SOURCE: “Brome as a Dramatist,” in Richard Brome: A Study of His Life and Works, Henry Holt and Company, 1913, pp. 46-77.

[In the following essay, Andrews surveys Brome's surviving plays, discussing their structure, characters, versification, and moral content. Regarding the playwright's plots, Andrews declares: “In Brome, English drama reached an extreme of intricacy which has never been equaled.”]

The period of Brome's activity as a dramatist extends from the end of his apprenticeship with Jonson, which we may call about 1628, to the closing of the theatres in 1642. The records of his work show that he wrote, or had a hand in, twenty-three plays at least, sixteen of which have come down to us.

In order to determine a little better Brome's position in the history of drama, it may be well to place him with respect to his contemporaries. At the time he began to be prominent as a dramatist, most of the important Elizabethan and Jacobean writers were either dead or had ceased producing. Jonson's popularity had waned, though he wrote three more plays before his death in 1637. The same year Dekker died, but he had stopped writing plays more than ten years before. Fletcher had died in 1625, and Middleton in 1627, before Brome's success may be said to have begun. Heywood, Chapman, and Day still lived on, but were turning out but little dramatic work, the inferior productions of their old age. The only man of importance of the preceding generation who was still active was Massinger, who wrote eight plays between 1628 and the year of his death, 1639. Ford produced his best work during this period. Shirley, who produced over forty masques and plays between 1625 and 1642, is, I think, the only other strictly contemporary dramatist who is Brome's superior either in the number or the value of his works.

This is not a very proud boast—to be ranked second or third in the third period, the decadent period of Elizabethan drama. Looked at from the contemporary point of view, however, Brome is of more consequence. In this ‘brazen age’ of drama we call Shirley the last of the Elizabethans with individuality; Brome we may regard as ranking first among those who succeeded purely by imitation. If we compare him with the very numerous tribe of Caroline imitators, he stands out as a figure of real importance. As a dramatist of humors and manners, he is distinctly the superior of Nabbes, Glapthorne, Marmion, and Davenant, his four principal contemporaries after Shirley. The lesser men who were working in the same field at this period were Jasper Mayne, Arthur Wilson, Sir Aston Cokayne, the Duke of Newcastle, Robert Chamberlayne, William Cartwright, and Alexander Brome. These last mentioned writers, all but one resting in comfortable obscurity, wrote one or two humor-comedies apiece between 1631 and 1640. In the field of romantic drama Brome produced one fine play, the Jovial Crew, which had a greater popularity than almost any other play written in the Caroline period. In romantic tragedy he ranks as a merely respectable imitator of Fletcher, not inferior to Cartwright, Carlell, and Suckling.

For a more detailed discussion of the plays technically, a classification will be necessary. Of the sixteen extant plays, one, the Lancashire Witches, we may put aside as a reworking of an older comedy of manners by Heywood. Nine more are comedies of manners, with a predominance of Jonsonian humor-characters. These are the New Academy or the New Exchange, the City Wit or a Woman wears the Breeches, the Northern Lass (or a Nest of Fools),¹ the Covent Garden Weeded or a Middlesex Justice of Peace, the Sparagus Garden, A Mad Couple well Matched, the Antipodes, the Damoiselle or the New Ordinary, and the Court Begger. The English Moor or the Mock Marriage has such a prominent underplot of manners that it may be classed here, though the main plot is romantic comedy. The two other romantic comedies are the Novella and the Jovial Crew or the Merry Beggers. The Novella, with its Italian setting, is pure romance, but the English Moor and the Jovial Crew have English settings and a number of humor-characters. Finally, there are three tragi-comedies, the Lovesick Court or the Ambitious Politique, the Queen's Exchange, and the Queen and the Concubine. These are written in the heroic manner, have some tragic feeling, deal with royal personages, and end happily. The scenes are laid respectively in Thessaly, Saxon England, and Sicily. Even here, when Brome is farthest from the manner of Jonson, he introduces humor-characters.

Of all of these plays of Brome, but one seems to have any problem of authorship connected with it. This is the matter of the dual authorship of Heywood and Brome in the Lancashire Witches.² Fleay is undoubtedly correct in his statement that this is an old play of Heywood's revised by Brome to make it timely in its contemporary allusions, for a revival in 1634.³ Fleay, however, has not given a very accurate determination of the parts attributable to the two authors.

The evidence which indicates that the play is a revision is in the obvious interpolation of an episode, an omission of one or two incidents that we are led to expect, and a mention in two places of names of witches or spirits inconsistent with the names in the rest of the play. A transaction between Generous and Arthur, involving a mortgage, is mentioned in Act 1 (p. 178),⁴ and Robin in Act 3 (p. 210), gives his master Generous a receipt for one hundred pounds, which he has dropped. These two incidents seem to be connected but not very clearly. They also ought to lead up to something, but they are hardly mentioned further. Again, in Act 2 (p. 197), Arthur and Shakstone bet on the speed of their dogs in chasing a hare, but the scene ends abruptly on p. 199 without the interference of witchcraft which we are led to expect. These scenes indicate that something has been omitted in the present version of the play. Moreover, the incident of the boy and the greyhounds (pp.196, 199-201) is obviously an interpolation with no connection with any of the threads of interest. The boy is brought in again in Act 5 (pp. 241 ff.) as a witness against the witches, but his evidence is quite unnecessary, for the dénouement is brought about by the soldier who sleeps in the mill. The final indication of revision is the speech of Mrs. Generous in Act 4 (p. 240):

Call Meg, and Doll, Tib, Nab, and Iug,

and the use of three of these names, Nab, Jug, and Peg, again in Act 5 (p.244). The names of the witches throughout the rest of the play are Maud (Hargrave), Meg (Johnson), Gil (Goody Dickison), Mall (Spenser), and Nan Generous; while the familiars are Suckling, Pug, and Mamilion.⁵

The play, then, as published in 1634, is a revision. We may dispose of the possibility of collaboration in the revision by the fact that Heywood was writing for the Queen's Company in 1633, and that the Lancashire Witches⁶ was brought out by the King's Men, the company for which Brome was writing in 1633 and 1634.

