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MARK S. DAWSON. Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London. (Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories, number 5.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xvi, 300. $80.00

2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 112; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/ahr.112.4.1259

1937-5239

David M. Turner,

Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

Although the divide between the genteel and non-genteel was the most fundamental social division in early modern England, the category of “gentility” is too often taken for granted, assumed to be an unproblematic and self-evident amalgam of wealth and status. Yet, as Mark S. Dawson demonstrates in this meticulously researched and densely argued study, gentility was a matter of intense cultural debate, and subject to rival claims. Rejecting as simplistic historical narratives that see gentility as “increasingly” represented in cultural terms, or the gentry being displaced in political prominence by a “rising” bourgeoisie, Dawson looks instead at what cultural discourses of gentility tell us about social structure and its anxieties in the late Stuart metropolis. The book focuses on the theater as a powerful cultural arena where gentility and its meanings were debated. It begins by reappraising the representation of the cuckolded citizen. Critical of the notion that plays became more sympathetic toward London's commercial elite in this period as an urban “pseudo-gentry” established itself, Dawson correctly demonstrates that the cuckolded citizen (or “cit”) remained a constant figure on the comic stage, as older plays remained in repertoire and even a significant number of new comedies rehearsed this conventional plot. Rather than offering a straightforward critique of social mobility, comedies instead represented cit cuckolds as “figures of lingering social anomaly” (p. 44), possessing the material trappings of elite status but lacking genteel birth and “blood.” Dawson locates the cit plot in the context of the development of commercial capitalism and the culture of credit with the adultery of city wives figuring the market's perceived instability, and with it the shaky foundations of the cit's claims to genteel status based on wealth as intangible and uncertain as his wife's fidelity.