Witty City Boys: Urban Masculinity and Citizen Gallants in The City Wit, Greene’s Tu Quoque, and The City Madam

Abstract

he activities, services, entertainments, and goods available in earlymodern London were not enjoyed and consumed exclusively by the gentle classes. t Nor were wit, ingenuity, and performative prowess—pinpointed by critics as London-based competencies—the exclusive purview of London’s gentlemen gallants. Nevertheless, the dominant narrative offered by seventeenth-century plays, a narrative reinforced by decades of literary criticism, emphasizes the London gentry, and particularly young urban gallants, as the primary consumers of London culture and holders of London-based cultural capital. As this narrative goes, when citizens do engage in the pleasures on offer in London or display sophisticated wit and London-based knowledges, they do so aspirationally, as a means of finding or cementing their place among the urban gentry. This dominant narrative is not, of course, inaccurate, but it is incomplete. In “Witty City Boys,” I work from the premise that culturally valued London-based competencies did not belong solely to the elite; more specifically, I argue that they were an integral element in the emergence of a youthful urban masculine ethos that was adopted by youngmale Londoners of both citizen and gentle rank. To young citizen men, the status such cultural capital accrued was by no means always linked to class mobility; on the contrary, select seventeenth-century London comedies present young citizen men who display pride both in their citizen status and in their urban sophistication. To these characters, urban competencies are part of their identity as citizens; they are not ameans of transcending their class and climbing into the gentry. These characters suggest that a keen understanding of and ability tomaneuverwithin London’s sophisticated cultural pleasures and complex social relations was an achievement of an urbane masculine status, a form of gender status that could be and was increasingly delaminated from class, even while class awareness and pride continued to be salient elements of early modern English identity.