Caryl Churchill's recent play, Serious Money, has been a great success both with the supporters of the City of London and those who are highly critical of the financial world. Financiers, brokers, jobbers and arbitrageurs came in droves to gleefully watch their life presented on the stages of, first, the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea and then the Wyndham Theatre in the West End of London in 1987–88. Various newspapers and magazines have puzzled over this interesting social and theatrical phenomenon, but no satisfactory explanation for the play's broad appeal has yet been offered.¹ Questions have been raised concerning the audiences' responses, such as whether people are blindly dancing on a volcano, or whether we are confronted with a post-modernist variety of conscious indulgence in one's own sins. Perhaps, however, the playwright is just doing her traditional job by putting the shortcomings of her time and society on the stage to be mocked at and laughed about. Churchill's play is deliberately called a “City Comedy,” after all, and it begins with an excerpt from Thomas Shadwell's The Volunteers, or the Stock-Jobbers of 1692.²

Reviews of the play have mainly been very favourable. Neil Collins in the Daily Telegraph of July 8, 1987, for instance, said that Serious Money is “worth a pile of textbooks about how the City really works,” and Frances Cairncross described the play as “a wickedly accurate portrait of the cultural revolution which has been taking place in the City.”³ But there are also repeated statements referring to a dangerous ambiguity in the play: “its message still confuses me”; it is “stuck in some moral no-mans-land,” “its moral focus is as flimsy as its central plot,” “I found it frankly incomprehensible”; “it's a piece that's all things to all wo/men.”⁴

These confusions, and the resulting criticism, can be resolved by showing how the play is linked with the tradition of the City Comedy, how its interpretation is dependent upon one's concept of that genre and of history, and what Churchill's view of history and human society is like. Northrop Frye's distinction between comedy and satire is helpful for an evaluation of Churchill's play and the audiences' reactions. Comedy represents “the mythos of spring,” where an old destructive order is replaced by a new one which is life-enhancing, fertile and positive in almost all of its aspects. Satire allows the old order to prevail. The dominating negative society is not overcome by a more idealistic new system, but it is shown to be absurd, and there are clear moral norms against which it is measured unfavourably. “Hence satire is irony which is structurally close to the comic: the comic struggle of two societies, one normal and the other absurd, is reflected in its double focus of morality and fantasy. […] Two things, then, are essential to satire; one is wit or humour founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack.”⁵

The audiences' decision to see Serious Money either as comedy or satire may explain their different reactions towards the play. Seen as a satire, the play must provide, however indirectly, moral norms which help to formulate value-judgments on the characters and their actions. As “satire is militant irony,” and as the “satirist commonly takes a high moral line,”⁶ morality is obviously an important aspect for the difference between comedy and satire in contemporary definitions. It is also the distinctive feature in the differences of the present-day spectator responses. The “moral line” in Serious Money is not so easily detected, however, if it is not seen in connection with the genre, the City Comedy, and its history.

The City Comedy proper was established “by about 1605” with “such plays as Jonson's Volpone, Marston's Dutch Courtezan and Middleton's Michaelmas Term.”⁷ Churchill's use of Shadwell makes it necessary to remember an English tradition that was already a century old in 1692. The link between the past and the present is consciously established in the modern play, when one of Shadwell's characters, at the end of Churchill's first scene which is taken completely from the end of Act Two in Shadwell's The Volunteers, leads the audience into the contemporary world: “Look ye Brethren, hye ye into the city and learn what ye can” (p. 14).⁸ The introductory scene in Serious Money thus reminds the audience of the tradition of the genre. It also refers to the long history of stockjobbing, which in 1692 was called “the modern Trade, or rather Game.”⁹ A third effect of the first scene is that it introduces a significant leitmotiv, because one characteristic element of the society of stockjobbers is highlighted, namely that of making use of everything for only one end, “to turn the penny” (p. 13). It is not the utility value of a thing that matters, but only its trade value.

While the first scene has reminded the audience of the links and similarities with the past, Scene Two (pp. 14–20) presents some major differences. These concern the ways in which trading is done today, namely on screens and phones. The means have changed and so have the locations. London is no longer the only or simply the main place of action, as it was in the traditional city comedies.¹⁰ Business is done worldwide and on an absolutely international basis: Belgium, New York, Sweden, Japan, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Milan and Zurich are the places mentioned in the “[t]hree different dealing rooms simultaneously” shown on stage (p. 14). The objective, however, is the same as in the past, and it is the only goal that counts: to make a profit. Language serves that end, being either explanatory, when used to describe assets and profit margins, or aggressive, when employed for buying and selling at a great speed.