We are able to determine, to a certain extent, the parts that may be ascribed to each author by comparing the play with the three sources that have been discovered. The main plot, the story of a woman of wealth practising witchcraft, finally discovered and condemned, is taken from a celebrated witch-trial in Lancashire in 1612. As ten witches were condemned and executed as the result of the trial, considerable notoriety was given to it. Heywood, with a journalist's instinct, made a play on the subject probably within a year of the trial.⁷ Besides this indication of Heywood's authorship of the main plot, the treatment of the erring wife by her husband (Act 4. p. 228) strongly suggests the Woman Killed with Kindness.

Closely connected with the main plot are three characters, Arthur, Shakstone, and Bantam,⁸ who, in the first scene of the play, accuse Whetstone, a foolish fellow, of being a bastard. At the end of the fourth act, Whetstone has his revenge by showing, with the aid of witchcraft, visions of the fathers of the three gallants—a pedant, a tailor, and a serving-man. Since this incident, as Langbaine pointed out, occurs in Heywood's Hierarchy of Angels,⁹ which was not published until 1635, and was, therefore, probably not known to Brome, I assign the parts in which these characters occur to Heywood.

Another interest in the play is the comic situation brought about by the reversal of the relations of father and son, mother and daughter, and servant and master, as an effect of witchcraft.¹⁰ This part of the play, which includes the characters of Old Seely, his son Gregory, and a friend, Doughty, I can find no good reason for attributing to Brome. On the other hand, as this reversed situation has some bearing on the relation of Arthur and Generous (pp. 178 and 182) in the main plot, it seems to me it must be assigned to Heywood.

The greater part of the rest of the play is taken up with the strange events at the marriage of Lawrence and Parnell, the servants of the Seely family. The witches play all sorts of pranks with the wedding-feast and frighten the guests; and one of them, Mall Spenser, gives Lawrence a bewitched cod-piece point, which causes a great deal of vulgar comedy by preventing him from consummating his marriage. This plot is involved to such an extent with all the different interests I have mentioned before, that I cannot see any possibility of a separate authorship for it. Arthur, Bantam, Shakstone, Whetstone, Seely, Doughty, and Gregory—characters in the other plots—are present in some capacity at most of the wedding scenes; Mall Spenser, who gives Lawrence the fatal present, has an intrigue with Robin, the servant who plays such an important part in the Nan Generous plot. Furthermore, there is a piece of external evidence which, I think, indicates that the Lawrence-Parnell plot was in the early version of the play. In Field's Woman is a Weathercock (5. 1), one character, addressing another as a very lusty person, says, ‘O thou beyond Lawrence of Lancashire.’ As Field's play was entered in the Stationers' Register Nov. 23, 1611, and the trial in Lancashire, from which Heywood drew his play, was not over until Aug., 1612, Field cannot be referring to Heywood's Lawrence. However, the probability is that both dramatists are using the name of a real character well-known to the audience, or a proverbial name for a person of his type. Whichever be the case, I think it safer to infer that the allusions to Lawrence should be dated as close together as possible. An allusion of this sort twenty years old would probably be forgot. Therefore, this external evidence also points to 1613 as the date of composition of the Lawrence-Parnell plot. Fleay seems to imply that the part of Lawrence and Parnell was added by Brome, because he says that the dialect which they speak is that of the Northern Lass.¹¹ This, however, is not true. The speech of Lawrence and Parnell, which is considered fairly good Lancashire dialect,¹² is much more difficult for the average reader than that of Constance in the Northern Lass, who speaks a sort of general North English dialect.¹³ As Heywood also has used a northern dialect elsewhere—e. g. in Edward IV.—as well as Brome, Fleay's argument is useless.

This attribution leaves very little part in the play to Brome. I think that all that can be shown positively to be his work are the passages that are undoubtedly based on the evidence gathered at the second trial for witchcraft in Lancashire in 1633. These are the short scene of the boy and the greyhounds in Act 2 (pp. 196-197); the sequel to it, in which one of the grayhounds turns into Goody Dickison (pp. 199-201); the scene of the meeting of the witches (pp. 218-221)¹⁴; and the boy's report of his adventure, at the beginning of Act 5 (pp. 241-244). This assigns to Brome about nine pages in all, out of a play of eighty-nine. Besides this, Brome changed the names of the witches and spirits throughout the play, and probably altered slightly the riming scene in Act 4 (p. 235), to introduce the references to Meg, Mamilion, Dickison, Hargrave, and All Saints' night. He also must have added the prologue and epilogue, and probably the song for Act 2, appended to the play.

All these details of the play, just enumerated, were drawn from the Examination of Edmund Robinson and the Confession of Margaret Johnson.¹⁵ They must, therefore, because of their later date, have been the additions of Brome. These interpolations have nothing to do with the rest of the play. In fact, Brome's reworking here has resulted in making a worse play out of a very poor one, merely to be up to date.

The authorship of the rest of Brome's work we have no reason to question. Four of the plays appeared during the author's lifetime, apparently under his supervision, for they have prefaces by him, and numerous commendatory verses by his friends. Moreover, the Antipodes has an appended note which I think assures us absolutely of its authorship. Ten more plays appeared under the editorship of Alexander Brome, the author's close friend. For the authenticity of the Queen's Exchange we have only the word of Henry Brome, the bookseller, but internal evidence, I think, confirms this. In fact, in all fifteen plays said to be by Brome alone, I can find no reason either in the Stationers' Register, the Herbert Office-book, or in internal evidence,¹⁶ for doubting the statement of the title-pages.

STRUCTURE OF THE COMEDIES OF MANNERS

There is a great deal of sameness about the comedies of Brome, but this is due, not to a lack of variety in types of plot, as Dr. Faust has suggested,¹⁷ but rather to a repetition of the stock characters and stock situations that seem to have pleased Caroline audiences.¹⁸ Brome's plots, I think, may be divided into four distinct types. The Antipodes must be put into a class by itself, for but one-third of it has a regular plot, which is the framework for the satiric masque with which the rest of the piece is taken up. Randolph's Muses Looking-Glass is the only other play I know which approaches this type.

