SOURCE: “Gatherings of ‘Naughty-packs,’” and “Generic Inversion: ‘The Choice Dainties of His Theatre,’” in Richard Brome, Twayne Publishers, 1980, pp. 75-92; 118-35.

[In the first excerpt below, Shaw examines “topographichal references” to specific London locations in several of Brome's plays. In the second excerpt, she analyzes three plays in which Brome satirizes conventional forms.]

The Weeding of Covent-Garden (1632), The Sparagus Garden (1635), The New Academy (1625-35), and A Mad Couple Well Match't (1637-39) are all comedies of manners; social satires exposing particular humors or the strivings of various characters for falsely affected pseudograces. In these plays the London citizen does not come off nearly so well. In almost every instance he is either the gull or the guller who becomes the main target of the ridicule for his foolishness and his aspirations. He is rendered laughable, however, and not socially castigated as he might be in a Jonsonian satire.

In addition, these plays utilize topographical references; particular locations, immediately identifiable to the audience, provide a meeting ground to which the characters, for whatever reason, are drawn. Brome was not alone in using realistic London references to catch the eye and laughter of the audience; both James Shirley (Hyde Park) and Thomas Nabbes (Covent Garden) produced plays the same year as The Covent-Garden Weeded (1632) appeared.¹ Nor was the idea original; Bartholomew Fair, although not a comedy of manners, had been an unqualified success as early as 1614 and was published in 1631 just a year before the vogue for place-realism caught on in the London theater.²

THE WEEDING OF COVENT-GARDEN

Brome acknowledged his debt to Jonson's play in the opening sequence of The Covent-Garden Weeded, in which the central structure of the play becomes clear. Cockbrain, a Justice of the Peace, and Rooksbill, a “great Builder in Covent Garden,” are admiring the architecture surrounding the new piazza. If only, they agree, the tenants to the new houses were as worthy as the structure. Unfortunately, like weeds, undesirable people spring up first in a new area. Cockbrain determines that he shall go about “unspied” and weed out these “enormities.” “And so,” he concludes, “as my Reverend Ancestor Justice Adam Overdo, was wont to say, In Heaven's name and the King's, and so for the good of the Commonwealth I will go about it” (B 1^v; I,i). Thus a frame is established, similar to that of Bartholomew Fair, within which the episodes bringing about the “weeding” will take place and identification is made between Cockbrain and Jonson's well-meaning justice.

As in Bartholomew Fair, the framework is merely a device of location. The title of Brome's play and its subtitle, The Middlesex Justice of the Peace, are misleading and suggest that his original dramatic plan may have got out of hand. After citing the descriptive detail of the new garden, Theodore Miles concludes that “apart from the names of the rooms, such as ‘Phoenix,’ ‘Dolphin,’ ‘Maidenhead,’ and possibly the personality of the proprietor, the photograph is not very sharp. Throughout, Brome is concerned mainly with forwarding his very typical and conventional comedy of dupes and dupers.”³ Professor Floyd has pointed out that, although “in the looseness of its structure it is reminiscent of Bartholomew Fair, [Covent-Garden Weeded] is more closely related to The Silent Woman, since practically all of the action of the main plot has its origin in the exaggerated humor of one of the characters.”⁴ The character Will Crossewill is as fine an example of humor or proclivity as ever came from Jonson's pen. As his name indicates, he consistently acts contrary to any suggestion, and his children have learned to request or provoke the opposite of what they really desire. The playwright is attempting two rather loosely knit dramatic impulses working at the same time: the purging of the garden itself and the bringing together of various conflicting elements which move at the whim of Crossewill or countermove at the direction of those who would thwart him.

Crossewill is the visual representation of the polarities in attitudes and affectations of both plots. His eldest son, Gabriel, an excellent satire against the Puritans, affects a ridiculous religiosity⁵ to “cross” his father for sending him away from Damaris, the women he loved. The younger son, Mihil, pretends to be so interested in the pious study of law that his father insists he leave his books lest he become as dull as Gabriel. Katherine, Crossewill's daughter, says she wants a husband so her father will not get her one, and Damaris appears to be a “Curtezan of Venice” when actually she is a virtuous maid who is ultimately honestly married.

While these and other false poses are pursued, Cockbrain attempts to cleanse the garden of the riff-raff it has collected. His appearances are at best intermittent, and only with somewhat clumsy ineffectiveness does the playwright recall to the audience's mind the “weeding” theme designated in the title. At the beginning of Act V, Crossewill appears on stage alone, commenting upon a letter he has received from Cockbrain:

What has this Coxcomb Cockbrain writ me here? … A project he says here for the good of the Republic, Repudding. This fellow has instead of brains, a Cobweb in his Noddle. … He is ambitious to be called into authority by notice taken of some special service he is able to do the State aforehand. But what great service is he able to do it, or which way to undertake it, falls not in the reach of my imagination.

(F 7^r; V,i)

Although, as his name indicates, he does have “a Cobweb in his Noddle,” Cockbrain's undertakings are far too vague to fall within the reach of the audience's imagination either.

To understand and appreciate Brome's artful characterization of Rooksbill, the “Builder” in Covent Garden, we must remember that parts of the famous London landmark were laid out by Inigo Jones, who is the target for Bromean satire elsewhere.⁶ Brome is very subtle but the initial dialogue suggests that Rooksbill was intended to draw laughter at the expense of Inigo Jones,⁷ the architect for the Russell estate. In his great admiration for the garden, the first thing Cockbrain singles out is “yond magnificent Piece, the Piazzo,” one of the parts of the garden built first by Jones and opened in 1631. It “will excell that at Venice, by hearsay,” Cockbrain goes on, although “(I ne'er travell'd)” (B1^r; I, i). Such association of Jones with Italy brings to mind Jonson's Introduction to Hymenaei, in which he attacks the brainless who would ignore the “full tables” of his poetic feast and take instead “Italian herbs, picked [by Inigo Jones], and made into a salad” of stage designs.⁸

Still referring to the architectural wonders of Venice, Cockbrain continues, “A hearty blessing on their brains, honors, and wealths, that are Projectors, Furtherers, and Performers of such great works.” That Rooksbill⁹ is presented as one of the “Projectors, Furtherers, and Performers,” one who copies or acts upon the creations of others, confirms the characterization of Inigo Jones in The Court Begger. To Brome and the other professional dramatists of Stuart England, Jones was a parasite who lived off or, in this case, built upon the artistic talents of others, interested only in wealth, social position, and royal favor, and not in creative originality. After crediting Italian genius, Cockbrain ignores Rooksbill's talents and comments only on the money he has gained from “such Structures,” then praises the Surveyor (“what e'er he was”) responsible for wedding “strength to beauty; state to uniformity, commodiousness to perspicuity.” All Rooksbill concerns himself with is the worth of the tenants who pay his rents. He is quickly assured not to worry; the “lime” and “hair” that are the builders' foundations are as “soil to dung” (B 1^v; I, i) to the land. With that final satiric thrust toward Jones, Brome turns his attention to the Justice's project for weeding.¹⁰ A further identification of Jones as Rooksbill occurs near the end of Act I, when Nicolas is asked whether the “great Builder” is his father. He replies affirmatively and adds that he hopes Rooksbill “will be the first shall lay his bones i' the new Church, though the Church-yard be too good for him before 'tis consecrated” (B 8^r-v; I,i), an allusion to Jones's construction of St. Paul's Church, which began in 1631. In addition, considering that Jones was a known Roman Catholic, the audience would be amused by Rooksbill's exaggerated admiration for Gabriel's extreme puritanism. Such use of topographical locations and interests associated with the architect gives a sharper satiric thrust to the place-realism in The Covent-Garden Weeded than has previously been realized.

In general, The Weeding of Covent-Garden has a rough, boisterous good humor about it. In addition to the creation of Crossewill and Rooksbill, Brome again shows his skill in the characterization of bawdy characters within a loose low-level plot. Mun Clotpoll is a gull who wishes nothing more than to be a part of the “fraternity” of “both Philoblathicus and Philobatticus” and is quickly taken by Captain Driblow. His name, which means blockhead, identifies him for the audience and he bumbles his way thick-headedly from the stage at the end of the play as unenlightened as when he came on it. The bawd, the “Countess of Codpiece-Row,” and her punks have the ribald good humor that Brome achieves in most of his low comic figures.

Quite rightly, R. J. Kaufmann has chosen to concentrate his critical attention upon the social and moral issues inherent within extreme paternalism which has led to polarization of filial reaction.¹¹ In The Covent-Garden Weeded, the whole concept of irrational and unnatural parental authority is reduced to absurdity. There is no more compromise between Gabriel's Puritan “brethren” and Mihil's “Brothers of the Blade and Baton” than there is room for the “Sisters of the Scabbard” (open prostitution) in Covent Garden. They are, rather, analyzed and ridiculed as the kind of excess which emerges from extreme authority. Clumsy reconciliation is achieved in the final lines of the play when separated lovers and divided families are rejoined, but at base the play relies rather weakly on satiric exposure and warning rather than on moral reconciliation.

THE SPARAGUS GARDEN

                              I had more to say—
The Title, too, may prejudice the Play.
It says the Sparagus Garden; if you
look
To feast on that, the Title spoils the Book.
We have yet a taste of it, which he doth lay
I'th midst of the journey, like a Bait by the way:
Now see with Candor: As our Poet's
free,
Pray let be so your Ingenuity.

(A 4 ^r)

In these comments from the Prologue to The Sparagus Garden, Brome seems to be aware that he is following a fad in his use of topical references and that too close identification of the audience with the setting of a play can distract attention from its thematic matter. Perhaps the “detached” use of local color discussed by Theodore Miles is the playwright's attempt to cope with the problem. All the material having to do with the garden, Miles points out, appears in the eleven scenes which make up Act III; only five “contribute to the action,” while the remaining are simple “‘shots’ of various aspects of the Sparagus Garden” grafted upon the play and therefore tending to halt the dramatic movement.¹²

In spite of the minor structural flaws and occasional distractions, the comic method by which Brome centers upon the thematic interests and exposes false values is ingenious. In each of the intrigues which complicate the play, irrational and unnatural behavior is ridiculed through the same comic device: at each level of the play—pseudoromantic, satiric, and farcical—a familiar situation or a common metaphor usually taken seriously or figuratively is rendered comically concrete.

The pseudoromantic plot is a comic adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, in which the Italian Montagues and Capulets become English Touchwoods and Strikers. Brome's young lovers, Samuel and Annabel, are laughable in their extravagant declarations of undying devotion. Rather than taking desperate tragic measures to overcome parental opposition, they engage in ingenious trickery which gives rise to much of the bawdy dialogue. The frustrating plot complications which have made their families enemies are unraveled only when Annabel's swollen belly proves to be nothing more than a cushion. As for those who would thwart the natural celebrations of love, each of the parental pharmakos figures is more concerned with outwitting the other than with the happiness of his offspring. Their animosity is an “ancient grudge” for which the young lovers must suffer until they outwit their parents. Friswood, the parallel to Juliet's nurse, is as garrulous as her counterpart but is more actively engaged in the plot developments; eventually she marries the heroine's grandfather, whose bed she has shared for years.

