‘The City is a great Theatre.’How is the city represented in Renaissance Comedy?

The city, and especially London, was reinventing itself rapidly due to vast changes during the Renaissance period. Urban life was one of considerable change for many reasons; new development in science, rapid technological advancement, cataclysmic urban growth, mass social movement and ever expanding world capitalism. A series of bad harvests and market fluctuations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries irreparably damaged the old land based economy by bankrupting smallholders, whose land was then gathered up into larger estates. There became a myth which surrounded London as individuals poured into the city believing urban life had something wonderful to offer which rural life did not, and that there is the possibility of making ones fortune, and discovering a whole new experience and way of life. However it appears that there is an almost fantastical disillusion surrounding the myth of London, as its duplicitous nature is revealed with the emerging modern society: ‘The city is...