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

HEATHER C. EASTERLING Parsing the City: Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, and City Comedy's London as Language. New York: Routledge, 2007. 197 pp. £60.00. Reviewed by Trish Thomas HenleyAs many historians and literary critics have noted, the popularity of the Jacobean city comedy results in part from the comedies' representation of the possibility of social transformation. The city comedies are intriguing in their ambivalence toward the stock characters that inhabit these plays. On the one hand, the plays expose the crass consumerism and reprehensible amorality of these city types. On the other hand, these comedies celebrate the wit and ambition of these gallants, whores, and city merchants. In Parsing the City: Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, and City Comedy's London as Language, Heather C. Easterling argues that these conflicted reactions can be found not only in relation to these London stereotypes, but also in relation to the very language they speak. Easterling's book explores the ways in which the genre of the "city comedy not only represents but interrogates the language of Jacobean London in plays that regularly stage the city precisely as language or languages" (1). In the world of early modern London, where someone's rank is increasingly difficult to ascertain at a glance, language becomes a locus of the anxiety about class-climbing, while it simultaneously exists as an additional avenue to obscuring one's own origins. Easterling examines how the city comedies reflect early modern ambivalence toward the vernacular. Applying several different methodologies to her topic, the author traces the way in which the vernacular represents London's apprehension about the types of people who inhabit London and even about England's place in Europe. In addition to materialist studies of the city comedy, Easterling looks to what she calls "non-literary frameworks concerning language" (8). Of particular interest to the author are two branches of socio-linguistic studies: the first involves descriptive linguistic surveys tracing early modern culture's delight and anxiety about its expanding vernacular; the second concerns gender and language.Parsing the City consists of an introduction and four chapters. The first chapter outlines the linguistic milieu of Jacobean England, and each of the other chapters interrogates a single play's representation of city as language. Chapters 2 and 4 focus on Ben Jonson's plays, and address Epicoene and Bartholomew Fair respectively. Chapter 3 considers Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl, exploring themes similar to those considered in relation to Jonson's work.Easterling begins her first chapter by examining various texts in which anxiety about containment and order is prominent. She connects early modern debates about the English vernacular's place in the linguistic hierarchy with the "problem of encompassing the increasingly urban world of London in the same period" (17). In these debates, Easterling reads "a trope of the particular copiae of seventeenth-century London" and finds a preoccupation with words "as much the root as the symbol of the society's sense of proliferation and fragmentation" (17). Following on Jean Howard's reading of the city comedy as a genre that both rehearses the problems of city life and offers up solutions, Easterling contends, "Jacobean city comedies are self-conscious responses to their society's coincident preoccupation with proliferation and with language" (18).One sign of a Jacobean preoccupation with the culture's burgeoning language is the concerted effort in this period to provide taxonomies for the vernacular. Around the same time that city comedies reigned on the stage, writers struggled with ordering their language through lists, glossaries, and tables. In the section dealing with such taxonomic texts, Easterling relies heavily on Juliet Fleming's work on gender and early dictionaries. Fleming has noted that many early dictionaries were constructed as works that might appeal especially to female readers. …