Auxiliary to the romantic mockery is a satire on the making of a gentleman. Tim Hoyden, a ninny from Somersetshire, is convinced he can be purged of the yeoman side of his lineage and become “a finicall City wit, and a superfinicall Court wit too” (D 2^v; II,iii). The purging, however, is not figurative but actual. R. J. Kaufmann calls this “literalizing in action” the concept of base and highborn blood.¹³ The poor gull actually allows his “foul rank blood of Bacon and Pease-porrige” to be drained off and replaced with what his parasites assure him is gentleman's blood. His diet is also designed to purge the “malignant baseness” of his present state so that ultimately his blood will be “as high as any Gentleman's lineally descended from the loins of King Cadwalder” (D 3^v; II,iii). Such a gull was familiar to the London audience, as was Tim Hoyden's brother Tom. Much more practical in nature (though not above indulging in the odd scheme for his own betterment), Tom Hoyden supplies the visual representation of country unaffectedness, complete with Somerset dialect. These two, the social aspirant and the solid rustic, are among the progenitors of Congreve's Witwoud and Sir Wilful Witwoud some sixty years later.

One of the gullers who preys on Tim Hoyden has troubles of his own. Poor Brittleware has a problem wife, Rebecca, who wants so desperately to become pregnant that her husband fears she will turn to some other bedfellow. Here Brome converts another stock comic situation to farce. Rebecca's determination to indulge in all the strange yearnings thought to be brought on by pregnancy (even if the actual state is so far denied her) allows the playwright to engage in nonsense based upon “literalizing” a common phenomenon. He can also indulge in further bawdy innuendo in which “man-litter,” “Paul's Steeple,” and the “knight of the burning Pestle” all take on sexual overtones. Even asparagus becomes a phallic symbol. Rebecca is encouraged to go to the “Garden of delight” where, Money-lacks assures her,

… you may have it [asparagus] dressed and eaten in the due kind; and there it is so provocative, and so quick in the hot operation, that none dare eat it, but those that carry their coolers with 'em, presently to delay, or take off the delightful fury it fills 'em with.

(D 1^r; II,ii)

The Sparagus Garden itself merely provides a locality to which all of the characters come at one time or another. A kind of high-class brothel where immorality is encouraged, the garden provides a microcosm for the kind of self-indulgences engaged in by the London middle-class citizenry, whether it be cheating in money or sex, or gulling for economic or physical satisfaction. The Sparagus Garden is, in other words, a Bromean Bartholomew Fair, without the “place” providing the dramatic unity which Jonson's fair did. As Clarence E. Andrews says, “The whole effect of witnessing the play must have been much like trying to watch a five-ring circus with side-shows added.”¹⁴ The author too was obviously not happy with the play and apologizes for its weaknesses in the epilogue:

At first we made not boast, and still we fear,
We have not answer'd expectation here,
Yet give us leave to hope, as hope to live,
That you will grace, as well as Justice give.

(L 4^v)

THE NEW ACADEMY

The dating of The New Academy, or The New Exchange is difficult. There are some indications it may have been written as early as 1626 when Brome was still under Jonson's tutelage and produced, as Bentley suggests, as a “rival attraction to James Shirley's The School of Compliment (1625).¹⁵ Both plays include a kind of mock academy where social aspirants attempt to learn affected graces, both involve a lost child (a daughter, Felice, in The School of Compliment and a son, Papillion, in The New Academy), and both effect their resolutions with the rediscovery of lost children and the sorting out of brothers and sisters. In each play there is an episode in which a supposedly doting wife turns out to be a shrew. However, both The School of Compliment and Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (the progenitor of place-realism drama) were printed for the first time in 1631, and a plethora of such plays, including The New Academy, more than likely followed these publications.

Besides noting the actual existence of a New Exchange, a gathering place in the Strand which became popular in the early 1630s, R. J. Kaufmann draws an association between The New Academy and the popular French acting group whose performances took place in a riding academy in Drury Lane in 1635. On this basis he dates The New Academy in 1635 and suggests that it was the first play written by Brome under his first Salisbury Court contract.¹⁶ Subsequent evidence shows that Kaufmann is probably right. Brome's reply to the suit brought against him by the Salisbury Court company states that Sparagus Garden was produced at Salisbury Court, but before he signed the first contract; he says then he wrote two more after the contract but before plague closed the theaters. The Queen and Concubine accounts for one of these and, unless there is an unknown play of which there is no record, The New Academy is the other.

The title indicates the theme of the play and the action, although turning upon French affectations, includes as much satire against those English who would adopt French manners as against the kind of posturing they admire. The well-spring of the satire, however, is much deeper than mere mockery of French intruders, for the play's mating intrigues deal with various aspects of the reconstructed and degenerated neo-Platonic love conventions which had been reintroduced into the London court by Queen Henrietta Maria. Professor Upham explains that “Platonism as an active working principle was not accepted by the English courtiers of the time in its really serious and austere aspect. … It was Platonism given a gallant or courtly twist; welcomed … as an excuse for zealous love-making”¹⁷ and it had filtered down to become the vogue for those who would affect to be what they are not. Among the Platonics were Davenant and Suckling,¹⁸ so it is not surprising that Richard Brome falls into the category of the anti-Platonics, whose “prevailing tone” was one of “satirico-comic deprecation” of the new fashion.¹⁹ The pretensions, the pseudograces of his characters form a thin veneer of politeness which fails to conceal irrationality, licentiousness, or self-indulgence.

Although not as skillfully interrelated as in more successful Brome plays, the familiar multiple plotting of The New Academy allows its author to strike out at current fashions and at particular human follies. If there is a central character to this play it is Old Matchil, if only by virtue of the fact that his crisis in the opening scenes and the decisions which arise from it set the romantic and satiric actions in motion. Matchil and his closest friend, a French gentleman named Lafoy, had exchanged children a number of years ago. Young Matchil had been reared in France and Gabriella Lafoy in England. Now, however, Matchil receives news that his son is dead, and he responds in a series of excessive reactions. First, he tells us, he sank into sorrow, but then he set aside “puling grief” and determined to revenge himself on Lafoy, whom he blamed for his loss. In a rage he not only dismisses Gabriella from his house but also his own daughter when she pleads loyalty to Gabriella. Because of the exchange of children, the son and daughter of Matchil do not know each other, and neither do those of Lafoy. When all four of the young people arrive together at the New Academy, the lack of sibling awareness leads to each brother becoming sworn to his own sister. In the closing scenes of the play, however, the new exchange of partners and vows takes place. The love interest of itself carries little of the mockery of affected manners which characterizes the other levels of the play. When they meet at the New Academy, however, the unscrupulous Stripgood passes the young ladies off as women of easy virtue and the young men as tutors lately arrived from France. They become Brome's means to expose the various gulls who frequent the academy either for sexual self-indulgence, licentious patter, or for what they fancy is social refinement.

Meanwhile Matchil, with all the drama of “a plague on both your houses,” determines to remarry. When his associates remind him that he has been “King of mirth” since becoming a widower, he brags,

… I will marry [a woman]
That I foreknow can never disobey me
And I'll defy the devil to dishonest her.

(I 1^v; I,i)

This he does; he weds his “drudge” and the new situation gives rise to still another Platonic mockery at the satiric level of the play. Rachael turns into a wife who is more than Matchil can handle. Much to his delight she is at first quick to defend herself and her marriage against the snobbish jibes of Lady Nestlecock, but Matchil's delight changes to chagrin when she attacks him for being an officious busybody. The marriage is seriously threatened when Rachael's determination to be a lady leads her to grant the wily Valentine the mock-courtly position of midon or “servant [as] Gentlewomen use it” (K 8^r; II,i). By offsetting the battle of the sexes seen in courtly wooing and disjoining natural man-wife relations, Brome attacks another convention—the false notions of obedience and the lack of mutual respect in marriage. Together these constitute a condemnation of marriage for convenience or practicality rather than for more natural reasons. Matchil finally recognizes that the “moving cause” of all his troubles has been his “own impetuous rashness.” Realizing that Rachael's behavior is “but to try mastery,” a “disease,” he says, which is “general among all women,” he makes a deal with her. As the knight to the “loathly lady” in Chaucer's “The Wife of Bath's Tale,” Matchil yields himself to her “thraldom.” If she will preserve his honor publicly, he will admit her command privately. The arrangement, quaintly Elizabethan rather than Caroline, promises to be as mutually respectful as that Avergus made to Dorigen in “The Franklin's Tale” and leads to the same promise of compatibility.

Coupled with the marital complications of Matchil and his wife are those of Rafe Camelion and his aspiring wife, Hannah. Professor Sedge has already called attention to the main comic method of the Rafe-Hannah plot, which is the transposition of the neo-Platonic creed.

Camelion's “humour” [he says] is an excessive desire to prove he is not jealous of his wife's behaviour. … The point of Brome's presentation of Camelion's excessive anxiety not to seem jealous is to satirize the state of society in which the natural relationship of trust between man and wife has been undermined by the introduction of a new ethic that attempts to put trust between man and wife on the level of external etiquette.²⁰

Rafe, however, is a knight whose errant jaunts abroad are highjinks at the ducking pond down the street; Hannah's midon is the same Valentine who was quick to offer his services to Rachael Matchil. Valentine swears Hannah is his “Faery” and he is bound to her by the courtly vow of secrecy, but he is a cynical rogue whose every action belies his exaggerated declarations of service. Such undercutting reduces the degenerated pretensions of Platonic love to absolute absurdity.

At the farcical level, another kind of knight is mocked in the person of Sir Swithin Whilmby, “the crying knight,” who woos Lady Nestlecock in outrageous poetry. His daughter, Mrs. Blitheshort, has the most significant Bromean comment on the whole nonsense of the low comic level of the play. After listening to the mad cross-wooings for a while, she pleads,

Love, as I shall adore thee for a deity,
Rid me of this ridiculous society.

(K 7^r; II,i)

It is only after all the various intrigues and relationships are set in motion in the first two acts that the “new academy” or “Acomedy,” as Nestlecock's witless son calls it, is introduced. From then on, the academy and what it represents provide both the unity of place and opportunity for satire as all the characters visit this so-called school of manners and compliment. Joyce and Gabriella, taken there by their uncle, act as bait to draw in lecherous youths. When they question the effects of their behavior on their public reputation, Stripgood claims their actions are vindicated because they bring “Justice” upon folly. This draws a sharp retort designed to attack false notions of courtship rituals, for the “courtly Gypsy tricks” taught to women, the ladies quickly point out, “trench upon” their modesties. The meeting of the girls with their own brothers and the sincerity in their ultimate cross-matching serve to emphasize the ludicrous poses affected by the others.

