SOURCE: “Richard Brome,” in Contemporaries of Shakespeare, William Heinemann, 1919, pp. 261-74.

[In the following essay, Swinburne favorably compares Brome's plays to those of his contemporaries and considers The Antipodes one of the “most fanciful and delightful farces in the world.”]

If the futile and venerable custom of academic disputations on a given theme of debate were ever to revive in the world of scholarship and of letters, an amusing if not a profitable theme for discussion might be the question whether a minor artist of real and original merit is likelier to gain or to lose by the association of his name with that of a master in his art. And no better example could be taken than that afforded by the relation of Dick Brome to Ben Jonson. The well-known first line of the commendatory verses with which his master and patron condescended to play the part of sponsor to his first comedy must probably be familiar to many who care to know no more than that Ben had “Dick” for a servant once, and testified that he “performed a servant's faithful parts”; and further, that when Dick took to play-writing Ben encouraged him with sublime condescension and approval of the success attained by his disciple through dutiful observation of those laws of comedy “which I, your master, first did teach the stage.” From this Olympian nod of supercilious approbation it might be inferred, and indeed has very probably been inferred by the run of readers, that Brome, as dramatist and humorist, was little or nothing more than a shadow or an echo, more or less definite or distinct, of his master's figure and his master's voice. And unquestionably he must have learnt much and gained much by such intercourse and such discipleship. His first play, The Northern Lass, appearing and succeeding as it did under the kindly if haughty patronage of his master, and deserving as it certainly was of that patronage and success, might perhaps have been better and might perhaps have been worse if the author's agile and active talent had been uninfluenced and unmodified by the rigid example and the imperious authority of Ben Jonson. The stage is so crowded and the action is so crossed by the coming and going of so many ludicrous and serious figures, that the attention if not the patience of the reader is overstrained by the demand made on it; and the movements of the figures through the mazes of a complex dramatic dance are not so happily regulated as to avoid or to avert an irritating sense of confusion and fatigue. But there are scenes and touches of character in it worthy of very high praise: the gentle heroine, tender and true (if somewhat soft and simple) as a “northern lass” should appear in compliance with tradition, is a figure very gracefully outlined, if not quite adequately finished or relieved: there is something more of sentimental interest or romantic suggestion in the ingenious if incomposite plot than might have been expected from a disciple of Jonson's: and the direct imitation of his Bobadil and Master Mathew is too lively and happy to be liable to the charge of servile or sterile discipleship. And there are few scenes in all the range of serio-comic drama more effective and impressive on even a second or third reading than that in which the friend of an intending bridegroom attempts to break off his match with a woman whom he believes unworthy by denunciation of his friend's imaginary vices, and is fascinated himself by the discovery of her unshaken and unselfish devotion.

The modern reader of this play, the earliest attempt of its author and an excellent example of his talent, will probably be struck by the evidence it affords that Brome in our own day would have won higher distinction as a novelist than he did in his own as a playwright. Were he now alive, he would be a brilliant and an able competitor in their own field of work and study with such admirable writers as Mrs. Oliphant and Mr. Norris. His powers of observation and invention were not, if I mistake not, inferior to theirs; and the bent of his mind was not more technically dramatic. In fact, his characters are cramped and his plots are distorted by compression into dramatic shape: they would gain both in execution and in effect by expansion, dilation, or dilution into the form of direct and gradual narrative.

The opening scene of The Sparagus Garden is as happily humorous and as vividly natural as that of any more famous comedy. Tim Hoyden is a figure not unworthy of comparison with Sir Mannerly Shallow in Crowne's excellent broad comedy of The Country Wit—as that rural knight may be held worthy to rank as a precursor, a herald from afar, a daystar announcing the sunrise, of Congreve's matchless and inimitable Sir Wilfrid Witwould. But in Congreve's time, and even in Crowne's, the construction of a play—its carpentry, to use a French term beloved of the great Dumas—was too well understood for it to have been possible that a writer of brilliant ability and conscientious energy should have offered to the public a play so roughly put together—so loose on its hinges and so shaky in its joints. “It is no common play,” says a friend of the author in a remarkably well-written copy of commendatory verses;

Nor is thy labyrinth [? so] confused but we
In that disorder may proportion see.

That is, I should be inclined to add, on a second reading. The actual audience of that ideal time for dramatists and poets must have been as quick to seize the clue and follow the evolution of the most complicated plot or combination of plot with underplot or counterplot as to catch and relish the finer graces of poetry, the rarer beauties of style, the subtler excellences of expression. The influence of Jonson is here still patent and palpable enough; but the incomposite composition of so vigorous and humorous a piece of work will recall to the mind of a critical reader, not the faultless evolution of such a flawless masterpiece as The Alchemist, but the disjointed and dislocated elaboration of so magnificent a failure—if failure we may diffidently venture to call it—as The Devil is an Ass. It is surely a very bad fault for either a dramatist or a novelist to cram into the scheme of a story or to crowd into the structure of a play, too much bewildering ingenuity of incident or too much confusing presentation of character: but such a fault is possible only to a writer of real if not high ability.

