The idea of the city and the ever-burgeoning City of London spawned a great deal of literature and especially drama in the seventeenth century. Indeed, it spawned an entire genre in the Jacobean period: city comedy, as written and created by Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and John Marston, amongst others. The dramatis personae of these city comedies invariably featured pickpockets, cozeners, and prostitutes, as well as the gullible members of the London gentry on whom such characters preyed. Famous examples would be Jonson's The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614), and Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters (1605) and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611). The common locations of these plays were areas such as Southwark and Cheapside, many of which were to be found in the Liberties of London, the same place in which the commercial public theatres were constructed. These plays reflected London society back to their London theatre audiences and in turn influenced the London-based comic drama of the Restoration years after 1660. By the time of the drama of Congreve, Etheredge, and Wycherley, however, the locations depicted had undergone a geographic shift from the realm of the Liberties to the rather more well-to-do West End and the Strand. The focus was now on the world of the leisured classes rather than the economic districts Jonson had homed in on (although it should be added that Jonson had made his own forays into the domain of the leisured classes in the Strand in Epicoene (1609) which, not surprisingly, was a popular choice for revival in the Restoration theatres).

Philip Massinger's The City Madam (1632) is a play directly resonant of earlier Jacobean city comedies. Focusing on the fortunes and otherwise of the family of Sir John Frugal, including his profligate and dominating wife and daughters who clearly command all at home, the play is peopled by the usurers and down-at-heel aristocrats familiar from Middleton's plays and Massinger's own earlier A New Way To Pay Old Debts, explored in detail in Chapter 5. For this reason there is a tendency to read these plays as essentially nostalgic and backward-looking in their outlook and approach.