One by one, the masks of pseudomanners are discarded willingly or by force of situation. For all her airs of propriety, Lady Nestlecock slips into common language when angered. “I'll put her by her school tricks,” she shouts when her son is called a “walking dunghill,” and “not only unmask, but unskin her face too, and she come over my heir apparent with such Billingsgate Compliments” (N 1^r; IV,i). One by one, the mock knights are ridiculed into reality. Sir Swithin Whilmby recognizes his niece's right to choose her own husband and gives over his tears.

I will no longer whine.
Heaven give you joy [he says to Blithe], As you
          are you're own, y'are mine.

(O 5^v; V,i)

When Rafe thinks he is losing money, he gives way to jealousy and then is brought sharply to his senses with the realization of his previous folly. Valentine is exposed as a “boasting libertine,” and Matchil admits to his own “wilfulness” and “officiousness” when true love finds a way.

The ending with its reconciliations is the most contrived of any of Brome's plays. The revelation of previously unknown relationships and the introduction of a deus ex machina are piecemeal devices used to unravel cross-intrigues. In addition, extraneous stage entertainment intrudes too often upon the action. It is true that the extravagant French dances, part of the instruction provided by the academy, are affectations of foreign and unnatural pseudograces, but both these and the intrusive songs violate the unity of action and divert the audience's attention from the thematic anti-Platonism. Swinburne, however, was too harsh when he called it a “tangled and huddled comedy … worth reading once as a study of manners and language.”²¹ Like The Sparagus Garden, The New Academy does have merit as an example of a rather sophisticated comic method; but unfortunately both plays tend to disintegrate into diversion.

A MAD COUPLE WELL MATCH'T

Unlike The Weeding of Covent-Garden, The Sparagus Garden, and The New Academy, the title A Mad Couple Well Match't does not immediately indicate a specific location. Its place-realism is quickly established, however, so that there is no doubt the players inhabit an area of London known intimately to the theater audience. Moments into the opening scene, the servant, Wat, tries to encourage Careless, the wild hero of the main plot, to think of some new project to improve their desperate financial straits. Careless moans,

I cannot, nor will I trouble my brains to think of any, I will rather die here in Ram Alley, or walk down to the Temple, and lay myself down alive, in the old Synagogue, cross-legged among the Monumental Knights there, till I turn marble with 'em.

(B1^v-2^r; I, i)

Later, when Careless has been taken in by the Thrivewells, he says,

I need no more ensconcing now in Ram Alley, nor the Sanctuary of Whitefriars, the Forts of Fullers-rents, and Milford-lane, whose walls are daily battered with the curses of bawling creditors.

(C 8^r; II,i)

The whole area indicated in these speeches was one of evil reputation, inhabited by bawds, debtors, and the like. Ram Alley,²² with all the sexual connotations of goatish lechery, is where Careless has enjoyed his whore (and where Wat, incidentally, has also enjoyed her), and it is where he returns from his uncle's house for his excesses of “Wine, Roaring, Whoring” (D8^v; III,i).

The area of Ram Alley is also where Alicia Saleware, the mercer's wife, has cuckolded her husband with Sir Valentine Thrivewell and any other man she can bed. The fact that she is called “Ally” only makes the sexual punning on Ram Alley more descriptive of her favorite pastime. Contrasted to Ram Alley is the home of Thrivewell and Lady Thrivewell; there the sexual act is actually only consummated once when Phoebe, the whore, enters Careless's bed in place of Lady Thrivewell in a well-arranged bed-trick.

Brome has left the reference in the play's title ambiguous. Both the Thrivewells and the Salewares are coupled in mad arrangements, and in each case the arrangement is designed to expose the flaws of the aristocratic fetish for Platonic non-jealousy, a favorite target for Bromean satire. This courtly game is handled quite differently from the one in The New Academy, even though there are certain similarities in structure and character.²³ In A Mad Couple the multiplicity of mating dances suggests that the title may also refer to the variety of mad couplings in which all are well matched in their intrigues and connivings.

The first of these arrangements, that of the Thrivewells, is quite remarkable in its urbanity and in its clear revelation of the changing status of women in marriage. In answer to his wife's queries on his obvious discomfiture and indisposition, Thrivewell confesses to an adulterous liaison with Alicia Saleware. In addition to priming her all year by shopping in her husband's store, he has paid Ally a hundred pounds for one sexual encounter, thinking after “to deal Rent-free.” Now the merchant's wife demands each “new purchase [be] at the same former rate, and so for all times after” (C 1^r; I,i). Lady Thrivewell appears to register shock only at such unreasonable prices and to accept that confession absolves him of the crime, but in reality she determines to teach him a lesson. Only after making him believe that she too has committed adultery does he come to realize that confession does not mitigate injury, that what is sauce for the gander can be sauce for the goose, and that friendship and trust are as much a part of marriage as are practicability and heir-getting.

With Alicia Saleware and her husband, friendship and trust are carried to an absurd extreme. Saleware is a good fellow but stupid enough to abide by a “Covenant” that says he and his wife will model their conduct after those of the court. Thus, he must not hang over her all the time, or even share a room with her—“that were most uncourtly.”²⁴ Neither must he question where she goes or what she does—that were untrusting. She reminds him when he asks what “Honor” Lord Lovely, “a wencher,” has lately done for them,

Did you not Convenant with me that I should wear what I pleased, and what my Lord liked, that I should be as Lady-like as I would, or as my Lord desired; that I should come, and go at mine own pleasure, or as my Lord required; and that we should be always friends and call so, not after the silly manner of Citizen and Wife, but in the high courtly way?

(E 5^v; III,i)

Brome's main satiric thrust is clearly against the aristocratic code and those who would pretend to it. Saleware's stupidity at accepting such an artificial relationship is linked first to the mercer's own pretentions to courtly behavior and then to his uxoriousness and, finally, to his avarice. Informed that his wife will not share a bedroom with him in her new house, Saleware fantasizes, “But I shall have a chamber in your house and next to yours. Then in my Gown and Slippers Friend at Midnight—or at the first Cock—.” But no, he must make a choice.

Soft for stumbling Friend [his wife answers], I'll do you any honourable offices with my Lord, as by obtaining suits for you, for which you must look out, and find what you may fitly beg out of his power, and by courtly favour. But keep your Shop still Friend, and my Lord will bring and send you such customs, that your Neighbours shall envy your wealth, and not your Wife; you shall have such comings in abroad and at home, that you shall be the first head nominated in the next Sheriff season, but I with my Lord will keep you from pricking. Be you a Citizen still Friend, 'tis enough I am Courtly.

(E 6^v; III,i)

Thus Saleware's agreement to do “as the sweet Lord will have it,” couched in a blasphemous paraphrase of “God's will be done,” becomes part of the viciousness of the whole circle of citizen affectation and greed.

In the main plot Alicia Saleware is matched by Careless, nephew to the Thrivewells. He, too, couples lechery with lucre; his machinations are also totally self-indulgent and immoral. Thomas Saleware is linked with Sir Valentine Thrivewell. Both are guilty of their own folly and are easy dupes to the plots of wife and nephew. The only admirable character is Lady Thrivewell, and even she is forced to deal with immorality on its own terms and at its own level in order to outwit both Alicia and Careless. Whether Alicia and Careless ever actually learn a lesson and show any signs of reform is another matter. Professor Sedge suggests,

Brome's play clearly exposes the dangerous excess in feminism that can result from the Platonic non-jealousy ethic. Alicia is humbled when her intention to cuckold her husband [still another time] is foiled by his arrival at the crucial moment. By her wits Alicia tries to save face but she has been frightened into a realization of the error of her behaviour and her submissive reply to her husband's demand for a return to a more natural relationship between man and wife suggest that she has learned from her error.²⁵

The folly of the doctrine that “friendship itself allows all liberty” is exposed when Alicia is caught in her own trap, but whether she is truly repentant is another question, for she has shown remarkable ability to tack to whatever wind is blowing. At the end of the play Lord Lovely has cast her off with some pious words of advice, but Saleware thinks she has just been trying to make him jealous all the time. What other choice has she but to be “loving man and wife henceforward” (H 1^r; V,ii)? As for Careless, there is no sign of regret for past action or declaration of future virtuous intent whatsoever. Nevertheless he does end up with a “humorous” wife who is attracted to him and determines to marry him for the very licentiousness which makes him a scoundrel. Perhaps some virtue can be found in his willingness to marry his whore and make her honest, but his reasons for action never change. He trained Phoebe in sex and therefore she can hold him “Tick tack”; she “knows her play” and thus will please his bed (G 6^v; V,ii), but as soon as a better opportunity arises with Crostwill, the wealthy widow, he switches to her. No word of affection or respect passes; rather, he promises lustily,

                    —at night, at night, at night—
We'll get the Boy that shall become a Knight.

(H 1^v; V,ii)

The critics have assailed A Mad Couple on moral grounds more than any other Brome play. Schelling, one of the most vociferous in this century, says, “A Mad Couple well Matched … reaches depths of coarseness and vulgarity. … The complaisance and unaffectedness of the immorality … lie far lower than the worst of Middleton, and with some other passages of Brome relieve Dryden and Wycherley of the odium of having debased English drama below depths previously reached in the reign of the virtuous King Charles.”²⁶ Forty years later, Floyd persists in this vein: “One of the coarsest and most revolting plays presented before the Restoration, [A Mad Couple] deals with the shameless conduct of ‘a young wilde heir’ whose very lecherousness wins him the wealthy ‘humorous’ young widow for a wife.”²⁷ Even Kaufmann, though he admits it to be a “successful achievement” and a “skillful city comedy,” links A Mad Couple with the Restoration and dismisses it as “the most obscene” of Brome's works, “worth reading,” but requiring “little critical comment.”²⁸

Offsetting these pejorative assessments is a group of less one-sided critics. Swinburne takes a much more objective view. “A Mad Couple Well Matched,” he says, “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.” “Variety of satirical observation,” he goes on, “and fertility of comic invention, with 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.”²⁹ Charles E. Guardia adds to this praise for integrated and unified structure. “Every thread,” he says, “is so completely involved in the others that to take one would necessitate a considerable change in the rest.”³⁰ There is no doubt that A Mad Couple is one of the best structured of Brome's city comedies. The three main threads of narrative are introduced in the first three scenes and are kept integrated to the final resolution, and the characterizations are consistent. Although one sex disguise is necessary for the intrigues, the play has none of the artificial devices that weaken others of the comedies, and it is remarkably free of extra-dramatic entertainment.