A Mad Couple well Matched is very clever, very coarse, and rather worse than dubious in the bias of its morality; but there is no fault to be found with the writing or the movement of the play; both style and action are vivid and effective throughout. That “a new language and quite a new turn of comic interest came in with the Restoration” will hardly be allowed by the readers of such plays as this. That well-known and plausible observation is typical of a stage in his studies when Lamb was apparently if not evidently unversed in such reading as may be said to cast over the gap between Etherege and Fletcher a bridge on which Shirley may shake hands with Shadwell, and Wycherley with Brome. A more brutal blackguard, a more shameless ruffian, than the leading young gentleman of this comedy will hardly be found on the stage of the next theatrical generation. Variety of satirical observation and fertility of comic invention, with such vigorous dialogue and such strong sound English as might be expected from a disciple of his master's, give to this as to others of Brome's comedies a quality which may fairly and without flattery be called Jonsonian; and one of the minor characters is less a reminiscence of Juliet's nurse than an anticipation of Miss Hoyden's. No higher praise could be given, as no higher could be deserved.

The prologue to The Novella is really worthy of Dryden: its Jonsonian self-confidence and defiance are tempered by a certain grace and dexterity of expression which recalls the style and the manner of the later rather than the earlier laureate. In this brilliant and audacious comedy the influence of Ben Jonson's genius and example is exceptionally perceptible and exceptionally happy; for here it is the author of Volpone, not the author of Bartholomew Fair, who has inspired and guided the emulous ability of his servant. The metre and style are models of comic language and versification; the action, if a little complicated and more than a little improbable, is as lively as in any of Fletcher's rather than of Jonson's comedies. The plot is as usual a little too exacting in its demands on the attention of reader or spectator; there is not quite sufficient distinctness of outline in the various figures of seniors and juniors, pantaloons and harlequins, Gérontes and Léandres, to make it at first sight as amusingly easy as it should be to follow their various fortunes through so many rather diverting than edifying evolutions and complications; but, daring even to the verge of impudence as is the central conception of the subject, the tone or atmosphere of this Venetian comedy is less greasy than that of the author's London studies in vicious or dubious lines of life; a fresh point in common, I need hardly observe, between the disciple and his master.

In The Court Beggar and The City Wit, twin comedies of coarse-grained humour and complicated intrigue, we breathe again the grimier air of Cockney trickery and Cockney debauchery; but the satire on “projectors” or speculators in monopoly is even now as amusing as it is creditable to the author to have seconded in his humbler fashion the noble satirical enterprise of Massinger and Ben Jonson against the most pernicious abuses of their time. The three wits of the court, the country, and the city are good strong sketches in caricature; and there are passages of such admirable eloquence in such excellent verse of the higher or graver comic style as would not have misbeseemed the hand of Jonson himself. The opening scene, for instance, in which the heroine remonstrates with her father for exchanging the happy and honoured life of a hospitable and charitable country gentleman for the mean and improvident existence of an intriguing parasite, is as fine an example of earnest or serious comedy as may be found in Shirley at his best: and the scene in the second act between the grave and eloquent dotard Sir Raphael and the unmercifully ingenious Lady Strangelove is even a better because a more humorous piece of high comic work; so good, indeed, that in its kind it could hardly be bettered. But The City Wit is the finer and shapelier comedy of the two; well conceived, well constructed, and well sustained. The conception, if somewhat farcically extravagant in outline, is most happily and ingeniously worked out; and the process or progress of the comic action is less broken, less intermittent, more workmanlike and easier to follow, than in most if not in all of the author's preceding plays. Even where the comic types are far enough from original, there is something original and happy in the treatment and combination of their active or passive humours.