After the past, as presented in the first scene, and the present in the second, Scene Three (pp. 20–30) demonstrates the changes that have taken place. These are not changes from the 17th century to our day, but the differences that have arisen within two living generations, between the people of around fifty and their children. The first, in this play, are the traditional stockbrokers or bankers who went to public schools and universities and have had much influence in the country. The young generation want that power for themselves and in particular the money connected with it. They are quite different from the “young ‘fashionable men’” of such city comedies as Jonson's Volpone or Middleton's A Mad World My Masters, who “gull the foolish and trick the knavish in order to secure for themselves the style of living—wit allied with money—which was beginning to show itself in the drama as the sole ambition of young gallants about town.”¹¹ The “yuppies” of our time are not characterized by wit or any intellectual quality. They are happy not to have gone “to university and [to] learn to think twice,” they have “no intention of working after […] thirty,” and they are prepared “to fight dirty” (p. 21). They call themselves “oiks” (p. 21) and acknowledge that in their present situation “it's come in quite useful” that they were “too aggressive” for school, and were, therefore, kicked out as “hooligan[s]” (p. 22).

These differences in the generations are shown in connection with changes in two professions, banking and trading. The successful banker Merrison, who sees “man [as] a gambling animal,” is chucked out of his job by Durkfeld, the trader, who does not “deliberate” as much as Merrison, but stresses that he shoots “straight” (p. 23). His personal characteristics are those of all traders who make twice as much money as the bankers, but are still lower in public esteem (p. 24).

The banker Zackerman presents the conclusion to be drawn from the changes: “The financial world won't be the same again / Because the traders are coming down the fast lane. […] [T]he new guys are hungrier and hornier […] It's like Darwin says, survival of the fit” (p. 25). This is the philosophy of the present, and it is shown to be valid over the entire globe. England now is an integrated part of the financial world, no longer the ruler of the British Empire. The changes in British and world politics after the loss of the Empire, and the change in the financial world after the Big Bang in the City of London in October 1986, are all mentioned in Zackerman's monologue on contemporary life.

Socially, London is still regarded as the best place to live, at least if compared with Tokyo, New York and Hong Kong. You “have classy friends,” whom you can see “in the country at the weekends” (p. 25). Such a meeting is shown in a “tableau” as “[t]he meet of a hunt” (p. 26). The hunt imagery, which has already been used, is here highlighted to reveal the atmosphere and mentality of the society portrayed, the ruthlessness, competitiveness and aggressiveness of predatory people. Only one person, Frosby, a jobber, is on foot. He is the odd one out, an onlooker only, now that he has “been asked to retire early” (p. 29). He again introduces the theme of the entire scene, change: “Some things change, some things don't end. / After all, a friend's a friend” (p. 28). He then reveals, however, that the changes in the political and financial world also affect such a personal thing as friendship. Formerly for him “[t]he stock exchange was a village street. You strolled about and met your friends.” You knew everyone by name and could rely on fair play. But “[s]ince Big Bang,” business has become an anonymous affair taking place on screens, where you never know whether you are still in touch with reality or not, whether people are really there, and tell the truth. Traders now are “barrow boys,” even “no better than a thief” (p. 29). Frosby cannot come to terms with this new situation. He is aggrieved and “very frightened” (p. 30). He also wants revenge, because this is not his world anymore, and he has no real friends left. So he decides to inform the Department of Trade and Industry about insider dealing involving, above all, Jake Todd, the son of Frosby's friend Greville.

The changes presented in Scene Three thus concern all areas of society: the generations, the professions, world politics and economics, the places where people work and live as well as the individual relationships between people at work and in private. Society is more aggressive, more prone to killing and destroying human life than it had been only a generation before. Its main ideology is an aggravated form of the one that dominated the 17th century play: “to turn the penny” has become “to make serious money.” Human culture is being destroyed; the world is becoming a jungle again, where everyone is hunting and being hunted and in which the weakest go to the wall. Human history is in regress, developing from bad to worse.

The direction human life is taking is dramatically shown in the next scene (pp. 30–34), which informs us that Jake Todd is dead. Business is “in no way affected by his death” (p. 31). Two different theories as to how Jake might have died are proposed: Zackerman reports that “[t]hey think it's suicide” (p. 30), whereas Jake's sister Scilla believes “he must have been murdered.” Her reason is that “he treated it all as a game. Can you really imagine him killing himself for shame?” (p. 32). Scilla, trying to find Jake's murderer, talks with her father about the people Jake worked with (Scene Five, pp. 35–37). These are the arbitrageur Marylou Baines, whom Greville Todd compares with the real-life character Ivan Boesky, who became ill-famed in the United States through insider dealings; Jacinta Condor from South America, who rather than use the international financial aid her country receives to help the population, buys “Eurobonds in Swiss banks” for herself (p. 35), so that some reviewers have compared her with Imelda Marcos; and Billy Corman, a corporate raider. They are presented as Jake's “powerful friends,” which in this world “means powerful enemies who'd like to see him dead” (p. 36). A desire to kill, to die or to be killed characterizes the entire society.

