Wooing in English: Staging the Dutch in English Comedy

City Comedy offers a space in which audiences become familiar with social and theatrical types like gallants and unhappy wives. Three comic types—the merchant, the foreigner, and the puritan—appear on many early modern stages. Characters with Dutch features contribute to this understanding and show how important the Dutch were to England’s understanding of itself. Characters from or tied to the Dutch Republic appear and are comedically punished in William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Lording Barry’s The Family of Love, John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist. These comedies and the Dutch Arch erected for the king’s Royal Entry also demonstrate the tensions in England between religious toleration and commercial rivalry in the Anglo-Dutch relationship.