The City Wit is a very good play, modeled on the type of the Alchemist, that is, it consists of a series of tricks¹⁹ rather than of a regularly developed intrigue. Crasy, a fallen tradesman who discovers that his relations and friends turn against him when he is in trouble, plots a revenge upon every one of them in turn by means of a series of disguises, with the help of his servant Jeremy. This gives a chance for six or seven excellent situations, almost any one of which could, like those of the Alchemist, be separated from the others. Some of them, however, again like those of the Alchemist, grow out of one another. This same sort of duping Brome has used again in the underplots of two more plays, Covent Carden Weeded and the Sparagus Garden. Here we have the fleecing of one or more country fellows by a band of London scoundrels or ‘roarers.’ As I have not come across this ‘cony-catching’ plot in drama before the Alchemist, I suppose we may consider that play the origin of all these scenes and underplots in Cartwright's Ordinary, Marmion's Fine Companion, Nabbes' Bride, and Glapthorne's Hollander, as well as those in the two plays of Brome just mentioned.²⁰ If these scenes were as typical of the lost plays of the period as they are of those extant, cony-catching must have been a stock situation of the late drama.

None of the other plays of Brome can be considered as merely a series of tricks. The rest of the plots are extremely complicated intrigues. But these I divide again into two classes, those made up of three, four, or five interests separable from one another, but united in the end; and those in which the various threads of the intrigue are completely involved in one another from the first act. Of the first class the Sparagus Garden is typical. This has five distinct interests, two of them wholly episodic, the other three brought together into one in Act 5. The main plot is a very complicated intrigue of two lovers separated by the enmity of the father of one and the grandfather of the other. The first underplot deals with the gulling of a country clown. The second underplot concerns the tricking of Sir Arnold Cautious by his nephew and other gallants. The episodic elements are the quarrels of Brittleware, the jealous husband, with his loose wife, and the very realistic tavern-scenes at the doubtful resort known as the Sparagus Garden. The main plot is further complicated by the addition of the unnecessary Money-lacks, father of the heroine, who does much plotting on his own account. The first underplot has one Tom Hoyden, who plots against his brother Tim, the country gull. The second underplot is loosely made to help the main plot by adding motive. There are other minor interrelations all through the play. All those interests, however, are kept practically distinct from one another until the last act. Here they are brought together with some skill. The whole effect of witnessing the play must have been much like trying to watch a five-ring circus with side-shows added!

The other plays that I put in this class are the Damoiselle, with three separate interests; the New Academy, with four; the English Moor, with four; Court Begger, with four; and Covent Garden Weeded, with three. Many of these separate interests are extremely involved in themselves—for instance, the main plots of the last two—and have much that is purely episodic besides. The last-mentioned play might be put in a class by itself, because the main plot is wholly dependent upon the exaggerated humor of one of the characters. This makes it exactly of the type of the Silent Woman. Just as Morose's exaggerated hatred of noise is the motive at the basis of that play, so Crosswill's desire to act contrary to the wishes of everybody with whom he comes into contact causes all the plotting and counterplotting of his children and friends in Covent Garden Weeded. However, as this play has underplots of a long-lost girl turning up and marrying a reclaimed rake, a band of ‘roarers’ who gull two victims, and a justice who weeds Covent Garden after much experience with its noxious plants, I class it with the comedies of separate interests, like the Sparagus Garden.

The other type of intrigue which Brome has used, that in which the threads of which the plot is composed are inextricably involved in one another from the beginning to the end of the play, has two examples, the Northern Lass and the Mad Couple well Matched. For an instance of this type I will summarize the situation at the beginning of Act 4 of the Northern Lass. Sir Philip Luckless has married the Widow Fitchow, but the pair have quarreled before the consummation of the marriage. Tridewell is in love with Mistress Fitchow, and she with him. Sir Philip is in love with Constance, the Northern Lass, who has gone mad for the love of him. Mistress Fitchow wishes her marriage annulled, but will not allow Sir Philip to marry Constance if she can help it. Constance has two other suitors, Nonsense and Widgine, both strongly backed by different persons who are interested, the Widow Fitchow being the backer of her brother Widgine. Sir Paul Squelch, a justice, the guardian of Constance, wishes her to marry Nonsense. Squelch incidentally has an intrigue with Holdup, a harlot, whom, in order to conceal her, he has disguised as Constance. This is but a bare statement of the situation, without mentioning the episodic scenes and the nine additional characters to help confuse the progress of the plot. The difference between this sort of plot and that of the comedy of the type of the Sparagus Garden is at once evident. In the Mad Couple well Matched there is the same intricacy of plotting. Here we have six or seven intrigues, in which everybody attempts somebody else's virtue, though there is not very much virtue in the entire dramatis personæ. But every thread is so involved in the others that to take one would necessitate a considerable change in the rest.

This variety of plot is exactly that which became most popular in the comedy of the Restoration. Even when we see it at its highest development in Congreve, it is difficult to follow, and impossible to remember long. It is interesting to note that both of Brome's comedies of this class were produced during the Restoration period with great success.²¹

The striking characteristic of all Brome's comedies of manners, of whatever type, is the extreme complication of their plots. They are mazes which have to be traversed a second time in order that the reader may be sure of finding his way at any point. To see them on the stage would require such close attention on the part of the audience that witnessing a play would become a serious mental effort, rather than a relaxation. And this complexity is characteristic not only of Brome, but of most of his contemporaries in the field of comedy. Brome has merely outdone them slightly in this respect, and has handled his difficult problem a little better. In Brome, English drama reached an extreme of intricacy which has never been equaled, and never can be surpassed without a hopeless entanglement of the wits of the audience. Even one of the characters in the Sparagus Garden exclaims:

Well here's such a knot now to untie
As would turn Œdipus his braine awry.

Middleton summed up his own type of comedy in his introduction ‘To the Comic Play-Readers, Venery and Laughter,’ of the Roaring Girl (1611). Here he compares playmaking to the ‘alteration in apparel’: ‘Now in the time of spruceness, our plays follow the niceness of our garments, single plots, quaint conceits, lecherous jests, dressed up in hanging sleeves.’ The comedy of the next generation lost the singleness of plot, and developed the other elements. In comparison with this quotation, we may take one from Richard Flecknoe's Discourse of the English Stage (c. 1660)²²: ‘The chief faults of ours are our huddling too much matter together, and making them too long and intricate; we imagine we never have intrigue enough, till we lose ourselves and Auditors, who shu'd be led in a Maze, but not a Mist; and through turning and winding wayes, but so still, as they may find their way at last.’ Any modern reader will feel that this fits Brome's plays much better than C. G.'s lines before the Sparagus Garden:

Nor is thy Labyrinth confus'd, but wee
In that disorder, may proportion see.