In the traditional City Comedy, many characters acted with pervasive cynicism. In Serious Money, selfishness and greed are taken for granted. In either case, people are treated like objects or property, but the modern play no longer shows that objects are sometimes treated like people, as happened in the 17th century. Acts of humanity do not occur. Human feelings, are reduced to “greed or fear” (p. 65); at best they are left on the level of clichá. People are only driven by a completely irrational greed to possess, to “have” as much as possible. Corman, for instance, represents the “takeover mania” (p. 41) that has been going on in real life for quite some time now.¹² With him, it is no longer a hunt, but a real war that is going on. Thus the hunt imagery is replaced by concepts from this more aggressive form of killing. Jake Todd was a vital member of Corman's “war cabinet” (p. 38). He, too, was involved in the war on “[o]ld-fashioned and paternal” qualities, such as “loyalty” of employees, “the support of the local community” for a company, the employer's interest in long-term prospects and a healthy industry (pp. 38, 46).

Different but real human feelings seem to arise when Zackerman talks with Jake about the strategies of this war. Only here is a completely new aspect revealed: Jake's dreams and secret wishes. They are related to the English need for land, gardens, and woods (p. 43). Romantic idylls are evoked, almost like the pastoral myths Northrop Frye has identified with all social mythology, where childhood, nature or an earlier social condition is romanticized in a “nostalgia for a world of peace and protection, with a spontaneous response to the nature around it, with a leisure and composure not to be found today.”¹³ But the idyll elicited in this flashback is always only partly there. It is constantly disrupted, because it is spoken of as something that can be owned and possessed, bought and sold. The idealistic world Jake hints at, but which he cannot really understand anymore and for which he does not have enough words left, becomes reduced to materialism. Ultimately even God, the epitome of the world of ideas and spirituality, is reduced to a materialistic thing: “Oh yes, I'll make you a market in divinity (any day)” (p. 44). If this happens, however, something substantial is missing in human life. Jake comes close to realizing this, but he cannot talk about it (p. 43). The spectator can only assume that Jake has had an intimation of mortality, a vague notion that his existence has lacked substance, meaning and value, while it has been reduced to the material aspects of life. Was it this emptiness which made him afraid and desperate enough to kill himself? The play only suggests this as one possibility (especially here and on pp. 33–34). The suggestion, however, is at least as strong as the other one, namely that Jake was killed.

The overwhelmingly negative moral temper of the City Comedy was made strikingly evident in the depiction of women, who were often bawds, whores, courtesans. The most common type was “the wife whose leisure feeds sensuality and makes time for adultery.”¹⁴ In Serious Money adultery is not mentioned as a sin anymore. There is not a single intact family in the play, nor are there any close relationships between people in which faithfulness could become a problem. On the contrary, faithlessness is taken for granted. Children are disloyal to their parents and vice versa. The same applies to brothers and sisters. As soon as Scilla has reasons to assume that her brother “was making serious money,” she is no longer interested in finding his murderer (p. 53). From that moment on she simply tries to lay her hands on the money. She looks upon her endeavour as a game, like “playing cops and robbers” or “a cross between roulette and space invaders.” There are no moral obligations of any sort; “you can make out like a bandit,” or, at least, you have a lot of fun (p. 54).

In fact, Scilla is even greedier than her brother (and she has no fears), while Marylou Baines is the most successful dealer of them all. The stock exchange is no longer “an old boy network” (p. 87). Only as newcomers do women suffer from being reduced to the object of sexual desires, but they soon learn to adopt the same attitude for their own behaviour towards others. In this world, human beings are just means to an end. Everyone is a bawd and a whore, prostituting him—or herself in their efforts to be successful. No one ever asks whether what he/she is doing is “good” in the moral sense of the word. It is always just “good” in the sense of “useful” and “profitable” for oneself.

The relationship between the sexes, a traditional element of the City Comedy, is brought into the foreground in scenes nine and ten (pp. 56–62). The attitude and behaviour of men and women towards each other is characterized pretty bluntly: “It's like animals in a zoo” (p. 54). Vince, a trader, indiscriminately asks each girl, “Coming out with me tonight?” (p. 56), and Terry is a trader all the girls have been out with (p. 55). Everyone is driven by sheer (sexual) desires, not caring for the human beings they are with. Sexual greed is impressively linked with the characters' work in the final scene of Act One, where innuendoes and dirty language culminate in the “Futures Song” (pp. 61f), which constitutes the finale and climax of the first part of the play:

Out you cunt, out in oh fuck it
I've dealt the gelt below the belt and I'm jacking up the ackers
My front's gone short, fuck off old sport, you're standing on my knackers […]
So full of poo I couldn't screw, I fucked it with my backers […]
So L.I.F.F.E. is the life for me and I'll burn out when I'm dead
And this fair exchange is like a rifle range what's the price of flying lead?
When you soil your jeans on soya beans shove some cocoa up your head
You can never hide if your spread's too wide, you'll just fuck yourself instead.