It is against the “matter” of the play that most adverse comment has been directed. In dealing with the argument as to whether poetic justice is violated, Elizabeth Cook explains, “There is really a confusion of two standards in his [Brome's] time,” that of an earlier age which rewarded virtue and punished vice, a standard badly abused by Caroline writers who could and did include the grossest of scenes only to justify them in the last act as trials of virtue; and the Jonsonian satire “which claimed to purge vice by making it ridiculous: a theory that could be used to justify the grossest exhibition as the most moral.”³¹ To Brome's credit, he does not resort to a miraculous conversion of Careless and Alicia at the end of the play. If they seem unpunished, we might remember that Subtle, Face, and Dol Common, worthy of “the longest cut at night,” also escaped unscathed in Jonson's Alchemist. All three will live to gull another day.

Everyone is neatly paired off at the end of A Mad Couple Well Match't; marriages which have become shaky through mutual folly are, at least for the time being, still solvent, and new unions are made. But Lady Thrivewell warns the widow Crostwill that she is “undone,” and this may suggest that marriage based on Careless's sexual terms will be as weak as one on any other single base. Furthermore, Wat's willingness to take the whore and the hundred pounds Crostwill offers, suggests another Saleware marriage in the making. Wat's words to Careless,

This woman has been mine as much as yours, she has done as much with me for Offices, and Service I have done for her, as she has done with you for Love and Money …

(G 7^r; V,ii)

certainly suggest that Phoebe will be another Alicia. The conclusion is very much within the Jonsonian tradition: vice is exposed, and the implication of a moral norm only implied by inversion. If mortals persist (as they almost invariably do) in establishing false codes and standards for natural human relationships, they will continue to be fools.

.....

Toward the end of his career, Richard Brome wrote three plays each quite different from the others in tone and structure and in which the action takes place in distinctly different settings from any of his other comedies—The Love-sick Court, a play which is difficult to date but probably belongs to the late 1630s, The Antipodes (1638), and A Jovial Crew (1641). In each case, the setting is an integral part of the total effect and gives rise to a specific dramatic situation. Each exposes misconceptions of life directly related to the London theater audience and those playwrights who catered to it. What is more important in these plays and what links the three together is that each achieves its dramatic totality by Brome's turning of the generic form upon itself. The Love-sick Court is a parody on romantic tragicomedy; The Antipodes, a satire within a satire; and A Jovial Crew, an antiromance.

THE LOVE-SICK COURT

It seems impossible now that The Love-sick Court could ever have been taken as a serious tragicomedy. Yet Swinburne condemned it as “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.”³² Later, Alfred Harbage commented, “Brome … became the chief spokesman of professional antagonism toward the courtly invasion and the Cavalier mode. Once, however, he weakened and paid the new fashion the tribute of imitation.”³³ In recent years, R. J. Kaufmann's view of the play has superseded these pejorative opinions. He proves that The Love-sick Court is not an inept imitation of popular court drama but a burlesque, a romantic parody.³⁴ As Douglas Sedge points out, the fact “that Brome's play has only recently been recognized as a parody of the courtly mode is perhaps an indication of the degree of hyperbolical magnanimity to be found in the ‘straight’ courtier plays. Brome is scarcely exaggerating.”³⁵

Once The Love-sick Court is accepted as burlesque, the title itself becomes dual in its implications. Not only is the court of Thessaly “love-sick,” but so is the court of Caroline London, which indulges in neo-Platonic games of love and self-love. By the same token, Brome's prologue becomes a satiric thrust at the cavalier playwrights who catered to this self-indulgence.

Sometimes at poor men's boards the
curious find
'Mongst homely fare, some unexpected dish,
Which at great tables they may want and wish.

(Sig. F 7^r)

In the plays discussed in Chapter 4, Brome exposed the folly of the Platonic social fashion and those who would imitate it; in The Love-sick Court he strikes at the court plays which dramatically reenact social extravagances and at the dramatists who provide stage mirrors for their devotees—those court playwrights whom a contemporary, James Howell, mocks: “This love sets the Wits of the Town on work. …”³⁶

The basic narrative structure of The Love-sick Court is the simplest of any Brome comedy; it has a main plot concerned with the members of the Thessalonian court and a subplot about their servants. By the laws of Thessaly, should a king be without male issue, the nobleman to whom he would match his daughter becomes “immediate heir to the Crown” (G 1^v; I,i). The nobleman may be a soldier who has done great service to the state, like Stratocles, The Ambitious Politique of the subtitle, or “the son of some Great General slain in battle for his country,” in this case either of the twins Philocles or Philargus. Princess Eudina must decide in five days or the choice will be turned over to the Commons. Such as it is, the plot potential is in the romantic tradition of The Knight's Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The complications expected of rival suitors—Philocles-Philargus versus Stratocles—and of rival brothers—Philocles versus Philargus—might be expected in any early Tudor romance. However, with hilarious abandon, Brome throws in almost every other romantic gimmick imaginable. There is an oracular riddle from Delphi designed to befuddle and confuse the court and the “Twins in birth”:

Contend not for the Jewel, which
Ere long shall both of you enrich.
Pursue your Fortune: For 'tis she
Shall make you what you seem to be.

(G 6^r; I,ii)

The conundrum gives rise to exaggerated declarations of love and loyalty from each brother to the other. Add to this a dream vision in which Eudina sees Philocles and Philargus embrace and then face each other with swords. Any disappointment that a duel does not ensue is made up for by a mock duel in Act IV when “they espy one another, draw, and pass at each other, instantly both spread their arms to receive the wound” (K 1^r; IV,ii). When this fails to eliminate one of the brothers, each tries to kill himself. Into this confusion Brome puts a potpourri of suspected incest (Placilla, the twins' sister, agonizes over the illicit love she feels for Philocles); attempted rape, as Stratocles decides seducing Eudina will secure his royal ambitions; and a smattering of humors figures: Stratocles, the braggart soldier; Garrula, a drunken nurse; her son, a pedant whose every utterance is illustrated by the classical “once upon a time”; and a few pastoral rustics who effect some remarkable reversals in character. The playwright also introduces lot-drawing and sleeping potions, miraculous conversions for the villains, a mock funeral procession for Philargus, who rises out of his coffin at the crucial moment, and, finally, the revelation of mistaken identities. Philocles turns out to be the King's son and brother to Eudina, which puts him out of contention for her hand and free for Placilla; Philargus is then the logical mate for the Princess. Professor Kaufmann refers specifically to the mock duel scene, but his remark, “It does not take much visual imagination to see how ludicrous this could be made in the acting,”³⁷ could take in this whole burlesque.

To add to the absurdity and emphasize the parody, Brome provides a subplot which directly parallels the main one and is deliberately designed to undercut it in manner and motive. Brome's device here is to allow the servants' common sense continually to cut across the affectations of the courtly circle. Eudina's maid, Doris, has several suitors: Tersulus and Varillus, servants to Philargus and Philocles; Geron, the “whilom” pedant; and Matho, Stratocles's man. The latter two boasters are caricatured for their pretensions to the courtly extravagances of the main plot. The first, quite harmless, addresses Doris by letter. She reads:

My Lesbia, my Cinthia, my Licoris
Or (which is best of names) my lovely Doris
          —that's I.
I still am thine and cannot commutate,
I am as certain to thee as thy fate.
'Tis not my study, or my travails can
Make me to thee appear another man:
Thou may'st affirm of me as Whilom
did
Xantippe of her husband whom she
child,
Grave Socrates regardless of his
worth
He still returned the same as he went forth.
Before I visit thee, thus may'st thou hear on
Thine in the tribulation of love—Geron.

Her response is, “Fate deliver me” (G 7^v; II,i). Matho's advances are colored with the same ambitions as his master's, and his attempt at wooing by circumlocution becomes nonsense:

I will acquaint my Lord; who for your care
Shall upon his advancement to the Crown
Give me command, who will give present order
Unto my man for your promotion.

(G 8^v; II,i)

Matho's position in the play is that of mock villain and that of Geron is fool (perhaps together representing the dual nature of Stratocles). The two serious contenders, Tersulus and Varillus, “as deeply vow'd in friendship” as are Philargus and Philocles, each try to woo for the other. Doris finally proposes that she shall choose the servant of whichever lord Eudina weds, but not before each servant's apparently selfless dedication to his brother's suit renders the friendship code of the main plot even more ludicrous. Only when the glib-tongued Doris drops a hint for a practical solution does any hope for breaking the stalemate appear. She affirms her proposition and adds:

                              Yes and hold you
This for Creed, That heaven must make its choice
Of one of them before she take the other.
You understand me; and now cease your strife;
When the one's Lord's dead, I'll be the other's
wife.

(I 8^r-v; IV,i)

One of the lords must die before either plot can be resolved. To solve the dilemma of a mock romance, however, a mock death and a mock funeral and the revelation of a mock secret leads the play to its conclusion. We are left to visualize what kind of masque dances the actors would devise for Geron, the ruffian-rustics, and for the “Nymphs” (wherever they came from), to end the play on a final hilarious note.

The Love-sick Court is a credit to Brome's ingenuity. It is the only time that he actually invades and stays in the court world³⁸ and, by deliberately breaking in upon the domain of the dramatists whom he had condemned for misconstruing the aims of comedy,³⁹ he successfully ridicules their world and their art.

THE ANTIPODES

Although The Love-sick Court is highly stylized and triumphant in its mockery, The Antipodes is the most sophisticated and ingenious of Brome's satires. In this play he uses a dramatic framework specifically adapted to a particular satiric intent, based upon the idea of an antipodal London. Unlike the plays using place-realism, The Antipodes has a hypothetical rather than an actual setting through which the characters in the play (and the audience to it) recognize their follies and the follies of London life by observing their opposites in a kind of distorted mirror. The effect is as if the audience were standing with its back to a large mirror and seeing what is reflected in it over its shoulder by using a second mirror held in the hand.

In the opening scene, Joyless, an old country gentleman, has brought his son to Doctor Hughball in London to be cured of a melancholic madness brought on by excessive reading of extravagant travel books.⁴⁰ Peregrine Joyless has totally withdrawn from the world of reality into an illusory world filled with phantasmagoria and unnatural natural science. The psychiatrist Hughball lives with “a phantastic Lord,” Letoy, and together they form a director-producer relationship for a play-within-a-play through which a comic catharsis takes place and the young man is cured. The Antipodes is a “dramatization of psychiatric therapy”⁴¹ which, with the possible exception of Ford's The Lover's Melancholy (1628), is unparalleled in Renaissance drama.⁴²

Hughball's psychiatric method, the basic comic device of the play, is ingenious in its simplicity. The doctor presumes the young man to be quite sane and offers to transport him to the most distant of all Sir John Mandeville's exotic places—the “world of Antipodes,” where the people

In outward feature, language, and religion,
Resemble those to whom they are supposite:
They under Spain appear like Spaniards,
Under France Frenchmen, under England English
To the exterior show: but in their manners,
Their carriage, and condition of life
Extremely contrary.