This last quotation and two more in the plays, may indicate that Brome was adversely criticized in this respect, even by some of his contemporaries. In Covent Garden Weeded²³ a character says: ‘Nay, mark, I pray you, as I would entreat an Auditory, if now I were a Poet, to mark the Plot, and several points of my play, that they might not say when 'tis done, they understood not this or that, or how such a part came in or went out, because they did not observe the passages.’ And again in the Damoiselle²⁴ occurs a similar remark:

                                                            Now Wat
Observe me:
As an ingenious Critick would observe
The first Scene of a Comedy, for feare
He lose the Plot.

A thing which adds to the confusion of Brome's plots is his great fondness for introducing episodic scenes and characters.²⁵ There is a natural temptation to do this, if one's chief aim is to show manners or humors. This is the reason for the introduction of the realistic scene of the shoemaker and tailor dunning the gallant in Covent Garden Weeded, and the tavern-scenes in the same play and in the Sparagus Garden, as well as of the scenes between the humors, Widgine and Anvile, in the Northern Lass, and the numerous episodic passages between Courtwit, Swaynwit, and Citwit in the Court Begger. Exact parallels to these are the scenes introducing Dawes and Lafoole in the Silent Woman. Of a less pardonable sort are the episodes which merely add confusion to the plot, without showing humors or manners. Such are those in which Anvile in the Northern Lass is sent to Constance's house, under the impression that it is a brothel, and is beaten; and Squelch, in the same play, is tried in his own house by another justice, and forced to marry Trainwell to extricate himself from his position.

But in spite of this overloading with episode in some of the plays, I consider Brome a very clever master of plotting. Of course such involved intrigue cannot be approved of by modern standards; but if we accept the criteria of Caroline and Restoration taste, we must admit that none of the ‘Sons of Ben,’ and but few of the Restoration playwrights, equalled Brome in weaving four or five strands of interest into one play. Schelling²⁶ and Ward²⁷ agree in calling him a very skilful handler of plots; and even Symonds,²⁸ who has little to say in his favor, admits that his plots are firmly traced, and sustained on one plan throughout, without any suggestion of improvisation. Dr. Faust,²⁹ on the other hand, says his plays are looser in construction than even Every Man out of his Humor, but I do not see how even the most careless reading could lead to this conclusion.

Brome's good points in plotting are his careful exposition in the first act, his attention to motives in the greater number of his plays, and the preparation he never fails to give for any important turn in the plot, except, of course, where he aims at complete surprise. The City Wit illustrates these qualities very well. The motives for Crasy's series of plots throughout the play are all carefully elaborated in the first act, where every one of his family and friends goes back on him in trouble. The entrance of Pyannet Sneakup, the shrew, is very well prepared for, so that she comes on in a whirlwind of invective. And near the beginning of the fifth act (p. 358), Crasy clarifies the very complicated situation by recapitulating the part of the scheme he has already planned. This monologue is very useful, and not at all crudely done. This last trait Dr. Koeppel has observed in Brome. He says, in speaking of Massinger's constructive power³⁰: ‘Same of the dramas of his contemporaries resemble mazes in whose paths both author and spectator may be lost. Richard Brome tried to avoid this by drawing attention to particularly difficult complications by an explicit remark of one of his dramatis personæ.’

One reason Brome is difficult to follow, in spite of the craftsmanship displayed in this manner, is that these hints and preparations often come so far before the action that they are forgotten by the audience. Examples of this are to be found in the Sparagus Garden, where an important revelation of the fifth act is prepared for by mysterious hints in the sixth scene of the second, and again in the Mad Couple. A place where this preparation of the audience is successfully accomplished is Covent Garden Weeded. Here a revelation of the fourth act is led up to by two conversations and a dumb show in the first three. A very fine dialogue, giving antecedent action with skilful unobtrusiveness, is that in the Sparagus Garden 1. 3. The Antipodes is an excellent example of Brome's attention to details in carrying out his main idea. Much of the humor of the play depends upon the detailed consistency in carrying out the inversions of position. These are but a few of the most striking illustrations of the playwright's careful endeavor to keep his plots clear.

The plays of Brome's contemporaries, besides having his weaknesses, are deficient also in his best point—plotting. Nabbes' Covent Garden, for instance, is mostly aimless dialogue, with little plot, very loosely put together. Tottenham Court is not much better, and the Bride is a series of separate attempts of a villain upon his cousin, without any organic unity in the plot. Marmion's Holland's Leager has another very loose plot—merely a number of old situations thrown together with but little sequence. Brome's situations are usually hackneyed, but they at least grow organically out of what precedes. Marmion's Antiquary is better, but not equal to Brome in the handling of complicated intrigue. His Fine Companion, however, is as good a play as the average of Brome's. Cartwright's Ordinary is devoid of invention, and absurdly crude in stage-craft. Glapthorne's Hollander is clear because it is simple, but his Wit in a Constable is most confused and hard to follow, although it has not nearly so much material as Brome employs in one plot. Cokayne's Obstinate Lady is one of the poorest-made plays of even this poor period. Beside the four last mentioned plays, Brome's productions, tiresome as most of them are, shine like bright metal on a sullen ground. In Mayne's City Match we have a plot of some cleverness, but poorly knit and hard to follow. It is a play of complex type, that needs much more care in preparation and explicit reference. Shirley's comedies are not so complex in structure as Brome's, but, though Shirley is superior in most respects as a dramatist, he has often less ingenuity in plotting.