The words are by Ian Dury, the music by Micky Gallagher, two rock and pop musicians. The song emerges out of the furious trading that has been presented on the stage immediately before. It uses words from that trading and is actually triggered off by an insult made by one character, who says to another person, “You're trading like a cunt” (p. 67). It also makes use of imagery and elements from the earlier scenes, in order to create a grotesque picture of the sordid life in LIFFE (the London International Financial Futures Exchange), where lust, sexual desire and excessive greed for money are intertwined. The fast, dynamic and musical performance backs up the grotesqueness and absurdity of what is being sung. The presentation suggests that we are dealing with something that is fun and without any real consequences. Like Scilla's games, however, this song does not reveal innocence at all. Seen in relation with what is happening to people in the play, who, because of this kind of trading, lose their jobs or even their lives, the song is not only hilarious, grotesque and absurd, but also macabre. It is sung by men and women alike. There are no significant differences between the sexes in the modern play.

One character type of the traditional City Comedy is particularly interesting in comparison with Churchill's play: the usurer, regarded as a villain symbolizing “forces of aggression, ruthless materialism, aspiration and anarchy in Jacobean society”:

The usurer is the villain because he embodies a power which is not integrated into the social and political system, which is subversive of hierarchy and divorced from public accountability and from public responsibility. […] The plays focus on the nation's private and public value systems as they are brought out in relation to money.¹⁵

Serious Money also focusses on value systems that manifest themselves in relation to money. But there are no usurers in the play. This is not an accidental fact. On the contrary, it has to do with how serious money is being made today. The business no longer primarily involves the person who owns money, lends it and benefits from the interest that has to be paid. The usurer, like the traditional banker, has been replaced by the trader, whose job is buying and selling with a profit. “Anyone who can buy oranges for ten and sell at eleven in a souk or bazaar / Has the same human nature and can go equally far” (p. 63). That is why the “barrow boys” (p. 29) are now so successful in LIFFE, where “the best qualified people are street traders” (p. 54). In the United States it is “Jews from the Bronx and spivs from South California” (p. 25). Corporate raiders like Corman also buy in order to sell again at a profit. Dirty tricks like insider dealing and getting into horrendous debts are just part of this business.

Like the usurer of old, the contemporary characters symbolize “forces of aggression, ruthless materialism, aspiration and anarchy.” But the important difference is that they do not see themselves as villains, nor are they regarded as such by the society they live in. On the contrary, the play shows to what extent they are even totally “integrated into the social and political system.” “Public accountability” and “public responsibility” do not exist. Like the traditional City Comedies, Serious Money is concerned with “private and public value systems as they are brought out in relation to money.” But the focus is no longer on a particular part of a nation, it is on the financial and political world as a whole.

The perspective is also not limited to a certain class, whereas the City Comedy, and in particular the plays of the Restoration Comedy, were basically restricted to portraying an extremely “upper-class” culture.¹⁶ Neither education nor pedigree is important when barrow boys replace bankers. The only prerequisite is success. The distinction between “us” and “them,” which has been an important aspect of the classes in England since the 19th century,¹⁷ has significantly been changed into a distinction between successful and unsuccessful people, or even between people with and without employment. Workers are no part of this society, except as an entity that must be “[b]etter run, streamlined, rationalised” (p. 38), or sacked altogether. They belong to what is missing in this world, like friendship, loyalty, “research and development” in the industries (p. 46), any long-term prospects and a productive life. Apart from these vital elements, the play portrays all the significant areas of modern society. They are shown to be pervaded by the stockjobbers, corporate raiders and arbitrageurs. These people do not only dominate the financial world, they are also hand in glove with the Government, they are on “the board of the National Theatre,” they run for president, become ambassadors, own great parts of the media, etc. (p. 110). Almost the entire world is shown to be permeated by the attitudes, minds and behaviour of serious money-makers.

The keen interest in the social achievements and follies of society that is noticeable in the City Comedy is also valid in Serious Money. The old form depicted only part of the society, its negative elements and distorted, dangerous aspects. There was still a chance to reform, though. However indirectly it may have been hinted at in the plays, the audience was quite aware of this possibility. Even when some of Jonson's and Middleton's plays showed that “aggressive individualism has become an accepted behavioral norm and reductive conceptions of human nature hold sway,” the reality was regarded as being redeemable.¹⁸ There was still a chance of improvement in human life and history.