The Damoiselle, a spirited and well-written comedy, is so inferior in tone and composition as to suggest a reversion on the author's part to the cruder and coarser effects or attempts of his dramatic nonage. Justice Bumpsey is one of Brome's very best and most original creations—so fresh, and so genuine a sample of comic or farcical invention that Jonson might have applauded it with less extravagance or perversion of generosity than his cordial kindliness of nature led him sometimes to indulge in. There are passages and scenes of genuine eloquence and of pathetic sincerity in this rough and wayward piece of dramatic composition or incomposition; but the presentation of the plot or plots is as clumsy and confusing as their evolution is awkward and confused; and the noisome villainy of a character at first presented as a possible object of sympathy, and finally as a repentant and redeemed transgressor, might have made Wycherley himself—or any one but Wycherley—recoil. But there is no sign of decadence in literary ability or inventive humour; indeed, if I mistake not, two or three better comedies than this might have been carved out of the material here compressed and contorted into the mould of one. In the first scene of the second act a dramatic and effective touch of satire will remind the reader of Mr. Pickwick's horror and Mr. Perker's protest against his horror at the existence—in his day as in Brome's—of witnesses whose oaths were as readily on hire as the principles of a disunionist politician—or, if the phrase be preferred, of a separatist statesman.

The Queen's Exchange is one of the last examples of its kind; a survival from the old school of plays founded on episodes of imaginary history and built up with incidents of adventurous romance; active in invention and agile in movement, unambitious in style, and not unamusing in result. The clowneries and the villainies, the confusions and the conversions of character and fortune, seem curiously archaic or old-fashioned for the date of this belated tragicomedy; but to lovers of the better sort of drama it will be none the less acceptable or tolerable on that account.

One of the most fanciful and delightful farces in the world is The Antipodes. In this charming and fantastic play a touch of poetic humour, a savour, of poetic style, transfigures and exalts wild farce to the level of high comedy. The prologue to this, one of his latest comedies, is as remarkable for its exceptional quality of style as is the admirable dedication of his earliest, The Northern Lass. After a satirical apology for his inability to compete with the fashionable writers of plays

                                                                                          that carry state
In scene magnificent and language high
And clothes worth all the rest, except the action,

he reminds his audience that

Low and home-bred subjects have their use
As well as those fetched from on high or far;
And 'tis as hard a labour for the Muse
To move the earth, as to dislodge a star.

Had these two last lines been Dryden's, they would have been famous. And had the play thus introduced been Jonson's, it must have taken high rank in the second if not in the first class of his works as a successful comedy of humours. Joylesse and his wife, with the “fantastic” Lord Letoy, are faithful but not servile studies after the manner of the master, who had been dead but a year when it came out, and as we learn from the author's postscript was generally applauded. The small part of the curate or chaplain Quailpipe might have been of service to Macaulay in a famous chapter of his history as an example of the humble if not contemptible position occupied in great households by men of his cloth or calling.

If Shirley may be described as a bridge between Fletcher and Etherege, Brome may be defined as a link between Jonson and Wycherley. But if some of his stage effects are crude enough in their audacity of presentation and suggestion to anticipate the tone and manner of the theatre under Charles II, the upshot of such a play as this pays at least a conventional deference to the proprieties and moralities. Virtue—of a kind—presides over the solution of a tangled and crowded intrigue, which might perhaps have gained rather than lost in clearness or vivacity if impression and effect by a little more reserve in the exercise or reticence in the display of ingenuity and invention. Perplexity and surprise ought hardly to be the mainsprings of comic art as displayed either in the evolution of intrigue or in the development of character. But no such fault, and indeed no fault of any kind, can be found with the play within this play. Even on a third or fourth reading it is impossible for even a solitary reader to reopen it at almost any part without an irresistible impulse to laugh—not to smile approval or appreciation, but to laugh out aloud and uncontrollably. The logic of the burlesque, its topsy-turvy coherence, its preposterous harmony, its incongruous congruity of contradictions, is as perfect as its exuberance of spontaneous and various fertility in fancy and in fun is inexhaustible and superb. The delicious inversion of all social or natural relations between husband and wife, mistress and servant, father and son, poet and puritan, lawyer and client, courtiers and clowns, might satisfy the most exacting socialist; and the projects for the relief, encouragement, and support of criminals and scoundrels in general at the expense of the State could hardly be held unworthy of consideration by the latest and loudest apostles of professional philanthropy. Something of Jonson's influence is still perceptible in the conception and construction of this play; but in joyous ease and spontaneity of comic imagination and expression the disciple has excelled his master.

The English Moor, or The Mock Marriage, is an ingenious and audacious comedy of ill-contrived and ill-combined intrigue, at once amusing and confusing, which might have been better than it is if both characters and incidents had been fewer, but more neatly and lucidly developed and arranged; rich in good suggestions and good possibilities, but imperfect in evolution and insufficient in impression through overmuch crowding and cramping of the various figures and the complicated action. The Love-sick Court is such an example of unromantic romance and unimaginative invention as too often wearies and disappoints the student of English drama in its first period of decadence; yet even in the decadence of the greatest and most various school of tragic and of comic poetry that ever this country or this world has witnessed there are signs of life and survivals of style which give to all but its very meanest examples a touch of comparative interest and a tone of comparative distinction.