Several times, however, Brome has fallen into a very serious fault in structure. This is the very cheap solution of a situation by the introduction of a deus ex machina in the fifth act. In the Antipodes, Old Truelock comes in at the end of the play, and relieves us of all doubts as to Lord Letoy's good intentions by explaining that Diana is really Letoy's daughter, who has been brought up from infancy as his own. A quite parallel situation is that of the dénouement of the New Academy, where it turns out that the chastity of Hannah is proved to her jealous husband by the information that Valentine is her half-brother. Hardyman, her father, is introduced here for the first time to prove this. The Mad Couple has two dei ex machina in the fifth act. These plays are the only ones in which this inartistic device is used to bring about a real solution. Brome had precedents for this in at least two plays by Jacobean dramatists of the first rank, Massinger's crazily constructed play, Believe as You List, and Middleton and Rowley's Spanish Gipsy. In the former, two new characters are brought on in the fifth act to solve the situation, and in the latter, a long lost wife and daughter turn up unexpectedly at the end.³¹

To conclude this discussion of the structural features of Brome's comedy, his dramatic motives should be mentioned. Three plays, the Northern Lass, the Court Begger, and Covent Garden Weeded, depend wholly upon expectation; no important surprise occurs. In all the others there is no use of surprise in the first four acts, but in the fifth there is always one surprise, usually in the identity of some character. This method is used several times by Jonson, notably in the Silent Woman. The Damoiselle has two surprises in the last act, and the Sparagus Garden three. Two of these last are prepared for by slight hints early in the play. This cheaper dramatic motive, is one of Brome's weaknesses, resulting from copying Jonson, who used it with real success but once.

CHARACTERS

A perusal of any one of the plays will show that Brome has much more interest in plot itself, in devising and solving intricate situations, than his master, Jonson. He tries to carry out Jonson's principle in characterization, but he never allows his interest in humors to create a play of the type of Every Man in his Humor or Every Man out of his Humor. In fact, none of the ‘Sons of Ben’ attempted anything of the sort. However, Brome does introduce purely episodic humors into his plots.

Brome cared more for humor-study than any other of the Jonsonian imitators, and succeeded best in it. But his humors are nearly all imitations—stock characters of London life repeated over and over in this late period of the drama. Some of these characters portray touches of nature that make them stand out somewhat above their types, and show that Brome was an observer of men, though he lacked the creative impulse to break away from the conventional methods of depicting them.

One of his favorite types is the jealous husband, a perennial figure in drama. The four representatives in these plays have nothing distinguishing about them. There are four uninteresting foolish citizens' wives, who are either indiscreet with their husbands' customers or pretend to be. Old knights who are still amorous, and decayed old gentlemen who live by projects or dishonorable employments, abound in the plays. The half-dozen of these, who bear such names as Sir Arnold Cautious and Sir Humphrey Dryground, are rather more disgusting than amusing, with the exception of old Hearty in the Jovial Crew. The ‘blunt servingman’ is a slightly drawn figure, who occurs in four plays. I imagine Brome's fondness for him may be caused by the fact that he himself was perhaps such a character when he was reading Tacitus to Ben Jonson; but this is dangerous dallying with surmise. The Puritan,³² the pedant, and the usurer, figure two or three times each. In his women-characters Brome is quite successful. The shrews, widows, nurse, silly lover of fashion, and foolish mother, as well as the bawd and the plentiful supply of eight harlots, all have an amusing self-assurance and great glibness of tongue. The last mentioned class of women are often drawn as rather pathetic creatures, with much good in them. Besides all these, there are one or two each of the class of ‘wenchers,’ projectors,³² a braggart, and a pickpocket. But Brome's best types are the foolish young countryman who comes to town to marry or to be made a gentleman, and is fleeced and made a fool of, the blunt old country gentleman, and the old justice. There are about seven in the first class, and a dozen in the last two. These old men with some special crotchet are the most amusing characters of the comedies, but repeated so often that there is too little variety in them.

In all this array of characters there is little originality. Not that they are feebly drawn, for there is considerable vigor in Brome's pen at times, but we have seen people with these same exaggerated peculiarities from the miracle plays to Jonson. About the best individual figures are Mrs. Pyannet Sneakup, a very good caricature of a shrew, in the City Wit; Constance, in the Northern Lass; and Springlove, in the Jovial Crew.³³ The last two are Brome's only original contributions in the way of character-drawing to English drama. Constance is a pathetic figure with a freshness, simplicity, and naturalness that are markedly contrasted with the rather unwholesome atmosphere of the most of Brome. She is the only example in all the comedies, of unsophistication made charming. Rev. Ronald Bayne suggests that the seventeenth century saw in her some of the charm of the heroines of Scott. The Yorkshire dialect she speaks adds much to this. Springlove is the best figure in Brome's best play; Charles Lamb speaks with some enthusiasm of him in a review of the play in 1819.³⁴ Springlove is a gipsy, whom civilization has been unable to subdue. The love of the fields and woods and the call of the open road suggest the late nineteenth-century theme of vagabondia.³⁵

REALISM AND ROMANCE

The chief interest in Brome's work to-day as drama is, of course, historic rather than intrinsic, but it also has a real interest to the student of the manners of the seventeenth century. In reading with this interest, one must be careful to remember that the ‘realism’ of the comedy with a complicated intrigue becomes almost as artificial and as divorced from actual life as work that is frankly romantic. The exigencies of such plots as Brome is fond of bring about situations that probably occurred as seldom in the life of the seventeenth century as in that of to-day. For instance, the association on the stage of women of character with harlots, a common situation in Brome, probably does not reflect the manners of the age. Likewise, the presence of gentlewomen at taverns was a much rarer thing in life than in Brome's comedies. Artificialities of this sort become dramatic conventions, just as types of characters do.

The student who reads Brome for manners must carefully consider this point. But there are some scenes which are doubtless transcripts of the daily life of England under Charles I. Such scenes are that in which a rabble duck a pandar in the Damoiselle (4. 1); that in which an old woman is ducked for scolding (in this case, however, a ‘manscold’) in the Antipodes; the very realistic tavern-scenes in Covent Garden Weeded³⁶ and the Sparagus Garden, and the scenes at an academy of deportment in the New Academy.³⁷ At scenes of this sort Brome is very successful. In fact, the historian of society will find more for his purpose in Brome than in Jonson, who saw more humor in universal foibles than in ephemeral conditions.

Realism was Brome's most congenial field, but, like Shirley, a typical playwright, he tried his hand at whatever was popular. As romance was in great demand through the latter half of the period of his activity, he made several attempts at two or three varieties of romantic plays. In the prologue to the Northern Lass he says that he is capable of serious work, and in the prologue to the Sparagus Garden, actually promises something to ‘take graver judgment.’ This, I suppose, he attempted to fulfill in the three tragi-comedies. These Fletcherian imitations have been moderately praised by Ward, Schelling, and Rev. Ronald Bayne. The earliest, the Lovesick Court, is a mediocre piece of work, but the other two, the Queen's Exchange and the Queen and the Concubine, are really interesting, in spite of the fact that Brome's poetry has no distinction. All three plays show the skill in plotting that I have commented on in speaking of the comedies of manners.