In Churchill's play there is no sign of hope and possible improvement. Not only do the two acts of her play reveal that the negative elements portrayed are all-pervasive, but the second act clearly shows that everything is in fact deteriorating. Humanity repeats its mistakes all over again, but on an even greater scale. Churchill uses the third-world-motif to make this evident at the beginning of Act Two. Jacinta Condor flies in to London to buy more Eurobonds and invest her country's money most profitably for herself. Zackerman sarcastically comments upon this and the third world's plight: “Pictures of starving babies are misleading and patronising. Because there's plenty of rich people in those countries, it's just the masses that's poor” (p. 64). The South American, Jacinta, is joined by an African, Nigel Ajibala, “a prince and exceedingly rich,” educated at Eton, who expresses his basic education quite simply: “One thing one learned from one's colonial masters, / One makes money from other people's disasters” (p. 69). History thus repeats itself; the former colonies act in the same way as their masters did in the past (and have been doing ever since), or even worse, as they exploit their own people. Nobody is interested in learning from history how the lot of human beings as a whole could be improved; everyone is just madly trying to better his or her personal financial situation. Once again there is no distinction made between men and women.

Is this world only “depicted, not disturbed,” as in the City Comedy? Dr. Johnson said about the playwrights of the 17th century that “they pleas'd their age, and did not aim to mend.” The audience was seen as “ironically contemplating its viciousness,” rather than “‘joyfully contemplating its well-being.’”¹⁹ The same can be said about a great number of the spectators of Serious Money. Churchill clearly indulges them, by offering intriguing visual effects, music and rhyme. But she also obviously works with exaggerations. She increases the speed of change in our society. She makes clear that this change is for the worse. It is like cancer. She writes about it in verse, making her sentences rhythmical, seemingly light and funny. But what sounds and looks funny, good-humoured, and easy-going actually describes the loss of all human values and an attitude that brings about death. The frivolities of wit or repartee, the language that constitutes for some critics the “most conspicuous quality” of the City Comedy,²⁰ are found in the modern play with a special destructive macabre twist and often an excessive aggressiveness. The motto in the coat of arms of the London Stock Exchange, Dictum Meum Pactum (My word is my bond), for instance, is changed into: “My word is my junk bond” (p. 105). Because of its offensiveness and violence, the glossy, seemingly light presentation does not distract from the cruel facts lurking behind the amusing performance. Whether Jake killed himself or was murdered, his death is inseparable from the world he lived in, from his job and aspirations. Like him, the society, industry, and human life in general will be destroyed. The characters in the play are indeed dancing on a volcano, for “five more glorious years” (p. 112), i.e., as long as the (Thatcher) Government and the people will support this way of life. It is a dance macabre, ingenuously choreographed by Caryl Churchill and intended to be disturbing.

Jake's death and its possible causes have become irrelevant by the end of the play. Corman's take-over deal has been postponed, as the undertaking is unpopular with the public and might damage the election chances of the Tory government. Both items are of minimal importance compared with the vital question of how the basis for the world portrayed can be secured. Its foundation is shown to be the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher and the political atmosphere it provides. Caryl Churchill has written the portrait of a society, not a play about a murder case or a business transaction. Her topics are more or less the same as in the traditional City Comedies. “Moneymaking” is the most important one. It takes up so much of the characters' time that the “pursuit of women” is reduced to dirty language and greedy looks. “Self-interest” and “survival” are necessary aspects of a world that is thoroughly predatory.²¹

Churchill uses the two-act structure in order to repeat and intensify the images, motifs, topics and themes in her play. The people unscrupulously making serious money continue in their endeavours to be successful. Money and jobs are turned over faster and faster. The speed will increase. The old generation is completely forgotten in the second act (pp. 109f), and life is reduced to the amoral game of having a try at being personally successful. It is like a ride on a merry-go-round. But it is evident that the game will end in catastrophe, because it is based on a senseless, self-indulgent egoism destructive of all human values and long-term prospects of human life. The accelerated development towards destruction is vividly captured in the two acts of Churchill's play. Even those of the audience who do not think that the Thatcher government is responsible for such a development can identify with this phenomenon.

The play's theme is certainly not to “assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men,” as in Milton's Paradise Lost. It is rather “to assert the eternal mechanism of making serious money, how this affects human life and how not to justify the ways of men to men.” If the effect on human life is ignored, the play may be regarded as a light, funny city comedy, partly indulging in the mechanism of Bergson's laughter.²² As a “Serious” City Comedy, however, it encompasses much more than that. Serious Money seems to be a satire rather than a comedy. The situation at the end of the play has not improved but deteriorated, the society presented is death-bound. The play employs hunt and war imagery. Society is playing amoral games that destroy human life. It is the object of a satiric attack which takes its moral norm from the human life excluded from or annihilated in the absurd world of the play.

