The space of identity and the identity of space in The City Wit by Richard Brome

My paper is about The City Wit (1629-1632), a play by Richard Brome. This city comedy revolves around the trade world, where all the characters aim at social recognition, even trampling on feelings and moral values. Only the protagonist, the bankrupt jeweler Crasy, rejects this view. Like a comic Iago, he uses a series of successful disguises and tricks to regain what he has lost because of his excessive generosity. He succeeds in his objective thanks to his apprentice Jeremy, disguised as widow Tryman, and the servant boy Crack, with whom he revives the Jonsonian triumvirate of The Alchemist. Firstly, I will show how the construction of gender and class relations is implicated in the conceptualizing of space, considering both the impact of space on the characters’ behavioral attitude and on the construction of their interrelations, and the mixture of social relations which concurs to define the uniqueness of a place. Secondly, I will investigate the manipulation of place for the re-fashioning of a new identity, as in the case of Widow Tryman who builds up a fictitious Cornish identity and a past. Finally, as the subtitle of the play is the woman wears the breeches, I will discuss the transgression of limits of gender through the comic device of crossdressing, by analyzing a mannish woman and a man disguised as a widow. The play paves the way for further debates over who really wear the breeches at that time as well as nowadays.