Of the three romantic comedies of intrigue, the Novella is the least interesting. There is no Jonsonian influence discernible, but the plot has the intricacy almost always characteristic of Brome. In the English Moor, a well constructed main plot, of very good comedy of its type, is combined with a highly romantic underplot suitable for a tragi-comedy. The combination is not happy, but the plots separated might make two good plays. The piece is particularly interesting as an experiment. Brome, who always affected to despise romance,³⁸ is here attempting to satisfy the popular demand for it, without giving up his favorite study of humors and manners.

However, in his last play, the Jovial Crew, Brome has succeded in combining realism and romance with charming effect. His method here is to choose an amusing romantic plot, and develop it with humor-characters. The success of the combination is probably due to the fact that the plot itself is a mild satire on the love of romance in young ladies. With this idea in mind, the situation of the Spanish Gipsy is transferred to contemporary English country life, and supplied with humor-characters, which Brome can draw with skill. The combination of these two forms of art is exactly what Jonson tried in his failure, the New Inn. But Jonson tried to write romance with very little action. As Dr. Tennant says in his analysis,³⁹ three-fifths of the play is a bore. Brome, who is much less interested in satire, or in humor-study for its own sake, and who always has a keen eye for what is dramatic, has been able to avoid Jonson's mistake.

VERSIFICATION

‘Each of the Elizabethan and Jacobean men has a metrical method of his own; Ford and Shirley have metrical methods not of their own, being for the most part only those of Jonson or Middleton weakened by toning down to a uniformity of manner; but Davenant, Suckling, and a whole host of minor Carolans (who, to our comfort, contributed only one or two plays each), have no metre properly so-called of any kind; they wrote in a system which even Wagner only ventured to hope for, not to act on, of music without bars; they had no rule but their individual whim; and the result was a hybrid of irregular iambic, certainly not verse, and which it would be an insult to the ghosts of Milton, Landor, and De Quincey to call prose.’⁴⁰ This statement of Fleay's, harsh and sweeping as it is, certainly applies to the versification of Brome. In fact, the lover of poetry must read through an arid waste to find a few lines to enjoy in the work of even the most conspicuous names in the dramatic literature of the reign of Charles. Massinger, interesting as he is as a playwright, has nothing but facility to recommend his verse. Symonds allows him scarcely a dozen lines of intrinsic beauty.⁴¹

If this is true of the romantic drama of the period, we may expect to find extremely careless work in the realistic comedies of manners. Why these should be written in verse at all is hard to see. Yet Brome, following the custom, wrote six out of the nine plays of this type partly in verse. The Antipodes, with the exception of a dozen lines, is wholly in verse. This rather useless practice, I suppose, we may attribute to literary convention.

As verse adds very little to comedies of manners, and in fact, detracts from the realism, we should not be over-nice in criticizing Brome, Nabbes, and the rest, for their roughness. Cartwright, who had fair ability as a versifier, has shown in his Ordinary that long speeches and elaborate similes in the romantic manner hardly suggest the atmosphere of the dregs of London society. The more prosaic the verse, the better it is for this purpose. Brome, however, wrote as execrably for tragi-comedy as for his ‘low and home-bred subjects.’

In the Prologue to the Northern Lass he says:

Gallants, and Friends-spectators, will yee see
A strain of Wit that is not Poetry?
I have Authority for what I say:
For He himself says so that Writ the
Play,
Though in the Muses Garden he can walk;
And choicest flowers pluck from every stalk
To deck the Stage; and purposeth, hereafter,
To take your Judgements: now he implores your
          laughter.

This boast Brome never succeeded in making good, for an analysis of the verse of his three tragi-comedies, in which he evidently expected to take our judgments, shows no more metrical skill than is apparent in the comedies of manners. His verse always averages rather poor, and shows carelessness and lack of ear. Every scene presents difficulties of scansion that frequently make the reader prefer to read the so-called verse as prose rather than take the trouble to determine the author's intention, if indeed, he had any. Lines of no rhythm at all are occasionally introduced, like these two in the Queen and Concubine (1. 1.):

I was i' the' way: but the Queen put me out on't.
But what of him now in the battail?

A very irritating rhythm that is a marked mannerism with Brome, is produced by a huddling of unstressed syllables in the middle of an eleven-or twelve-syllable line. For instance, in the first scene of the Antipodes, he allows the following:

Might make a gentleman mad you'll say and him.
And not so much by bodily physieke (no!)

Another effect that may become very annoying is caused by the jolt at the end of a line with a hovering stress on the tenth and eleventh syllables. For example:

With an odd Lord in towne, that looks like no Lord.
Some of your project searchers wait without sir.
With his old misbeliefe. But still we doubt not.

Another annoying point in Brome's rhythm is the uncertainty as to whether some twelve-syllable lines are Alexandrines, or lines with extra mid-line syllables, or lines with double feminine endings. For instance:

In competition for the crown as any man.
For you to rectifie your scrupulous judgement.
I am an old Courtier I, still true to th' Crown.

Other examples of carelessness in versification are the two ‘fourteeners’ in the first scene of the Lovesick Court, and the occurrence, four times in Brome's work, of a word divided at the end of a line.⁴²

This accusation of general carelessness in technique is not a random generalization based on the verse-writer's early work. I can find no indication of development in skill, no progress of any sort. The examples quoted below, of the best verse I can find in Brome, are both from plays written probably in 1635, the middle period of his production. The late plays, the Antipodes, Court Begger, and Jovial Crew show no attempts at remedying the faults of the early work. The number of feminine endings and of run-on lines shows some slight variation, but no regular chronological progress. In the use of a certain definite type of verse to introduce variety, the four-stress heroic line, or ‘ten-syllable tetrameter,’ as Professor Cobb⁴³ calls it, there is again no evidence of increase or decrease in frequency. While Shakespeare's use of this, varying from sixteen to six per cent, makes an added chronological verse-test possible, no such check can be found for Brome, whose use does not vary much from an average of eight per cent.

