Social Dramas: Literature and Language in Early-Modern England.

How the repeated social tropes and paradigms of the City comedies give us an in-depth look into everyday London society in the early 17th-century.

Although literature is often assumed to belong to the sphere of representation rather than constituting an accurate reflection of social reality, early-modern English drama can tell us much about social attitudes in the early seventeenth century. The City comedies were, in particular, composed by authors who were embedded in the mundane social ex...