(C 4^r; I,vi)

Hughball whets the characters' anticipation with a description of the antipodal world where “contrary to us … people rule the Magistrates,” “men do all the tittle-tattle duties while women Hunt, Hawk, and take their pleasure.” Antipodean women hunt falcons with pheasant, deer pursue hounds, and cats are kept in cages to protect them from mice; lords sell their belongings to feast their servants, and “Merchants wives do deal abroad Beyond the seas, while their husbands cuckold them At home.” Lawyers are honest men who work at trades during vacations so they may “give the law for nothing in the term times”; the clergy, on the other hand, are covetous court wranglers. “Hirelings, clowns, and tradesmen” enjoy “all wit and mirth and good society” while poets and players are Puritans (C 4^r-D 1^v; I,vi). After these and other examples, the verbal becomes visual. At the beginning of Act II, Peregrine awakens from a drugged sleep actually believing he has slept for eight months and has traveled to antipodal London. Acts II, III, and IV are given over to the play-within-the-play performed by Letoy's servants for the benefit of Peregrine and in which he is the central character. Hughball's examples also prepare the theater audience for life in topsy-turvydom, and once what Swinburne called the “incongruous congruity of contradictions”⁴³ is accepted, every antipodal sequence follows with superbly logical and hilarious consistency.

The scheme offers infinite possibilities covering a comic spectrum ranging from burlesque farce (such as two “catch-poles” running away from a gentleman who wants to be arrested) to the subtlest satire. Consider, for example, the satiric perambulations of a gentleman brought to court for refusing to sleep with the wife of a merchant from whom he has received various wares. The gentleman not only refuses to pay double for the wares but declares virtuously he wishes to “content” only his wife. The merchant's argument is in the form of an elaborate progression of logic: tradesmen live off gentlemen; gentlemen content women; contented women make good wives; tradesmen need good wives; even if a tradesman shall consume the gentleman's estate, his son (through the contented wife) shall ultimately inherit it anyhow. Therefore, the gentleman should sleep with the merchant's wife. Letoy's servant, who plays the part of the judge, gives a qualified verdict. As a Justice, he should make an example of the gentleman and deny him the sight of any woman until he give satisfaction to the merchant's wife so that such a dangerous breach of custom does not occur again. But as he is “a Citizen by nature” he will use “urbanity.” Finally, he concludes,

And as I am a gentleman by calling,
(For so my place must have it) I'll perform
For you the office of a gentleman
Toward his wife, I therefore order thus:
That you bring me the wares here into Court
(I have a chest shall hold them, as mine own)
And you send me your wife, I'll satisfy her
My self. I'll do it, and set all straight and right:
Justice is blind, but Judges have their sight.

(G 4^r-v; III,viii)

Peregrine is so impressed with such a display that he knights By-Play on the spot. In a single scene, Brome attacks all the social, economic, and legal abuses which he has exposed in other plays, although never so compactly, so pointedly, or so humorously.

An equal credit to Brome's dramatic skill is the manner in which he prevents sequence after sequence of cloud-cuckoo reversals from losing their comic impact. In the first place, Peregrine is not the only one suffering from a fixation malady. His wife, Martha, still a virgin after three years of marriage because her husband prefers the pleasures of fantasy to those of the nuptial couch, is in a frenzy of child-longing. Secondly, Old Joyless, partnered in a January-May second marriage, suffers from irrational jealousy toward his young wife, Diana. These three, with Letoy, are the important onstage spectators to the play-within-the-play,⁴⁴ and their comments upon the action cut across the absurd contraries of the antipodal world, keeping the theater audience constantly aware of the various levels of representation.

At the end of Act IV, Peregrine, having been convinced Martha has been transformed into a Princess of the Antipodes, kisses her and they retire to a bedchamber. The “real knowledge of a woman,” prophesies Letoy, will be the last step of his remedy. By degrees “his much troubled and confused brain” will become “settled and rectified” (K 1^r; IV,xii). The consummation also cures Martha's concern for her untouched maidenhead and implies that she will not be childless for long.

All but the last sequence is then given over to curing Joyless of his jealousy. For this Brome introduces another play-within-a-play, this one to be produced for Joyless. In this sequence Letoy is a conscious actor, Diana an unconscious participant, and Joyless the concealed observer. When Diana's chastity remains indignantly firm before Letoy's mock persuasions, Joyless is convinced of the strength of her purity and the folly of his jealousy.

Still another kind of performance is inserted within the greater play in the last scene, a moral masque that celebrates the triumph of Harmony over Discord. The antimasque, in which Discord's factions, Folly, Jealousy, Melancholy, and Madness hold the stage, represents the previous joylessness of those who were her victims. Then Letoy signals the approach of the main masquers:

See Harmony approaches, leading on,
'Gainst Discord's factions, four great dieties;
Mercury, Cupid, Bacchus, and Apollo.
Wit against Folly, Love against Jealousy,
Wine against Melancholy, and 'gainst Madness,
          Health.

(L 4^r; V,xi)

Discord is, of course, confounded by the forces of Harmony in Letoy's masque as surely as it was in his playlet for Joyless and in his master production for Peregrine, and the play ends with Peregrine's epilogue to the audience asking for their “gentler hands” to dispel that last of their fears. Thus as Letoy, the doctor within the play-world, cures his patients, so Brome the doctor-playwright hopes to cure his theater audience through comic catharsis.

Various suggestions have been made for sources of The Antipodes, particularly for the device of a play-within-a-play as a cure for some character's malady.⁴⁵ Rather than being related to any other specific production, The Antipodes more likely falls within the tradition of plays which include interpolated interludes, plays, or masques for some dramatic revelation.⁴⁶ More important speculations have been made as to the invention of reversal. Joe Lee Davis would link The Antipodes with The Muse's Looking Glass (1630) written by another “son of Ben,” Thomas Randolph.⁴⁷ Randolph's highly artificial play represents Thalia, the muse of Comedy, as having a mirror in which “Vices of Excess and Defect” are made to see their opposites; its characters are allegorical and its aim is a defense of comedy against Puritan attacks on the stage rather than a satire on London life. Another possibility might be William Strode's The Floating Island, which was performed first at Cambridge in August 1636. Here the “floating island,” England, falls into confusion and disorder when the subject courtiers, represented as various human passions, rebel against their kingly master, Prudentius. Although characters in Strode's play, particularly Sir Amorous and Sir Timerous-Fearall, have a certain quality of Jonsonian humor, the whole production smacks of a kind of university erudition that Brome was more likely to attack than to copy.⁴⁸

Professor Ian Donaldson has shown quite clearly that the notion upon which The Antipodes is based belongs within an ancient folk tradition quite familiar to Brome's audience. “So usual was the association of the antipodes with absurdity,” he states, “that by Brome's day the phrase to act the antipodes had become a proverbial expression for a reversal of the expected order of things.”⁴⁹ Donaldson draws evidence for the antiquity of the antipodal notion from Cosmas Indicopleustes, the eighth- or ninth-century Greek navigator whose conviction that there was no “antipodes” was based on the improbability of a people who “contrary to nature” existed “head downward.”⁵⁰ The possibilities for ludicrousness such as this, however, are inherent within the antipodal concept itself, regardless of what Brome's immediate impulse may have been. In fact, Professor Donaldson also shows that the notion of an antipodes is but a part of the whole concept of comic inversion, one metaphoric aspect of a world upside-down.⁵¹

Other early seventeenth-century works such as Bacon's nondramatic Nova Atlantis or Jonson's masque Newes from the New World Discover'd in the Moon might also be included as influencing The Antipodes. Certain physical similarities between Bacon's fantasy world and Brome's might indicate that the playwright had some knowledge of the Nova Atlantis (pub. 1627). The island of Bensalem, according to the opening paragraph of Bacon's unfinished work, was somewhat north of the South Sea route between Peru and the Orient; geographically, the people of the island were closer to being antipodal to those of Great Britain than the people of other fantasy worlds which preceded Brome's. Technical though this may sound, this physical distance achieves the same kind of separation for Bacon as Brome later relied upon in The Antipodes—a separation which allows the audience the very objectivity the playwright is seeking. The people of Bacon's fictitious island, however, are allegorical as well as satirical and are certainly much more learned than Brome's Antipodeans. In addition, the people Peregrine thinks he is ruling are not perversions or purified versions of the stage and theater audience but opposites, different by virtue of geography and therefore acceptably different in custom and manner. This very dichotomy of behavior patterns is the basis of Brome's satire.

Although it was not published until the 1641 Folio, there seems to be little doubt that Richard Brome would have known Jonson's News from the New World Discovered in the Moon, as he was already associated with the London theatrical world during the time of its writing and production (1620). The geographical setting for Jonson's work, however, bears no resemblance whatsoever to his protégé's antipodal realm. The news of the “Lunatic” world has arrived by “Moonshine” and is reported from the stage at Whitehall by the poet's heralds who also serve as presenters of the masquers and antimasquers.

Nonetheless, some Jonsonian influence in The Antipodes lies in specific ideas which Brome may have picked up from the masque dialogue. At one point, after one of the heralds has explained that “Lunatic language” is “only by signs and gestures,” he is asked, “How do their Lawyers then?” The conversation continues:

2 Her. They are Pythagorians, all dumb as fishes, for they have no controversies to exercise themselves in.

Fac. How do they live then?

1 Her. On the dew of the Moon like Grasshoppers, and confer with the Doppers [anabaptists].

Fac. Ha' you Doppers?

2 Her. A world of Doppers! but they are as lunatic persons, walkers only, that leave only to hum, and ha, not daring to prophesy, or start up upon stools to raise doctrine.⁵²

There is no doubt that Brome's The Antipodes is also infused with Jonson's comic vision through which, as Donaldson says, “Folly and wickedness are expressed in terms of moral contrariness.” Although this kind of “strong moral polarity”⁵³ is particularly clear in Brome's “triumph of Harmony over Discord” performance, it is also basic to the whole dramatic representation of the play.

Finally, it must be recognized that although Brome relies upon a familiarity with the concept of antipodeanism, his dramatic invention is surely his own. He had experimented with the device before. Less elaborate reversals occur in The Damoiselle and in The City Wit. The relationship of the Salewares in A Mad Couple Well Match't is exactly the case brought before Justice By-Play enacted in its vicious circle of immorality and greed. The most important of his early plays which illustrate this comic technique is surely The Late Lancashire Witches, in which the Seely plot provides a visual expression of the necromantic perpetrations which turn the dramatic world quite literally upside-down. In The Antipodes, however, the poet uses no magic; no witches play at bowls with normal custom except insofar as Hughball and the playwright himself are witchdoctors. With the same kind of logical consistency that Swift later achieves in Gulliver's Travels, but with none of the Swiftian viciousness, Brome provides what Swinburne called a “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, [which] 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.”⁵⁴

Brome proves the value of comic catharsis. His satiric effect is gained by a duality of representation—one assumed to be firm and constant as the viewers' conception of what life is and the other the exaggerations, the opposites, or what they actually see in performance on stage. The catharsis comes through the ultimate realization that what they think and what they see are two distorted reflections of the same vision, and thus comic catharsis within the interpolated performances onstage becomes catharsis for the audience to the greater play. The Antipodes is more sophisticated in its manner and method than any other of Brome's comedies and is rivaled only by A Jovial Crew in the continued critical praise given it. In fact, the two plays outrank all but the best of Jonson.