The model of Brome in his versification I think was Fletcher. The evidence of personal friendship between the two men, and of some influences in details, as well as in the general style of tragi-comedy,⁴⁴ makes the theory a priori not untenable. Among the distinguishing characteristics of the use of Fletcher given by Fleay⁴⁵ are the large number of feminine endings, and the ‘abundance of trisyllabic feet, so that his lines have to be felt rather than scanned; it is almost impossible to tell when Alexandrines are intended.’ Both these points are markedly characteristic of Brome's prosody. Professor C. H. Herford⁴⁶ has pointed out another distinguishing trait of Fletcher—that ‘the pause after two emphatic monosyllables, the first of which bears the verse stress, is common within the line, as well as at the end, and is very rare in Shakespeare.’ The use of this in the middle of the line I have not noticed in Brome, but the jolting effect of it at the end, which is a serviceable Beaumont-Fletcher test,⁴⁷ is one of the traits which I have tabulated as distinctly a mark of Brome. …

After exhibiting Brome's faults as a versifier, it is only fair to quote a few passages of his best work. The following is from the Sparagus Garden (3. 5, p. 163):

You dare not sir blaspheme the virtuous use
Of sacred Poetry, nor the fame traduce
Of Poets, who not alone immortal be,
But can give others immortality.
Poets that can men into stars translate,
And hurle men down under the feet of Fate:
Twas not Achilles sword, but Homers pen,
That made brave Hector dye the best
of men:
And if that powerful Homer likewise
wou'd,
Hellen had beene a hagge, and Troy
had stood.
…
Poets they are the life and death of things,
Queens give them honour, for the greatest Kings
Have bin their subjects.

Brome's best verse is to be found in the Queen's Exchange. The Shakespearian influence shown in situations and characters may also be felt occasionally in the verse. I quote two of the most effective passages:

                                                                                At the same place again?
If there be place, or I know any thing,
How is my willingness in search deluded?
It is the Wood that rings with my complaint,
And mocking Echo makes her merry with it.
Curs'd be thy babling and mayst thou become
A sport for wanton boys in thy fond answers,
Or stay, perhaps it was some gentle Spirit
Hovering i' th' air, that saw his flight to Heaven,
And would direct me thither after him.
Good reason, leave me not, but give me leave
A little to consider nearer home;
Say his diviner part be taken up
To those celestial joys, where blessed ones
Find their inheritance of immorality.

(2. 3, p. 496.)

Ha! Do I hear or dream? is this a sound,
Or is it but my fancy? 'Tis the music,
The music of the Spheres that do applaud
My purpose of proceeding to the King.
I'l on; but stay; how? What a strange benummednesse
Assails and siezes my exterior parts?
And what a Chaos of confused thoughts
Does my imagination labour with?
Till all have wrought themselves into a lump
Of heaviness, that falls upon mine eyes
So ponderously that it bows down my head,
Begins to curb the motion of my tongue,
And lays such weight of dulness on my Senses,
That my weak knees are doubling under me.
There is some charm upon me. Come thou forth
Thou sacred Relique! suddenly dissolve it.
I sleep with deathlesse(48); for if thus I fall,
My vow falls on me, and smites me into Ruine.
But who can stand against the power of Fate?
Though we foreknow repentence comes too late.

(3. 1, p. 504.)

MORAL TONE

The ideas of decency in the seventeenth century were certainly very different from those of subsequent times. The numerous contributors to Jonsonus Virbius unite in asserting that Ben Jonson never wrote a word that might offend the chariest sense of modesty. Ben is always moral, but it would take a bold critic to call him modest. The same thing is true of most of the Jacobeans. With the Caroline dramatists there was somewhat of a weakening of the moral tone, and a slight increase in the vulgarity and indecency of the dialogue. But they surely did not have far to go in the last mentioned respect, after Bartholomew Fair. In both morality and indecency Brome reflects the tendency seen in the average plays of the reign of Charles I.⁴⁹

Alexander Brome, in his preface to Five New Plays of 1653, is quite right in saying that the plays are ‘as innocent of wrong, as full of worth,’ but he is not right in the sense in which he intended the line to be understood. Extreme coarseness seems to have become a dramatic convention in the comedy of manners. Middleton and Nabbes are as great offenders against modern taste as Brome. Glapthorne and Davenant become equally foul in language, whenever their style is colloquial. Even the knight, Sir Aston Cokayne, and the clergyman, Jasper Mayne, are quite as degraded.⁵⁰ The dramas of these men reached such a low point that Wycherley and Vanbrugh in the next reign could not descend much further. However, none of them put on the stage such unspeakable grossness as Jonson and Herrick employed in certain of their epigrams.

Though there is no difference in the indecency of language between the writers of the Caroline and those of the Restoration period, there is some difference in the moral tone of their plots. Plays in which vice is made attractive and virtue ridiculous do occur in Elizabethan drama, but they are rare. The triumph of the rake, Mirabel, in Fletcher's Wild Goose Chase (1621), marks the beginning of the moral decline carried on in Shirley's Brothers (1626) and Lady of Pleasure (1636), and Brome's Mad Couple well Matched (c. 1635). In the Brothers, Luys is the counterpart of Mirabel, and in the Lady of Pleasure, the three gallants, Scentlove, Kickshaw, and Littleworth, are typical Restoration sparks, who talk openly of intrigues, and affect immorality more than they practise it. In the Mad Couple well Matched there are four intrigues, and two more suspected; the bad characters all end happily; no one suffers for his flagrant immorality; the hero is faithless, a rake, a scoundrel, and a liar.

This play, however, is unique among Brome's. In all the rest, the good wins in the end. In several of them there is a definite moral, or at least a conscience, in spite of the fact that the aim is chiefly to amuse. An instance is Fabritio's excusing himself to the audience for his conduct toward his father in the matter of the old man's amours.⁵¹ Again we have the highly moral speech of Diana to Letoy, who pretends to tempt her virtue, in the Antipodes (5. 2). And in the Damoiselle there is a strong moral influence, without any trace of the Restoration manner. In his satire we have perhaps the best proof that Brome worked most of the time with a correct moral standard, for he always, like his master, ridicules folly and vice, but never virtue.⁵²

Notes

1. Sub-title first added to edition of 1663.

2. The five pages following are reprinted from my article, the Authorship of the Lancashire Witches in Modern Language Notes for this year.

