City comedy  

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City comedy, also called Citizen Comedy, is a common genre of Elizabethan drama. It is a vague term that different scholars use to mean slightly different things. Some usual meanings of the term include:

The first city comedy is generally agreed to be Englishmen for My Money, written by William Haughton and first performed in 1598 by the Admiral's Men. The genre soon became very popular; the intricately-plotted romantic comedies of Shakespeare and John Lyly that had been in vogue on the public and private stages until this point were largely supeseded by plays which were set in a recognisable contemporary London, and which dealt with, in Ben Jonson's words, "deeds and language such as men do use" (Prologue to Every Man in his Humour).

Other notable examples of the genre are Westward Ho, Eastward Ho, Northward Ho, and Greene's Tu Quoque.

The city comedy can be considered a forerunner of the comedy of manners.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "City comedy" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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