The character of credit and the problem of belief in Middleton's city comedies.(Critical essay)

Emerging in the late 1590s, English city comedies satirized merchant-citizens and gentlemen-gallants alike. Rejecting the idealizing celebration of the London citizen in earlier plays by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood, the city comedy used materializing bathos and frank sexuality to represent the city to itself. Following the rogue pamphlets and coney-catching broadsheets of Robert Greene, city comedies represented a range of notorious character types (e.g., the "tearcat," the "ruffler," the "doxy," the "upright man"), producing a rogues' gallery of tricksters defined by their methods of deceit. (1) But the antiacquisitive humor of city comedies by Ben Jonson. John Marston, and Thomas Middleton sits uneasily with the overt commercialism of the popular playhouses in which they were performed. This essay will suggest how several of Middleton's city comedies apply the logic of the commercial theater to the economic and theological problem of credit in early modern England. In the topsy-turvy world of Middleton's city comedies, it is the self-conscious deceivers who achieve credit, measured less by their honesty or their ability to repay outstanding debt than by their potential to create believable fictions around themselves. This credit has specifically theological connotations, since Middleton integrates a Calvinist process of "reclamation" in his depiction of early modern finance.

Though scholars typically associate city comedies with realism, especially in their focus on economic relations, we should also be aware of the enduring elements of popular romance and New Comedy that allow the genre simultaneously to celebrate and critique urban trickery. (2) Beneath the creaking plots and "cheap conventional intrigue" of Middleton's plays, for instance, T. S. Eliot found "a quiet and undisturbed vision of things as they are ... the same steady impersonal passionless observation of human nature." (3) Characters such as Dampit and Quomodo invoke a world that scholars tend to describe as irredeemably material. (4) Middleton satirizes the gullibility of bankrupt gallants who lose their lands to city merchants, but he downplays the possibility of restoring moral order through the punishment of his tricksters. Instead, his plays favor shifting satire over the stabilizing ballast of classical comedy and its attendant gestures of moral correction, rejecting the types of formal closure that a playwright such as Jonson preferred.

But Middleton's city comedies also differ from those of his contemporaries by applying Calvinist principles of spiritual examination in depicting the necessity of "character" as part of the economic life of London. (5) Plays such as A Trick to Catch the Old One (ca. 1605), Michaelmas Term (ca. 1605), A Mad World, My Masters (1605), and The Roaring Girl (ca. 1609) all feature characters who create believable fictions in order to survive in an expanding credit economy in early modern England. Take the plot of The Roaring Girl, as revealed by Sebastian to his betrothed early in act I:

 
  There's a wench 
  Call'd Moll, mad Moll, or merry Moll; a creature 
  So strange in quality, a whole city takes 
  Note of her name and person: All that affection 
  I owe to thee, on her in counterfeit passion 
  I spend, to mad my father: he believes 
  I dote upon this Roaring Girl, and grieves 
  As it becomes a father for a son 
  That could be so bewitch'd. (6) 

In characteristic speech mixing sex with money, Sebastian outlines his "counterfeit passion" for the "Roaring Girl" Moll--a passion that, if rendered believable, will make Sebastian's father consent to his son's marriage to his secret fiancee, Mary Fitzallard. Sebastian's performance of passion is explicitly theatrical: both character and actor playing that character seek to make an audience believe in their personas. In both cases, success is measured in terms of monetary payment. Middleton employs a specifically theatrical language of playacting, fashioning, and changing "countenance" to depict interpersonal relations as structured by credit and debt. The explicit connection between credit and countenance emerges in the plays, as in this exchange between Witgood and Lucre in A Trick to Catch the Old One:

 
  WITGOOD. You that know my danger i' th' city, sir, so well, how great 
  my debts are, and how extreme my creditors, could not out of your pure 
  judgment, sir, have wished us hither. 
  LUCRE. Mass, a firm reason indeed. 
  WITGOOD. Else, my uncle's house! why, 't had been the only make-match. 
  LUCRE. Nay, and thy credit. 
  WITGOOD. My credit? nay, my countenance: push, nay, I know, uncle, you 
  would have wrought it so by your wit, you would have made her believe 
  in time the whole house had been mine. (7) 

Witgood's main fiction in the play--that he is engaged to a wealthy widow who is really his courtesan--depends on the capacity of such men as Lucre and Hoard to believe in fictional narratives and characters. The passage also plays on the double meaning of credit as both an economic relationship and a form of belief. The associated word "countenance" has a similar compound meaning as both the physical traits of one's face and the figurative content of one's character. (8)