3. Fleay, Biog. Chron. 1. 301.

4. Heywood's Works, 1873, Vol. 4.

5. See pp. 187-189, 199-202, 218-222, 235.

6. See title page to a Maiden-head well Lost, 1634, and Schelling's list, Eliz. Drama 2. 586.

7. T. Potts's Discoverie of Witches in the County of Lancaster, London, 1613, (reprinted by the Chetham Society, 1845) gives a full account of the trial, but I do not think was the actual source of the play. Heywood probably had merely heard of the trial.

8. See pp. 176, 189 ff., 246 ff., 250 ff.

9. Bk. 8. p. 512.

10. Pp. 179-187.

11. Fleay, op. cit. 1. 303.

12. Crossley's Intro. op. cit. p. 65, n. 1.

13. Compare the words listed from the two plays by Eckhardt, Die Dialekt- und Ausländertypen des Älteren Englischen Dramas. 1900, 1. 86 and 87.

14. The original idea of this scene was probably in the first version, but the getting a feast by pulling at ropes and the presence of the boy, come from the 1633 source.

15. Both found in Crossley's introduction to T. Potts, op. cit., pp. 59-76.

16. E. H. Oliphant in ‘The Problem of Authorship in Eliz. Drama’ (Mod. Phil., 8. 3), says there are but three plays of Brome on which we may base a knowledge of his style with anything like absolute safety,-Antipodes, Jovial Crew, and Covent Garden Weeded, and adds that there are eleven more which may be accepted unless internal evidence cause us to doubt the external. He gives no reason for the particular selection of Covent Garden Weeded. His suggestion that the Mad Couple is probably founded on a play by Rowley, because it appears on the Cockpit list of 1639 between plays by Rowley and those of Shirley, I consider ill grounded.

17. Op. cit., p. 31.

18. Dr. Allen (op. cit., pp. 44-46) has mentioned Brome's repetition of himself as his most provoking habit. This is shown in the repeated types of character (see below p. 64); in the similarity of the disgrace-situation at the basis of the main plots of Novella, Damoiselle, and New Academy; and in the wearisome frequency of disguise as a motive in fourteen plays. ‘Secrets of birth, false marriages, a man marrying one person when he thinks he is marrying some one else, changed letters, confused identities, timely disappearances, drunken scenes, last scene conversions,—all appear just as one expects them to.’

19. Woodbridge, Studies in Jonson's Comedy, p. 60.

20. Cf. also Middleton's Fair Quarrel 4. 1 and 4, where Chough is taught to be a ‘roarer.’

21. See above, p. 30.

22. Attached to Love's Kingdom, a Pastoral Tragicomedy, 1664. In Hazlitt's Treatises on the English Drama and Stage.

23. 3. 2, p. 50.

24. 3. 1, p. 417.

25. Dr. Allen is certainly mistaken in saying that Brome ‘chooses his incidents and scenes with a view to ‘plot advancement, and, ordinarily, to that alone,’ and that ‘nothing is shown merely to exhibit or explain characters’ (op. cit., p. 49.)

26. Elizabethan Drama 2. 274.

27. Op. cit., 3. 131.

28. Academy 5. 304.

29. Op. cit., p. 32.

30. Cambridge Hist. Eng. Lit. 6. 173.

31. One other fault, that has been pointed out by Dr. Allen (op. cit. p. 51), is that the ‘preparation for the last act or the close of it is sometimes inadequate … According to long accepted tradition the conclusion of the comedy must be happy,—even the villain must be punished very lighty, if at all … So Brome, like many of his betters, is prone to convert his villain by main strength in the last scene. For this no preparation is likely to be adequate.’

32. See appendix II.

33. Walter Baetke (Kindergestalten bei den Zeitgenossen und Nachfolgern Shakespeare's, Halle, 1908, pp. 73-76) considers Gonzago in the Queen and Concubine an original type of the child in drama, a creation of Brome's.

34. The Examiner, July 4, 5, 1819 (Works, ed. Lucas, 1. 186).

35. In connection with this notice of types of character I may mention Brome's use of dialect and foreign phrases. The Northern Lass contains a great deal of Yorkshire dialect; the Lancashire Witches considerable fairly accurate Lancashire; and the Sparagus Garden a little of the ordinary clown-dialect (Somersetshire?) so frequently used by the Elizabethan dramatists. Some French and French English occurs in the Damoiselle, and one or two German phrases in the Novella. (For a complete list of dialect words, etc. see E. Eckhardt, Die Dialekt- und Ausländertypen des Älteren Englischen Dramas, Louvain, 1910-11). The City Wit has a great deal of Latin, and the Jovial Crew several scenes written in beggars' cant.

36. In 3. 1, an interesting tavern-bill is itemized.

37. This, again, may be purely an artificial invention. Shirley, who has anticipated Brome here in his Love-Tricks, or the Academy of Compliments (1625), may have developed the idea from Cynthia's Revels.

38. E. g., the Prologue to the Jovial Crew.

39. New Inn., ed. Tennant, Introduction, p. XXXV.

40. Fleay, Chron. Hist., p. 314.

41. Massinger's Works, Mermaid Series, Introduction, p. XV.

42. Antipodes 2. 3; New Academy 4. 1; Queen's Exchange 1. 1; Weeding Covent Garden, Prologue. Shirley is guilty of this in the Cardinal 1. 2, and Jonson used it in a few doggerel passages.

43. C. W. Cobb, ‘A Type of Four-Stress Verse in Shakespeare,’ New Shakespeareana 10. 1-15. Examples of this type in the Queen's Exchange 1. 1 are:

    Betwixt smooth flattery and honest judgements.
    Whom my great wisdom would allot the Queen.

44. See above, pp. 20; 68.

45. Shakespeare Manual, p. 153.

46. Eversley edition, Works of Shakspere (1904) 7. 154, note 1.

47. In an examination of a thousand lines of the work that is assigned to Beaumont alone, on external evidence. I have found practically no cases of hovering stress on the tenth and eleventh syllables.

48. A word seems to have dropped out here.

49. Dekker and Webster's Northward Ho is not exactly a moral preachment, either. The whole atmosphere of it is foul. Every man tries to cuckold his friend. Poetic justice is meted out in the end by marrying the worst villain to a prostitute. In one scene a man is pandar to his wife.

50. Marmion's comedies are the least open to objection, on this point, of all those of the time.

51. Novella 4. 2, p. 160.

52. See below, Influence of Jonson, p. 91.