ‘stand enlightened, but aware that the consequence for [Crasy] was an enervating disillusion’.
n11237 significant number of crowd scenes would have been a challenge.
n11238 No Wit No Help like a Woman’s.
n11239 ‘the perfect play for that moment.’
n11240 Are You Being Served.
n11241 Kim Durban directed a production at the Academy for Performing Arts, Ballarat.
n11242 This production was in modern dress, 1980s style, but with Caroline ruffs and collars:
n11243 Crasy played off the audience with great verve, allowing them the pleasure of seeing the actor as well as the character.
n11244 He was left onstage with nothing, whilst Jeremy and Crack stared at him in disbelief that anyone could be so stupid twice over.