A JOVIAL CREW

A Jovial Crew, or The Merry Beggars, was first produced in April 1641⁵⁵ and, we assume from the dedicatory letter to Thomas Stanley in the 1652 edition, it also “had the luck to tumble last of all in the Epidemical ruin of the Scene” for the King and Queen's Young Company before the Phoenix in Drury Lane went dark in September 1642, and the greatest age of English drama came to an end. Its pre-Commonwealth stage history lasted a mere sixteen months; from that period there is nothing to indicate with what enthusiasm, if any, it was received. Twenty years later, when it was revived in 1661 by the King's Company at the Vere Street Theatre, four performances in six months⁵⁶ attest to a popularity which continued through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁵⁷

Samuel Pepys's reaction to the play when he saw its first Restoration performance is particularly interesting, as it indicates what has been a continuing audience and critical assessment well into this century. “To the Theatre,” says Pepys for July 25, 1661, “and saw ‘The Jovial Crew’ (the first time I saw it); and indeed, it is as merry, and the most innocent play that ever I saw, and well performed.”⁵⁸ Intrigued and delighted by its surface romanticism, critics have continued to take at face value the woodland setting in which most of the vagabond action takes place. Even J. A. Symonds exempts A Jovial Crew from his critical attack on Brome's works. He admits the plot is “novel” and then goes on to relate it to the “ecole buissoniere of existence—which is so strong a characteristic of the English.”⁵⁹ “Brome turns away from the town” for A Jovial Crew, say Professors Thomas Marc Parrott and Robert Hamilton Ball more recently, and “a fresh breath of country air blows through the playhouse while the story of good Squire Oldrents and his merry daughters is unrolled.”⁶⁰

This last comment must certainly give the modern reader pause. How fresh is the air which blows through Oldrents's house? Having heard a fortuneteller prophesy that both his daughters, in spite of all his wealth, shall be beggars, he is full of melancholy and grief. His jovial friend Hearty would induce him to count his blessings and be mirthful, but forced merriment is sadder than melancholy. And what of his daughters? Just when are Rachel and Meriel “merry”? Certainly not at the beginning of the play, when they are “pent up and tied by the nose to the continual steam of hot Hospitality” (D 2^r; II,i) in their father's house; when they feel that by contrast to the freedom of the beggars housed in the barn, they are imprisoned by their father's sadness. And what of Springlove, Oldrents's steward, whom he loves as he loves his daughters? Each year there stirs in Springlove's heart and blood the longing to take to the open road, to join the merry crew of vagabonds who frequent the area, but, at the same time, he is aware of a duality of existence which draws him in different directions. It is exactly upon these polarities of existence, symbolized in Springlove, that the fundamental irony of A Jovial Crew is based, an irony which is visualized in the dichotomies of the setting and felt in the shifting tone and uneasy mood of the play. Thus, while it is easy to accept that A Jovial Crew is certainly different in setting and predisposition from others of Brome's plays, it is more difficult to accept that, at this late stage in his career, a playwright whose forte is obviously satire would turn to escapist drama, to an exultation of a mirthful green world totally divorced from the realities of human experience. By the same token, where we might accept R. J. Kaufmann's view that quite contrary to what previous critics have said, A Jovial Crew “is virtually a social parable for the times,” it is difficult to see a drama in which song and dance play such a large part as “full of weary disenchantment and something almost like despair for reasonable solutions of real social problems.”⁶¹

Each of the main characters in A Jovial Crew turns for various reasons to the company of the merry beggars. Springlove, in answer to his “nature” and in the hope of solving his master's fortune in a literal sense, agrees to effect the escape of Oldrents's daughters into the “Beggars Commonwealth” and act as their servant. With them go the ladies' suitors, who, though doubtful that the adventure is to be anything more serious than “a mad trick of youth,” decide they must go or lose their loves. On hearing they are gone, Oldrents determines to turn grief to “jovial Mirth” with such vehemence that even Hearty worries, “This is over-done. I do not like it” (F 2^r; II,i). In an effort verging on desperation, then, all leave the external world which they assume is full of care, enforced order, and human responsibility to find a free life among the “only happy People in a Nation” (E 1^r; II,i) in the woodland glade nearby. When Oldrents joins the company of beggars, he expresses their attitudes toward what he sees as the old life and the new,

                    What is an estate
Of Wealth and Power, balanced with their Freedom,
But a mere load of outward complement?
When they enjoy the Fruits of rich Content?
Our Dross but weighs us down into Despair,
While their sublimed spirits dance in the Air.

(F 3^r-v; II,i)

Ironically, it is the reality of the beggar life itself which cuts harshly across the romantic optimism of the escapists. While Oldrents rhapsodizes on the delight of rebirth into a natural world, a beggar doxy's cries in childbirth cut through the “confused noise … of laughing and singing.” If the folly of the main characters in their attempt to divorce reality from life in order to follow birdsong is not clearly evident to the reader by this point in the play (near the end of Act II), the violent dichotomy between kind, benevolent nature and harsh, painful nature brings it home with stunning impact. The beggars may be “Free above Scot-free; that observe no Law, Obey no Governor, use no Religion, But what they draw from their own ancient custom” (E 1^r; II,i), but they are not free from those laws of nature which separate men from “sublimed spirits.” For Oldrents, the confrontation with the Patrico's drunken wife and the beggar-priest's offer to provide him with a “Doxie⁶² or a Dell⁶³ that never yet with man did Mell,”⁶⁴ takes him aback. “A sudden qualm over-chills my stomach,” he responds to Hearty but then, bolstering his determination, “But 'twill away” (G 1^r; II,i).

For the young lovers the confrontation with reality is kept in a lighter vein but, nonetheless, their disillusionment is also physical. Their first night of freedom had been anything but tranquil. “Lightening and Tempest,” “the noise of the Crew,” “the hogs in the Hovel,” are not at all what the knights errant expected and their fair damsels are “crupper-crampt,” “bum-sidled with the straw,” “numm'd i' the bum” (G 2^r; III,i) from their hard lodging. Where now is the fanciful dream of the free and open road?

And so it goes—begging to eat is not fun but a profession in which hungry days come before the art is learned; the woodland is not free from predators like Oliver, who assumes the girls' virtue is as free as their life appears to be; man does not cast off miserliness or selfishness on a whim but carries it with him as does Martin, who agrees to help Amie escape an enforced marriage purely to advance his own station. It would appear that one by one each of the expected triumphs of the green world over the waste land is undercut by intruding a kind of harsh reality into the merry beggars' world.

Equally as skillful as he undercuts romantic notion, Brome also shows the other side of the coin. The hospitality which so marks the beggar-crew is paralleled by Oldrents's open door and, as his name indicates, his charity toward those on his land is as great as theirs under the sky.⁶⁵ He is as willing to grant freedom of will to Springlove as the beggar-priest, Patrico, is to his band. Oldrents's concern for his daughters' happiness and future would cast him as the genuine Patrico and the beggar-priest's vulgar disregard for anything more than the physical functions of the “doxies” and “dells” as somewhat obscene. Justice Clack may be a fool but he is harmless compared to the immorality of the lawyer-beggar or the soldier-beggar. The fact of the matter is although folly certainly forms a part of life in Oldrents's world, it is a much more compassionate, humanly responsible world than that of the beggars.

The deliberate undercutting of generic expectancy casts a sombre mood over romance in A Jovial Crew and shifts it away from the usual moral reassessments found in green world comedy. Thus the total comic effect is akin to that of The Antipodes although the dramatic process is different. The two worlds of A Jovial Crew do not occupy opposite sides of the moral globe, but when man chooses to live a life antipodal to accepted social and moral existence, he is, as it were, sole-to-sole with those of established custom and human responsibility. Then we have the question, “How can both be found standing upright?” There is something of the “strong moral polarity” in A Jovial Crew which Ian Donaldson sees as integral to Jonson's thought. The dichotomy is not, however, as severe as that envisioned by Jonson in Discoveries.

How many have I known, [said the learned poet] that would not have their vices hid? Nay, and to be noted, live like Antipodes to others in the same City; never see the Sun rise, or set, in so many years; but be as they were watching a Corpse by Torchlight; would not sin the common way; but held that a kind of Rusticity; they would do it new, or contrary, for the infamy? They were ambitious of living backward; and at last arrived at that, as they would love nothing but the vices; not vicious customs. It was impossible to reform these natures; they were dried, and hardened in their ill.⁶⁶

Brome was much more conservative and conciliatory than his master. There is, nonetheless, a distinctly Saturnalian quality to Brome's beggar world, an antimasque license which is only dispelled through the enactment of a play-within-a-play concluding the performance. By this time, however, the play has moved from the somber world of moral opposites. In what might seem a rather unsatisfactory contrivance, the harsh beggar world is replaced by a theatrical one.

Old. But is there a Play to be expected and acted by Beggars?

Cla. That is to say, by Vagabonds; that is to say by strolling Players. They are upon their Purgation. If they can present any thing to please you, they may escape the Law; that is (a hay) If not, tomorrow, Gentlemen, shall be acted, Abuses stripped and whipped among 'em.

(N 3^v; V,i)

The real beggars disappear and the conclusion of the play involves the rehabilitation of player-beggars. Previous economic injustices are reformed; parents and children, ladies and lovers are reconciled; Oldrents discovers Springlove is a lost son; and so the conventional romantic ending appears to be tacked on to what is an anti-romance. Oldrents's final claim, “Here are no Beggars … no Rogues, nor Players: But a select Company, to fill this House with Mirth” (O 3^v; V,i), is a prognosis for the future and not a reflection on the past. The prologue warned that the title A Jovial Crew may seem to promise mirth, but the play itself does not fulfill that promise. It presents a world of displaced characters invaded by others who would desire the same displacement. Player-beggars are joined by would-be players, and both try to act out life rather than live it. Real human harmony remains but a wistful longing, and only briefly can actors in a theater fill a house with mirth. Again as in The Antipodes, Brome has turned his art upon itself. In The Antipodes he turned play within play within play to satiric purpose, using comedy to serve as its own catharsis; in A Jovial Crew he turns romance upon itself, again using character-players to act out their own antiromance. Life itself remains morally open-ended and true human reality is both heart-warming and bone-chilling. Yet the net result is not despair over the inability to achieve harmony outside of the theater. Long-lost Springlove, a symbolic character quite unique in Bromean drama, prognosticates a human impulse which negates despair. In a Caroline world, a far cry from the moral world which Brome envisioned, Springlove characterizes a wistfully hopeful rather than a desperate prognosis.

