‘There be money to be gotten by foolery’: Jacobean City Comedy and Commercial Metatheatre

In John Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque (1611), a group of characters consider going to a playhouse and, whilst discussing the relative merits of the Globe and Red Bull, the character of Bubble dismisses the appeal of the Queen Anne’s Men’s clown, Thomas Greene, noting that he ‘is as like mee as ever hee can looke’, drawing attention to the fact that this character is played by Greene. Similarly, in Robert Tailor’s play, The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (1613), the bankrupt gallant, Haddit, tries to sell a theatrical jig and is shown threatening a player-sharer with the prospect of an apprentice riot in order to demand more money for it. This article shows that these are not isolated in-jokes or throwaway allusions to theatrical practice, but are characteristic examples of a specifically commercial form of metatheatre that illuminates the material and commercial contexts against which these plays were performed. The employment of such strategies underpins a sustained meditation on their places within the theatrical market. I suggest that city comedy, with its themes of debt, credit, prodigality, and unstable social status, provides an ideal vehicle for reflecting on such concerns as precarity, demand, and consumer appetite that characterise theatrical commerce.