This paper examines the strategies through which John Ford’s play validates an image of the rising urban middle class as constitutionally confused and therefore destructive to the social fabric of seventeenth-century London. The portrayal of the middle class as struggling to inhabit signifiers of gentility while simultaneously undermining their value as indicators of adherence to any particular social code constructs the urban bourgeois as an object deserving of enmity and punishment; such sentiments are in turn mobilized in the service of humorous entertainment for an implicitly elite audience via a set of historical discourses associating political egalitarianism with incest, and class mobility with a self-interested disregard for traditional cultural practices.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Jephson, V. L., Boehrer, B. T., (2025), "Mythologizing the Middle Class: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and the Urban Bourgeoisie", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Jephson, Valerie L.; Boehrer, Bruce Thomas. "Mythologizing the Middle Class: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and the Urban Bourgeoisie." Renaissance and Reformation 30 (3): 2010. 5-28. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v30i3.11504. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.