That satire in the usual Jonsonian sense is not the form of A Jovial Crew does not mean that Brome's favorite targets are ignored. When Hearty is encouraging Oldrents to ignore fortunetelling, for example, he gives a series of instances of their equivocations, each directed at objects of Bromean ridicule in other plays. One fortuneteller, says Hearty,

                    … told a Gentleman
His son should be a man-killer, and hanged for it;
Who, after proved a great and rich Physician,
And with great Fame in the University
Hanged up in Picture for a grave example.

Such a dig at doctors is worthy of Jonson. Another is the “squinteyed boy” who was forecast to be a pick-purse and a thief that grew up to be a cunning lawyer. Or, Hearty goes on,

Was not a Shepherd-boy foretold to be
A Drunkard, and to get his living from
Bawds, Whores, Thieves, Quarrellers, and the like?
And did not he become a Suburb Justice?
And live in Wine and Worship by the Fees
Racked out of such delinquents?

(B 1^v-B 2^r; I,i)

Later, among the beggar band, Brome singles out individuals whose circumstances afford satiric jibes at contemporary London conditions. The poet, who learned his art well in his profession, now practices it better by begging. The courtier, on the other hand, begs for pleasure as his father did before him, “refusing great and constant means from able friends to make him a staid man.” After all, “What's a gentleman but's pleasure” (C 4^r-v; I,i). Justice Clack, who doesn't enter the play until Act V, is at once humorous and the object of satire in his insistence upon punishing before examining, to make the law “surer” on his side (M 3^v; V,i). However, such jibes are only incidental; although incorporating something of Jonson's satiric vision, the play stops short of satire itself and remains contemplative. In its totality of dramatic impression, The Jovial Crew stands apart from the mainstream of Caroline comedy, satiric or otherwise. Its distinctive quality, like that of The Antipodes, owes its success to Brome's skill in turning conventionality into originality.

Notes

1. The play is called The Weeding of Covent-Garden on the title page; it is equally often referred to by its running title The Covent-Garden Weeded.

2. This utilization of a popular locale to establish a kind of unity for comedies of manners and intrigues is discussed by Richard Perkinson in his article “Topographical Comedy in the Seventeenth Century” (English Literary History III [1936], 270-90) and by Theodore Miles in “Place-Realism in a Group of Caroline Plays” (Review of English Studies XVIII [1942], 428-40). Other plays discussed in the group are Shakerley Marmion's Hollands Leaguer (1613), Thomas Nabbes's Tottenham Court (1633), and Thomas Jordan's The Walks of Islington and Hogsden (1641). Neither Perkinson nor Miles includes A Mad Couple Well Match't.

3. Miles, op. cit., p. 433.

4. Giles Floyd, “A Critical Edition of Brome's The Jovial Crew with Introduction, Textual Notes, and Glossary,” Diss., University of Iowa, 1943, p. xxvii.

5. [Ralph J.] Kaufmann's comment (Richard Brome: Caroline Dramatist [New York and London, 1961], p. 80) that the description of Gabriel's humor (E 2^r-v; III,i) can only be described as a rudimentary psychiatric “case history” makes Gabriel an interesting forerunner for Peregrine Joyless in The Antipodes.

6. This refers to the identification of Dainty in The Court Begger as Inigo Jones. Sir John Suckling, satirized with Jones and Davenant in The Court Begger, comes in for his share of ridicule in a prefatory poem to The Covent-Garden Weeded called “Upon Aglaura printed in Folio.” In the poem Brome says, among other things,

   This great voluminous Pamphlet may be said
   To be like one that hath more hair than head;
   More excrement than body. Trees, which sprout
   With broad leaves, have still the smallest fruit.

   (A 2^r)

   The poem was obviously added to Brome's manuscript later, as Aglaura was not written until late 1637 and published in folio form in 1638. Bentley points out that “according to contemporary accounts, Suckling gave the play to the King's Men instead of selling it, like a good work-a-day playwright, and he paid for special costumes and, according to Aubrey, scenery as well. Richard Brome could not forget this unfair competition with the poor professionals and grumbled about it repeatedly” (V, 1206).

7. In 1631, Frances Russell, fourth Earl of Bedford, engaged Inigo Jones “to lay out Covent Garden and to build a church in the piazzas which were projected” (E. Beresford Chancellor, The Annals of Covent Garden [London, 1930], p. 33).

8. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925–51), VII, 209-10.

9. OED, rook. Applied to persons as an abusive or disparaging term; a cheat, a swindler, or sharper. Thomas Dekker in The Wonderful Year (pub. 1603) uses “Rook” to mean a literary thief; “So many Rookes, catchpolls of poesy, That feed upon the fallings of hye wit” (Works [1884-86], I, 89).

10. The jibe is based on the professional prestige Inigo Jones enjoyed as an architect. Cockbrain's comment places Jones back in the building trade where Brome obviously thinks he belongs.

11. Kaufmann, op. cit., pp. 75-87. This theme is not the exclusive prerogative of this play. In The Queen's Exchange, written about the same time, Segebert's children take polarized positions in relation to their father. In other plays, attempts to enforce marriage produce the same result. In The Novella Victoria takes on the role of a courtesan; Millicent in The English Moor is disguised as a blackamoor.

12. Miles, op. cit., pp. 434-35.

13. Kaufmann, op. cit., pp. 59-60.

14. Clarence Edward Andrews, Richard Brome: A Study of His Life and Work (New York, 1913), p. 56.

15. Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1941–68), III, 81. The place of The New Academy in Brome's chronology is discussed in Chapter 1.

16. Kaufmann, op cit., pp. 53-57. John Payne Collier (History of English Dramatic Poetry II [London, 1831], 22-24) cites evidence that a company of French actors performed in London in 1629 (consult A. H. Upham, The French Influence in English Literature [New York, 1908], pp. 321-22). The lack of success of this endeavor, however, renders the occasion unlikely evidence for dating The New Academy earlier than Kaufmann suggests.

17. Upham, op. cit., p. 331.

18. The general influence of this new wave of Platonics upon such writers as Suckling and Davenant has been discussed by Jefferson Butler Fletcher (“Precieuses at the Court of Charles I,” Journal of Comparative Literature I [1903], 120-53); A. H. Upham (op. cit., pp. 308-64); and more recently by C. V. Wedgwood (“Comedy in the Reign of Charles I,” Studies in Social History, ed. John Harold Plumb [London, 1955], pp. 109-37); and George Sensabaugh (“Love Ethics in Platonic Court Drama 1625-1642,” Huntington Library Quarterly I [1937-38], 277-304).

19. Fletcher, op. cit., p. 150.

20. Sedge, op. cit., p. 171.

21. Sir Edmund Gosse and T. J. Wise, eds, The Complete Works of Charles Algernon Swinburne, 20 vols. (London, 1925–27), XII, 336.

22. Ram Alley was a well-known place of sanctuary in London south of Fleet Street where characters of questionable reputation gathered. The location is mentioned in Return from Parnassus (1601-1603), I, ii, 274; Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1621) II, ii, 123; and Jonson's A Staple of News (1626) II, v, 113. Its associations for the audience would be immediate. Another point of interest is that a new edition of David, Lord Barrey's play Ram Alley (1607-1608; pub. 1611) was printed in 1636, presumably to profit by the popularity of place-realism.

23. Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 56.

24. C. V. Wedgwood (op. cit., pp. 122-23) compares this situation to similar ones occurring earlier in Marston's Eastward Ho (1605) and in The City Madam (1637) by George Chapman.

25. Sedge, op. cit., p. 174.

26. Felix E. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama 1558–1642, 2 vols. (London, 1908), II, 272-73.

27. Floyd, op. cit., p. xxvi.

28. Kaufmann, op. cit., pp. 57, 182.

29. Swinburne, pp. 329-30.

30. Charles E. Guardia, “Richard Brome as a Follower of Ben Jonson,” Diss., Louisiana State University, 1939, p. 46.

31. Elizabeth Cook, “The Plays of Richard Brome,” More Books XXII (1947), 299.

32. Swinburne, p. 335.

33. Alfred Harbage, Cavalier Drama (London, 1936), p. 158.

34. Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 109ff.

35. Sedge, op. cit., p. 209.

36. Cited in Sensabaugh, op. cit., p. 279. The letter is dated June 3, 1634.

37. Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 120.

38. In the tragicomedies the action begins in and then moves out of the court world.

39. As, for example, he does in the Prologue to The Court Begger.

40. For specific examples interpolated into the dialogue from The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandeville and also from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, consult the explanatory notes in Ann Haaker's edition of The Antipodes (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1966).

41. Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing, Mich., 1951), p. 123. Professor Babb also points out that there are no medical resemblances to Hughball's method in medical writing of the period.

42. In Ford's play, Palador, Prince of Cyprus, is in a melancholic condition as a result of his love for the lost Eroclea. His doctor, Corax, reveals the cause of the Prince's lethargy through the “Masque of Melancholy.” The masque does not effect a cure, however. The Prince is only restored to health when united to his love. Brome, on the other hand, uses his masque at the end of The Antipodes as an illustration of what the plays-within-the-play have already effected.

43. Swinburne, op. cit., pp. 334-35.

44. Professor [Philip] Bordinat (“A Study of the Salisbury Court Theatre,” Diss. University of Birmingham, 1952, pp. 166-68) indicates scenes in which Letoy, Joyless, and Diana must have been watching from the upper stage. Letoy is with them at first and then descends to the main acting area from which he both directs the action and calls up comments to the viewers above. Later, as the play-within-the-play comes to an end, Letoy invites them down for “their parts are next.” Bordinat also gives a good argument (pp. 180-83) that when By-Play tells of Peregrine's mad intrusion into the actors' “Tyring-house,” he is describing the storage rooms of the Salisbury Court Theatre. The lines (sig. G 1^v-2^r; III,v), indicate, says Bordinat, that costumes were stored in an upper room and stage properties in a lower, thus facilitating quick movement of set pieces on and off the main acting platforms (i.e., a table set forth, covered with treasure [sig. K 3^v; V,iv]).

45. Andrews, op. cit., pp. 122-24.

46. The exposure of the guilt of Claudius in Hamlet's “mousetrap” scene is not the least of these.

47. Joe Lee Davis, “Richard Brome's Neglected Contribution to Comic Theory,” Studies in Philology XXX (1943), 520-28. Professor Davis expands his comparison of The Antipodes and The Muse's Looking Glass in “Thalia's Double Image,” Chapter two in The Sons of Ben (Detroit, 1967), pp. 59-80.

48. For an account of the importance of The Floating Island in contemporary religious and political controversy, consult Bentley, V, 1189-95.

49. Ian Donaldson, The World Upside-Down (Oxford, 1970), p. 81.

50. The whole of the paragraph from which Donaldson quotes is as follows:

    But should one wish to examine more elaborately the question of the Antipodes, he would easily find them to be old wives' fables. For if two men on opposite sides placed the soles of their feet each against each, whether they chose to stand on earth, or water, or air, or fire, or any other kind of body, how could both be found standing upright? The one would be assuredly found in the natural upright position, and the other, contrary to nature, head downward. Such positions are opposed to reason, and alien to our nature and condition. And how, again, when it rains upon both of them, is it possible to say that the rain falls down upon the two, and not that it falls down to the one and up to the other, or falls against them, or towards them, or away from them. For to think that there are Antipodes compels us to think also that rain falls on them from an opposite direction to ours; and any one will, with good reason, deride these ludicrous theories, which set forth principles incongruous, ill-adjusted, and contrary to nature.

