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As Van Fossen defines, city comedy, a sub-genre of Renaissance drama that flourished between the 1590s and the 1630s on London’s stages, “focused to a degree previously unknown in the English theatre on an urban (i.e. London) setting, on middle-class characters, on the present day” (15). Predictably, shops and workshops are the most common settings for their stories, but surprisingly these plays contain as many references to and representations of prisons, especially debtors’ prisons. The juxtaposition of shops and debtors’ prisons suggests that something is wrong with London’s economy and debtors’ prisons are important material and symbolic sites to represent the other side of London’s commercial growth in these texts. Therefore, dramatizations of debtors’ prisons and the lives of those who are incarcerated there provide a way to think about the relationship between the city’s commercial growth and the burgeoning of debt, namely the implications of an emerging credit economy. As Muldrew well shows, the second half of the 16th century witnessed the vast expansion of credit relations in the English society, which is accompanied by enhanced possibilities for default on debt and also for imprisonment. It is a quite new phenomenon and this period also saw the increasing cultural and ideological struggles and debates to understand and deal with this new credit economy. City comedies’ staging of debts and debtors’ prisons differs considerably from one another and it suggests that these plays are part of this ideological struggle. This article aims to examine how city comedies represent and participate in this cultural negotiation about the question of debts and debtors’ prisons by reading Eastward Ho, which is an interesting comedy co-authored by three prominent writers (Ben Jonson, John Marston, George Chapman). I believe Eastward Ho is a good starting point in that this play, while incorporating motifs and narratives that the dominant discourse produced to regulate the new economical and social phenomenon (credit economy) within the old and new moral frame, transforms and subverts them, thereby to produce a new kind of cultural narrative which implies a meaningful insight into the question of credit and credit economy.