Why then is this moral norm not generally found in the play, and why do so many spectators not feel disturbed by the performance, but rather amused and exhilarated? It is the history of the modern age, the complexity of the contemporary situation, the human predicament of our time that make it particularly difficult to adopt a moral point of view. The situation presented in the play will not essentially change by replacing a Tory government with a Labour cabinet. The greed disease has too firm a hold. Thus anyone seeing in the play just an attack on the Thatcher government may indeed simply laugh about it and brush it aside as a distortion of reality. The play has a far wider scope. The Conservatives are indeed criticized for supporting the ideology that dominates the play. But it is rather this state of mind as such that the play attacks, the materialistic egoism that destroys all human, life-enhancing values. Although the butt of the satire is shown, nothing is presented that could put an end to the destruction of human life. While the spectator of a traditional City Comedy and of satire was usually presented with, or aware of, a clear view of the remedial system and actual ways of making it real, the contemporary world is largely characterized by the lack of such a system. Neither does our time have anything similar to the concept of the seven deadly sins, i.e., a clear view of evil. Even when basic values are generally acknowledged, there is much disagreement about how to achieve them and what a “normal” and “good” society would actually be like.

Churchill reveals important shortcomings of contemporary (Western?) society, without offering easy solutions. She does not write from a simple feminist position either.²³ By satirizing the seemingly easy-going, playful and amoral attitude of the play's characters, she also makes evident that the postmodern position of laissez faire is equally unsatisfactory. Her play requires a modern spectator who is quite conscious of the social and political alternatives at hand. For a self-indulgent yuppie, Serious Money can be pure fun. For anyone with a mind for history and moral concern, it is more than that. It is a satire in the traditional sense which has connected satire with morality. It is, at the same time, a comedy in the traditional sense which attributed three elements (and sub-genres) to comedy: humour, wit and satire.²⁴ Churchill's satirical comedy combines the traditional elements with a typically modern perspective, insofar as her play does not refer to an implicit ideal and a generally accepted morality, but leaves it to the spectator to find ways of improving the present society. For this purpose, knowledge of the history of humanity is required, and knowledge of literary history is helpful.

The term “Serious City Comedy” thus points out the similarities with, and differences from, the traditional genre. The historical awareness needed for an evaluation of the play's effect also helps to place it within the literary tradition. Its place is founded in the history of the modern world, beginning in the Renaissance with its two-sided aspects that we are still wrestling with:

“the Development of the Individual,” “the Revival of Antiquity,” “the Discovery of the World and of Man” [on the one hand, and, on the other hand] the thrust of capitalist enterprise, the rise of economic individualism, the development of an amoral “realism” in political thought and action. We are aware, above all, of a great reorientation of attitude that prepared the way not only for the scientific achievements of the seventeenth century and the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but for the materialism of industrial civilization, the spiritual bewilderment of the nineteenth century, and the urgent anxieties of our own time.²⁵

Churchill, evoking this past, is today concerned with humanity's future. For her, there has been no “Advancement of Learning” since Bacon, certainly not in our knowledge of “Natural” and “Civil History,” nor in our “Moral Culture” or “Civil Knowledge,” at least none that has made itself evident in improved living conditions.²⁶ Humanity rather seems to be “bound / Upon a wheel of fire,” with this wheel of human history spinning faster and faster.²⁷ Churchill can no longer believe, like Hobbes, in a Common-Wealth secured by the authority of “the Civil Sovereign” and founded on “Faith in Christ, and Obedience to Laws.”²⁸ To her, “civilization” is not a safeguard anymore, it is destroying itself and about to ruin life altogether.

Churchill has shown in her plays, especially in Vinegar Tom, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Fen and Top Girls, that this destructive course of human history has again and again been unconsciously chosen out of fear and greed, egoism and, above all, fatal ignorance. Many of her characters could say: “What's wrong with me / the way I am? / I know I'm sad. / I may be sick. / I may be bad. / Please cure me quick, / oh doctor.”²⁹ Most of them do not know that the cure is only within themselves. Many do not want to know, because it is painful knowledge demanding hard work. Ellen, burned as a witch in Vinegar Tom, understands something of this truth and urges people to “think out what [they] want,” to become aware of themselves and their own position. Hoskins in Light Shining … wants people to see the “Light shining from us—.” But they fail, and the world is still “fraught with tidings of the same clamour, strife and contention that abounded when [they] left it.”³⁰

Lack of knowledge and concern are the dominant traits in Churchill's view of human history. There is, therefore, profound truth and dramatic irony in Pope Joan's statement in Top Girls: “Damnation only means ignorance of the truth.” Joan is as ignorant of herself and the world in which she lived as all the other women in the play, those of the past as well as of the present. Ignorance is what they all “have in common” and what makes them “all so miserable.”³¹ They are also great egoists, which often is a common consequence of ignorance. The least egoistic person, Joyce, is also the least ignorant, and the one most favourably presented in the play.

