“In his gold I shine”: Jacobean Comedy and the art of the mediating trickster
Brunning, Alizon
Early Modern Literary Studies 8.2 (September 2002) / Special Issue 10
Abstract
This essay argues that the Ovid’s description of the Golden Age is both appropriated and transformed in Jacobean City comedy. In Golding’s translation of Ovid material abundance is achieved without the need for labour. In comedy, particularly romance comedy, the imaginative re construction of such bountiful states might be seen to form a sort of wish fulfilment fantasy. City comedy though is predicated not on a nostalgic yearning for past ideal states but on the ‘reality’ of urban life. This ‘Iron Age’ corresponds with the postlapsarian state where God’s injunction that man should labour is keenly felt. However, from a positive perspective, the productive relationship between man and matter might be seen to provide a carnivalesque pleasure, while the mining, trade and venture which are denigrated in Ovid are celebrated in the light of early modern expansion. Labour here can be seen to provide a way of re-creating a new Golden Age. However, while City comedy contains elements of carnivalesque excess and mercantile success, the ‘golden hope’ of many of its citizens is that they can avoid the curse of Adam. Gold, in the form of money becomes the means by which the material cycle of production and consumption can be bypassed. This essay examines the ways in which the trickster figures of such City Comedies as Volpone, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and The Devil is an Ass harness the creative possibilities of money to create wealth without work.
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