In The Covent Garden Weeded the studious though not servile imitation of Ben Jonson is obvious enough to explain though not to justify the sneer of Randolph at the taste of the audiences who were more contented with what Brome swept from his master than with the worst leavings and the flattest dregs of that master's exhausted genius and decrepit industry. This clever and ingenious comedy is evidently built more or less on the lines of Jonson's most realistic and gigantic farce: and the obligation is no less directly than honourably acknowledged by Brome at the very opening of the very first scene, where Justice Cockbrain, “the Weeder of the Garden,” cites with all due accuracy, as well as all due respect, the authority of his reverend ancestor Justice Adam Overdo. It cannot, of course, bear comparison with that huge and unlovely though wonderful and memorable masterpiece; but it is easier in movement and lighter in handling of humours and events.

The New Academy, or The New Exchange, is a tangled and huddled comedy of unattractive and improbable intrigue, nor unrelieved by glimpses of interest and touches of humour; worth reading once as a study of manners and language,¹ but hardly worth tracing out and unravelling through all the incoherent complications and tedious convolutions of its misshapen and misconstructed plot. The romantic tragicomedy of The Queen and Concubine is a rather pallid study in the school of Fletcher, with touches of Jonsonian farce and more than Jonsonian iteration of cheap humours and catchpenny catchwords: but it is not unamusing in its vehement exaggeration of wickedness and goodness, of improbable impulse and impossible reaction; and there is still a certain lingering fragrance—the French word relent would perhaps express it better—of faint and fading poetry in the tone of style and turn of phrase, which no later playwright could regain or reproduce.

The best of all Brome's plays is curiously enough the only one that has attained any posthumous popularity or any durable celebrity. It has nothing of such brilliant, spontaneous, and creative humour as flashes and vibrates through every scene of The Antipodes; nothing of such eccentric, romantic, and audacious originality as modesty must blush to recognize and weep to acknowledge in The Novella; but for sustained interest and coherent composition of quaint, extravagant, and consistent characters with fresh, humorous, and plausible results, for harmony of dramatic evolution and vivacity of theatrical event, I doubt whether it could be matched, and I am certain that it could not be excelled, outside the range of Shakespeare's comedies and farces. The infusion of romantic interest and serious poetry in Beggar's Bush may give to Fletcher's admirable tragicomedy a higher literary place on the roll of the English drama; but the superiority of the minor poet as a dramatic artist, and not merely as a theatrical craftsman, is patent and palpable beyond discussion or dispute.²

In the dramatic literature of any country but ours the name of Richard Brome would be eminent and famous: being but an Englishman, he is naturally regarded by critics and historians after the order of Hallam as too ineffably inferior for mention or comparison with such celebrities as Regnard or Goldoni. That such a character as Justice Clack is worthy of Molière in his broader and happier moods of humour could hardly seem questionable even to the dullest of such dullards if his creator had but “taken the trouble to be born” in France, in Italy, or in any country but their own. As it is, I cannot suppose it possible that English readers will ever give him a place beside the least of those inferior humorists who had the good fortune or the good sense to be born outside the borders of England.

Notes

1. I have not met elsewhere with the quaint verb “to snook” (“over my wife at home,” says “an uxorious citizen”).

2. The text of Brome's plays, which, though reprinted with all their imperfections on their heads, have never yet been edited, might supply the English dictionary with several rare and noticeable words. In The City Wit a short dramatic entertainment or interlude is announced as a “ballet.” In A Jovial Crew we find the word “gentile” (once used, and afterwards cancelled, by Ben Jonson): “Provided your deportment be gentile” (a verse but too suggestive of Mr. Turveydrop and the Prince Regent); “gentily” or “gentilely”: “They live very civilly and gentily among us”—Act i, Scene 1; “remore” as a verb: “Should that remore us”—same scene; “rakeshame,” a curious variant or synonym of “rakehell”: “It had been good to have apprehended the Rakeshame”—Act iii, Scene 1. “Skise,” apparently a variant of the Shakespearean word “skirr”: “Skise out this away, and skise out that away”—Act iv, Scene 1; “yawdes” for jades: “Your yawdes may take cold, and never be good after it”—same scene. In the first scene of the second act there is a curious mention of Bath, and of Captain Dover's games on the glorious Cotswold Hills: “We are not for London.” “What think you of the Bath then?” “Worse than t'other way. I love not to carry my Health where others drop their Diseases. There's no sport i' that.” “Will you up to the hill-top of sports, then, and Merriments, Dover's Olimpicks or the Cotswold Games?” “No, that will be too publique for our Recreation.”