Only knowledge and humane behaviour could stop humanity's self-destructive progress. This is the history and value-judgment behind the funny, comical, satirical and musical elements of Serious Money, too. Under the surface of a light, though aggressive City Comedy there is the threat of death and complete extinction. That is why the play is serious about the need for an historical perspective, for a moral standard and for adequate human action. If these are not found, Churchill indicates, human history will deteriorate in an accelerating spiral of repetition leading to the ultimate annihilation of humankind.

Notes

1. See the New Statesman, 17 July 1987, pp. 1 of, where Churchill herself talks about the City and her play; the German business magazine Handelsblatt Magazin, 12 November 1987, pp. 24–32; the German weekly Die Zeit, 7 August 1987, p. 40.

2. See Churchill, Serious Money (London, 1987), pp. 11–14. (All subsequent page numbers refer to this edition.) The Volunteers is Shadwell's last play. He died in 1692; the play was first performed a few weeks later and published in 1693. In the “Prologue,” it is called “good Satyr,” and the “Epilogue” praises Shadwell as “the great Support oth' Comick Stage, / Born to expose the Follies of the Age: / To whip prevailing Vices, and unite / Mirth with Instruction, Profit with Delight” (The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers, vol. 5, [London, 1927], pp. 159, 161). Shadwell, regarded as a “prosaic and unflowing writer,” is nevertheless “notable for his sustained interest in social issues.” He is one of the “middle-class moralists” (Donald Bruce, Topics of Restoration Comedy [London, 1974], pp. 32, 33) and states that “the highest aim of all dramatists must be the imitation of Ben Jonson.” His “scenes are all beef and brawn, solid fare,” but “incalculably important as a picture of his times” (Summers in his “Introduction” to The Complete Works, vol. 1, pp. LXII, CCLf). Shadwell's play presents stockjobbing as no “honest Vocation” (p. 173).

3. Cairncross, “Trading futures,” Times Literary Supplement, 3 April 1987, p. 352. See also the Sunday Express, 29 March 1987: “a timely new play and it's a dazzler”; City Limits, 29 March 1987: “brilliant, unforgiving and furiously funny”; The Observer, 29 March 1987: “a vigorous, aggressive, funny and much-needed attack on British values”; Listener, 2 April 1987: “a raucous, complex, but sublimely theatrical swim against prevailing tides of thought.” See. G. Unwin's comment on Ben Jonson's The Devil is an Ass: “‘a study of its leading characters would be by far the best introduction to the economic history of the period’” (Shakespeare's England, vol. 1, [London, 1917], p. 340, here quoted from L. C. Knights, “Ben Jonson, Dramatist,” in The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford, vol. 2: The Age of Shakespeare [Harmondsworth, 1975], pp. 302–317, here p. 315).

4. The quotations are from Kenneth Hurren in Mail on Sunday, 12 July 1987, Steve Grant in Time Out, 15 July 1987, and John Connor in City Limits, 16 July 1987. See also Michael Coveney who wonders “what Jake has actually done” (Financial Times, 30 March 1987), and Victoria Radin's statement, “I wouldn't be able to explain the finer points of such plot as there is” (New Statesman, 3 April 1987).

5. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1971), p. 224.

6. Ibid., pp. 223, 225.

7. Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton (Cambridge, 1968), p. 78. See also Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto, 1973), and Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens, GA, 1985).

8. Churchill does not subdivide her two-act play into scenes. The divisions made in this article are based on thematic congruity and serve the purpose of delineating the contents and the structure of the play.

9. The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1971), S.V. “stock-jobbing.”

10. “Indeed, it is almost true to say that London is, for Jonson and Marston, one of the chief characters.” Gamini Salgado in the “Introduction” to his edition of Four Jacobean City Comedies (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 15.

11. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge, 1987), p. 162.

12. See the news of the financial world in recent times. Particularly interesting is the “Guinness affair,” which is also referred to in the play (pp. 27, 47). See e.g. The Guardian, 10 September 1987, p. 25; 2 October 1987, p. 1; and The Times, 2 October 1987, p. 1, on the affair. Simon Jenkins, “Boom Town,” The Sunday Times, 2 November 1986, p. 27, and Roy Hattersley, Choose Freedom: The Future for Democratic Socialism (London, 1987), pp. 215–228, discuss some of the most relevant financial activities in the City.

13. Frye, “‘Conclusion’ to A Literary History of Canada,” here taken from Frye, The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism & Society (Ithaca, 1970), p. 301.

14. Paster, op. cit., p. 153.

15. Gibbons, op. cit., p. 16. The usurer was, however, integrated into the system as early as 1572, when usury was legalized because of the constant demand for credit and for a freer movement of capital.

16. See, e.g., P. A. W. Collins, “Restoration Comedy,” in The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford, vol. 4: From Dryden to Johnson (Harmondsworth, 1979), pp. 156–172, and Bruce, op. cit., pp. 6off.

