Metatheater in City Comedy with Prodigal Son Plot Structure in Shakespeare’s Time

Abstract

My dissertation is an exploration of theatrical appropriation of prodigality and its economic and moral associations in city comedy written between the 1590s and 1600s. The three plays I discuss have apprentices as protagonists, young men who have not yet achieved the status of freemen citizen, within the prodigal son play’s plot structure. I argue that city comedy with those non-citizens can approach its generic premises through a more critical lens. At the same time, the master-apprentice relationship is similar to that of a father to a son since the artisanal guild served as a small domestic community. Based on this analogy, some city comedy writers adopted the prodigal son play scheme, but with a less conservative outlook. My dissertation considers the affinity of the theater profession and apprenticeship as represented in contemporary Protestant antitheatrical discourse. I argue that by combining the two distinct sub-genres, certain dramatists of Early Modern English city comedy countered the antitheatrical attacks by having the apprentice characters reverse the contemporary criticism of being prodigal, the reason that the theatrical profession was criticized. I analyze the scenes in the three plays that I consider metatheatrical, in which the protagonists reveal the artificiality of the premises of city comedy and the meaning of prodigality. I discuss the transaction scene in The Shoemaker’s Holiday by Dekker between the playful merchant Simon Eyre, with the help of the prodigal Roland Lacy, and a Dutch sailor, as a central event. Although it happens off-stage, the context and the consequences of this transaction reveal how social mobility is achieved through doubtful means, such as taking up someone else’s costume and adopting a verbal disguise. Similarly, the sailing in Chapman, Johnson, and Marston's Eastward Ho! is an event that reflects the theater genre. The failed voyage of the prodigal characters—Quicksilver the apprentice, Petronel the purchased knight, and Gertrude, a citizen’s daughter who marries him—constructs a temporary theatrical space on the ship. Overflowing allusions to contemporary plays accompany the process, and the vision of another apprentice, Slitgut, who presides over the whole stage, provides a metatheatrical perspective that the audience can relate to. In the most metatheatrical work, Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, as the actor characters constantly try to fight the audience characters’ intrusion into the plot, their original plot comes to mirror the fight between the prodigal characters and the characters with everyday logic. Amid the rivalry, one of the central settings for the conventional play, Merrythought’s house becomes a space that reflects theatrical activities. Consequently, the plays redefine the apprentice characters’ prodigality as a theatrical ability, and the transactions they engage in as metatheatrical events. The plays refute the criticism of the apprentice population and the theater professionals for being prodigal, because their transactions involve a considerable amount of work, although they do not produce tangible products.