his bride’s relatives, “a race of fools,” and discovers that the bride herself is a loud shrew. He regrets the marriage bargain even more when Constance, the sweet-voiced Northern lass who is in love with him, appears on the scene. Eventually, Sir Philip gets a divorce on a technicality (since he and Mistress Fitchow quarrel on their wedding day, their marriage is never consummated) and is able to marry Constance. Significantly, the conflicts between love and money, aristocracy and middle class, end in compromise: Half of Constance’s rich uncle’s estate comes with her hand, and Fitchow marries Sir Philip’s cousin Tridewell, who rather unconvincingly falls in love with her. By Brome’s time, dramatists had to give money and the middle class their due.

As the play’s title suggests, it was the sentimental portrait of Constance—the romantic element—that charmed Brome’s audience. Innocent and direct, Constance speaks in a fetching North Country dialect: “But for my life I could not but think, he war the likest man that I had seen with mine eyne, and could not devise the thing I had, might be unbeggen by him.” Mistaking Sir Philip’s courtly compliment for a marriage proposal, she pursues him all the way to London. Naïve and loving, Constance introduces another perspective into the scheming context of the play, particularly in contrast to Fitchow and the prostitute Constance Holdup. Yet even the prostitute, through confusion with Constance, takes on some of her halo, thus enabling the audience to sentimentalize both innocence and its loss. In short, Constance is a reminder that innocence exists out there somewhere—or so Brome’s audience wanted to believe.

The Sparagus Garden

A much better play than The Northern Lass is The Sparagus Garden, written around the midpoint of Brome’s career. A comedy in which the satiric element predominates, The Sparagus Garden might well win the appreciation of a modern audience. Brome warns in the prologue that the audience should not “expect high language or much cost,” since “the subject is so low.” In fact, the language is sharp, colorful, and varied (including courtly and Somersetshire accents and satire of gentlemen’s cant), not to mention full of sexual innuendo. The “low subject” is the Sparagus Garden, a suburban garden-restaurant with beds upstairs—the best little rendezvous for lovers in London. Here they can also sate themselves with asparagus, which is described as full of wonderful properties in both its erect and limp states.

Aside from the sexual appetites of Londoners, much else is satirized in The Sparagus Garden. For example, neighborly feuding is satirized in the characters of Touchwood and Striker, two rich old justices whose enmity over the years has grown into a close and sustaining relationship: They love to hate each other, and the desire of each to strike the final blow keeps them alive. Marital strife is satirized through the relationship of Brittleware and Rebecca: Brittleware fears that Rebecca will make him a cuckold, and Rebecca plays on her husband’s anxiety by reciting her sexual yearnings and Brittleware’s inability to satisfy them—“you John Bopeep.” Anxiety about sexual promiscuity is also satirized through the figure of Sir Arnold Cautious, “a stale bachelor” and “a ridiculous lover of women” (a voyeur) who will marry no woman because he can find no virgin. Other objects of incidental satire in The Sparagus Garden are lawyers and poets.

The social change occurring in the Caroline period is strikingly dramatized in The Sparagus Garden. Not only is the Sparagus Garden a resort for gentlemen accompanying city wives, such as Mrs. Holyhock, the “precise” (that is, puritanical) draper’s wife, but also its main agent (pimp/procurator/publicist) is Sir Hugh Moneylacks, a degraded knight who “lives by shifts.” Having run through his own estate and that of his middle-class wife, whom he drove to an early grave, Sir Hugh is now Striker’s disowned son-in-law.

A hardened hustler, Sir Hugh is not at all abashed by his father-in-law’s rejection, nor is the Sparagus Garden his only money-making project. In addition, he and his confederates are instructing the Somersetshire bumpkin Tim Hoyden, who has four hundred pounds to invest in the project, on how to be a gentleman—a subject of further satire in The Sparagus Garden.

A Jovial Crew

In contrast to The Sparagus Garden, A Jovial Crew is a Brome comedy in which the romantic element predominates. The last of Brome’s plays, A Jovial Crew is generally considered his best. It was a favorite of the Restoration and of the eighteenth century, when it was turned into a comic opera at Covent Garden—a version no doubt suggested by the play’s numerous songs and dances. Performed by a jolly crew of raffish beggars, the rousing songs and dances embody the beggars’ carefree philosophy, which stands in stark contrast to the middle-class ethos. The bands of beggars roaming the countryside are both an indictment of and an alternative to the emerging middle-class order. Coming from all walks of life—soldiers, lawyers, courtiers, and poets as well as peasants—the beggars turn necessity into a virtue: They form a “beggars’ Commonwealth” with its own language and values, values based on fellowship rather than money. In fact, they scorn money.

The middle-class characters view the beggars’ commonwealth with fear and fascination. Oldrents, an old country esquire whose home epitomizes middle-class prosperity, stability, and dullness, is vexed by a fortune-teller’s prediction that his two daughters will become beggars. His friend Hearty, “a decayed gentleman,” urges him to laugh at the prediction (to look on the carefree beggars and birds of the field and be as they), but to little avail. As it turns out, Oldrents has good reason to fear for his daughters—particularly since his rapacious grandfather wrested the family estate from a “thriftless heir,” Wrought-on, whose own posterity became beggars. Oldrents fathered a son with one of Wrought-on’s beggar-descendants, and his son, unknown to him, is his steward, Springlove, who has a yearning, each spring, to go wandering with the beggars.

Oldrents’ daughters also feel the attraction of the wandering life, which promises an escape from Oldrents’ dull household and worried disposition. The daughters, Rachel and Meriel, look on their begging venture as a lark, and they impose it on Vincent and Hilliard, their boyfriends since childhood, as an ordeal, a test of loyalty more significant than such childish games as “tearing of books” or “piss and paddle in’t.” In fact, they are all failures at alternative lifestyles, even though they have the services of Springlove, who equips and instructs them and gives them an introduction to the beggars. After experiencing the hardships of pricking their “bums” on a straw bed and waking without a mirror, they fly back to their middle-class nests.

Despite its fun and folly, its reminder of Shakespearean couples running through the forests of Arden and Athens, A Jovial Crew is a strong record of a deteriorating society on the verge of civil war. It was Brome’s final statement. The record had been building, however, throughout his works—a record of growing middle-class dominance, of money’s power, of declining loyalties and eroding values, of a vacuum at the heart of life. It is a record that the modern world might do well to examine carefully.