17. See, e.g., chap. 3 in Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of working-class life with special reference to publications and entertainments (Harmondsworth, 1958).

18. Paster, op. cit., p. 152. See Ben Ross Schneider, The Ethos of Restoration Comedy (Urbana, 1971), about “morality” in the plays of the second half of the 17th century, when “satire [was] moral” (p. 13). Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late 17th Century (Oxford, 1976), maintains that either “poetic justice” or “moral ends will have to be achieved” (p. 58). According to Gibbons, the City Comedy presents “a keen analysis in moral terms” (op. cit., p. 16).

19. Johnson in his “Prologue spoken at the Opening of the Theatre at Drury Lane, 1747,” l.22 (The Yale Edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 6: Poems, ed. E. L. McAdam [New Haven, 1964], p. 88); and Paster, op. cit., p. 150 (quoting from Jonas Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy [New York 1970], p. 244).

20. Collins, op. cit., p. 160.

21. See chapter 6 in Paster, op. cit., pp. 150–177: “Parasites and Sub-parasites: The City as Predator in Jonson and Middleton.” A brief survey of topics is provided by Salgado, op. cit., pp. 9–27. See also Bruce, op. cit., and Schneider, op. cit.

22. See Henri Bergson, Le Rire, in Oeuvres (Paris, 1970), pp. 381–485, where human behaviour that appears as automatic or mechanistic is seen as the cause of laughter (esp. pp. 385–418).

23. See Michelene Wandor, “Culture, Politics and Values in Plays by Women in the 1980s.” Englisch-Amerikanische Studien, 1986, pp. 441–448; and Helene Keyssar, “Hauntings: Gender and Drama in Contemporary English Theatre,” ibid., pp. 449–468.

24. See Shadwell's dedication of The Virtuoso: “I have endeavoured, in this Play, at Humour, Wit, and Satyr, which are the three things [… which] are the life of a Comedy,” and Hume's comment on “‘Wit, Humour, and Satyr’ [as] the basic elements which constitute a comedy” (op. cit., pp. 59ff, here quoting from Shadwell's dedication of A True Widow).

25. Knights, op. cit., p. 309, speaking about the 16th century (and quoting titles of parts of Jacob Burckhardt's book, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1860).

26. See Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, chapters I, II, XXII and XXIII in “The Second Book.”

27. Shakespeare, King Lear 4.7.46f. It is stimulating to compare the elements of the “Serious” City Comedy with G. Wilson Knight's comments on “the Comedy of the Grotesque” and “humour” in The Wheel of Fire (London, 1949), pp. 160–176.

28. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1973), p. 319. It must be noted here that “Shadwell resists the fashionable Hobbesian view that the instincts of Man, necessarily predatory, are curbed rather than expressed by morality. […] Shadwell puts forward the view that morality is absolute, and not merely incidental to a particular society and situation.” “Shadwell, who considered mankind inherently virtuous but vitiated by society, dissented from Hobbes's widely accepted view and found more good in private impulse than in public expediency. All the heroes and heroines of Shadwell's plays seek to escape from society into a life defined by themselves” (Bruce, op. cit., pp. 97, 99). Whether this was an additional reason for Churchill to choose a scene from Shadwell or not, it is clearly a position very similar to her own by its emphasis on morality and on independence or at least a critical detachment from the dominating society.

29. From a song in Vinegar Tom (Churchill, Plays: One [London, 1985], p. 149). The song expresses the desire to be cured, which in this case is the same as to know oneself and to understand one's position in the society. See another line from the same song: “I want to see myself” (Ibid., p. 151).

30. Ibid., pp. 156, 239, 241.

31. Churchill, Top Girls (London, 1982), pp. 4, 6, 18. Joseph Marohl's article “De-realised Women: Performance and Identity in Top Girls,” Modern Drama, 30 (1987), 376–388, does not take sufficient account of this extensive ignorance. He, therefore, thinks that Marlene is different from the rest. For the same reason, Michelene Wandor misses the “moral and political attitude” in the play and wrongly sees it as “apolitical” (in Carry On, Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics [London, 1986], p. 173, and in Look Back in Gender: Sexuality and the Family in Post-War British Drama [London, 1987], p. 125). All the women in Top Girls are not only ignorant of their “culturally-conditioned ideology” (Marohl, op. cit., p. 386), but also of their individual needs, fears and desires. Churchill makes this most evident in Marlene, our contemporary, who does not understand why she left her home, her own child and why she needs “adventures more” (Top Girls, p. 83). Marlene just wants to be happy and thinks she will find happiness in wealth. Her dream of happiness, however, is shown to be a nightmare, as “[f]rightening” as (the characters') real life and human history without knowledge and understanding” (Ibid., p. 87).