    (John Watson McCrindle, ed., The Christian Topography of Cosmas, Hakluyt Society, O.S. XCVIII [London, 1897], 17)

    We cannot expect, of course, that Brome or any other of his Renaissance contemporaries would necessarily know Cosmas, but, as McCrindle points out, “Nearly all the Christian fathers held the same opinion as Cosmas about the Antipodes” (loc. cit.), and through them the concept became a Renaissance commonplace.

51. Professor Donaldson devotes a chapter to discussing the relationship of Brome's The Antipodes to this theory of comedy (op. cit., pp. 82-98).

52. Or again,

    Fac. And Lovers are as phantastic as ours?
    2 Her. But none that will hang themselves for Love, or
    eat candle ends, or drink to their Mistress' eyes, till
    their own bid them good night, as the Sublunary
    Lovers do.

    (Jonson, VII, 519-20)

53. Donaldson, op. cit., p. 78.

54. Swinburne, p. 335.

55. Bentley, III, 71-72.

56. William Van Lennep et al., eds., The London Stage 1660-18 (Carbondale, Ill., 1960-68), I, i (1965), 31-46; and J. Q. Adams, The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert (New Haven, 1917), p. 118.

57. For the dates of these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revivals both as a play and as a comic opera, consult The London Stage, passim.

58. Robert Clifford Latham and William Mathews, eds., The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970), II, 141.

59. J. A. Symonds, “Review of the Dramatic Works of Richard Brome,” Academy V (March 21, 1874), 305 (école buissonière-hedgeschool; faire l'école buissonière-to play truant).

60. Thomas Marc Parrott and Robert Hamilton, A Short View of English Drama (New York, 1943), p. 178. For further comment on the green world quality of A Jovial Crew, consult Swinburne, p. 337, and Schelling, op. cit., p. 170.

61. Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 170.

62. OED, doxy. Originally the term in Vagabond's Cant for the unmarried mistress of a beggar or a rogue; a beggar's trull or wench.

63. OED, Dell. Rogues' Cant. arch. A young girl (of the vagrant class); a wench.

64. OED 5, Mell. To copulate. The OED cites this line as an example.

65. Professor Haaker explains in her edition of A Jovial Crew (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1968) that “whereas rents of farm lands increased threefold between 1600 and 1688, Oldrents generously allowed his tenants to continue at the old rate” (p. 15n). References are made throughout the play to his open-heartedness and kindness.

66. Jonson, VIII, 580-81.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

1. Individual Works

The Antipodes: a Comedy. Printed by J. Okes, for Francis Constable, and are to be sold at his shops in Kings-street at the sign of the Goat, and in Westminster-hall (London, 1640).

Five New Plays, viz. The Mad Couple Well Matcht. Novella. Court Begger. City Wit. Damoiselle. Printed for Humphrey Moseley, Richard Marriot, and Thomas Dring, and are to be sold at their Shops (London, 1653).

Five New Plays, viz. The English Moor, or The Mock-Marriage. The Love-sick Court, or The Ambitious Politique. Covent Garden Weeded. The New Academy, or The New Exchange. The Queen and Concubine. Printed for A. Crook at the Green Dragon in Saint Paul's Church-yard, and for H. Brome at the Gunn in Ivy-lane (London, 1659).

A Jovial Crew: or, The Merry Beggars. Printed by J.Y. for E.D. and N.E. and are to be sold at the Gun in Ivy-Lane (London, 1652).

The Northern Lass, a Comedy. Printed by Aug. Mathews, and are to be sold by Nicholas Vavasor, dwelling at the little South door of St. Paul's Church (London, 1632).

The Queen's Exchange, a Comedy. Printed for Henry Brome at the Hand in Paul's Churchyard (London, 1657).

The Sparagus Garden: a Comedy. Printed by J. Okes, for Francis Constable, and are to be sold at his shops in Kings-street at the sign of the Goat, and in Westminster-hall (London, 1640).

2. Collaboration

Heywood, Thomas and Brome, Richard. The Late Lancashire Witches. Printed by Thomas Harper for Benjamin Fisher, and are to be sold at his Shop at the Sign of the Talbot, without Aldersgate (London, 1634).

3. Collection

Lachrymae Musarum; The Tears of the Muses. Collected and set forth by R. B. Printed by Thomas Newcomb (London, 1649).

Secondary Sources

Adams, Joseph Quincy, ed. The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert 1623-1673. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917. Sir Henry Herbert's office-book (no longer extant) covered the period 1622-42 during which he was Master of the Revels. Among other relevant documents, Adams brings together quotations from it which appear dispersed throughout the works of Edmund Malone and George Chalmers.

Allen, Herbert F. A Study of the Comedies of Richard Brome: Especially as Representative of Dramatic Decadence. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1912. Originally a University of Michigan thesis, the critical attitudes expressed are out of date and based upon a questionable definition of decadence.

Andrews, Clarence Edward. Richard Brome: A Study of His Life and Works. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1913. Part of the Yale Studies in English Series, this work originally prefaced a dissertation edition of The Antipodes. The author's interest in his subject is historic rather than intrinsic.

Bentley, Gerald Eades. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. 7 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1941-68. This monumental work follows on from E. K. Chambers's Elizabethan Drama and is indispensable to anyone working in Renaissance Drama.

Clark, Arthur Melville. Thomas Heywood: Playwright and Miscellanist. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931. A solid scholarly study of Heywood in which the critic credits Brome for what dramatic merit The Late Lancashire Witches has.

Cope, Jackson I. “Richard Brome: The World as Antipodes,” in The Theater and the Dream: From Metaphor to From in Renaissance Drama. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. A highly complex theoretical study of the manner in which the metaphors “all the world's a stage” and life “is such stuff as dreams are made on” relate to dramatic structure and to art as a reflection of human experience. Includes discussion of The Queen's Exchange, The English Moor, The Antipodes, and A Jovial Crew. Shorter comments on The Queen and Concubine and The Novella appear in the notes. “Brome is the most accomplished and serious dramatist between the Jacobean masters and Dryden.”

Davis, Joe Lee. “Richard Brome's Neglected Contribution to Comic Theory,” Studies in Philology XXXX (1943), 520-28. Excellent study of The Antipodes's comic theory as “cathartic” and “extrarealistic,” inspired by Thomas Randolph's The Muses' Looking Glass (1630).

———. The Sons of Ben. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967. This work includes comment on eleven of Brome's plays as well as selected works by Henry Glapthorne, Peter Hausted, Thomas Killigrew, Shackerley Marmion, Jasper Mayne, Thomas Nabbes, and Thomas Randolph. Professor Davis sees only Brome's The Antipodes and Randolph's The Muses' Looking Glass as standing apart from the plays of these “minor dramatists” or “small fry.”

Donaldson, Ian. “‘Living Backward’: The Antipodes,” in The World Upside-Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Critical study of The Antipodes relating it to traditional views of the antipodes as a locale of physical and moral opposites and to the theory of comic inversion.

Fletcher, Jefferson Butler. “Precieuses at the Court of Charles I,” Journal of Comparative Literature I (1903), 120-53. Includes Brome among satiric opponents of the Neo-Platonic love cult in the court of Charles I.

Greg, W. W. A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration. 4 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1939-59. The title of this work is self-explanatory and its reputation as an indispensable bibliographic tool is firmly established.

Haaker, Ann. “The Plague, the Theatre, and the Poet,” Renaissance Drama n.s. I (1968), 283-306. Documentary and historical discussion of the legal disputes between Brome and the Salisbury Court Theatre in 1640 which reveals much basic information on Caroline Playwrights' contracts with theaters.

Ingram, R. W. “The Musical Art of Richard Brome's Comedies,” Renaissance Drama n.s. VII (1976), 219-42. This study gives credit to Brome for his skill in incorporating music and musical entertainments as integral parts of total dramatic impression.

Jonson, Ben. The New Inn or The Light Heart. Edited with Introduction, Notes, and Glossary by George Bremner Tennant. Yale Studies in English XXXIV (1908). New York: Henry Holt and Company.

———. Works. Edited by C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-51.

Kaufmann, R. J. Richard Brome: Caroline Dramatist. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961. A good modern critical study of some of Brome's works which, although claiming to present a “sympathetic account of Brome's seventeenth century conservatism,” does credit Brome with some creative originality and independent artistic consciousness.

Lynch, Kathleen. The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926. Traces gradual shifts in moral attitudes and comic standards from the late Elizabethan period through the Restoration and concludes that the drama of Ethridge, Congreve, and their contemporaries is part of a developmental process of which Brome is a part.

Miles, Theodore. “Place-Realism in a Group of Caroline Plays,” Review of English Studies XVIII (1942), 428-40. Includes Brome's Covent-Graden Weeded and Sparagus Garden among contemporary vogue of realistic plays dealing with specific London areas.

Nicoll, Allardyce, and Boswell, Eleanore, eds. “Dramatic Records: The Lord Chamberlain's Office,” Malone Society Collections, general editor W. W. Greg, II: 3 (1931), 321-416. Basic theatrical records from 1619 to 1637, including Brome as Queen of Bohemia's player and listing performances of The Late Lancashire Witches and The Love-sick Maid.

Perkinson, Richard H. “Topographical Comedy in the Seventeenth Century,” English Literary History III (1936), 270-90. Relates earlier topographical comedies to Restoration in the use of realistic settings as plausible backgrounds for comedies of manners.

Sensabaugh, George. “Platonic Court Drama,” Huntington Library Quarterly I (1937-38), 277-99. Background study of tenets, ethics, and criticism of Neo-Platonic love cult at Caroline court.

Swinburne, Algernon Charles. “Richard Brome,” in The Complete Works XII (1926), 326-38. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas J. Wise, eds., 20 vols. London: William Heineman Ltd., 1925-27. Highly stylized Victorian evaluations of Brome's plays, comparing him unfavorably to Jonson.

Symonds, John Addington. “Review of the Dramatic Works of Richard Brome,” Academy V (March 21, 1874), 304-305. Extremely negative view of Brome as a “lackey” to Ben Jonson.

Thaler, Alwin. “Was Richard Brome an Actor?” Modern Language Notes XXXVI (1921), 88-91. Argues Brome as actor from his inclusion in 1628 in a royal warrant to the Queen of Bohemia's players.

Wedgwood, C. V. “Comedy in the Reign of Charles I,” Studies in Social History. J. H. Plumb, ed. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1955, pp. 109-37. Relates specific motifs of Caroline comedy to topics of contemporary society.