SOURCE: “Brome's Comedy of Types and Inversions,” in Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, & Brome, The University Press of Kentucky, 1992, pp. 155-96.

[In the following essay, Clark detects a strain of sociopolitical criticism running throughout Brome's body of work but notes that the playwright offers no solutions to the problems he identifies.]

THE REVISIONARY POTENTIAL OF BROME'S BACKGROUNDS

There is even less information about Richard Brome and his acquaintances than there is about his colleagues and theirs. Apart from evidence about his theatrical associates, few traces of his background remain. Compared to that loyal son of the adviser and agent of noble patrons, Massinger, that genteel son placed at the inns of court by his well connected family, Ford, or that ambitious son of a moderately prosperous merchant, Shirley, we have scant knowledge of Brome's family, schooling, or friendships. So his attitudes remain even more open to conjecture than theirs. The hints left for us indicate that he came from common origins and worked his way up. One pattern among overachievers is to turn on their heritages, try to ignore their pasts, and take on their patrons' values. Most critics, such as McLuskie in The Revels History of English Drama, have accepted Kaufmann's description of a morally, socially, and politically normative as well as artistically traditional Brome.¹ But another pattern is also familiar: overachievers can cultivate their origins, develop critiques of current sociopolitical and artistic givens, and suggest revisions. This view, which has been recommended by Sedge, intimated by Shaw, and argued by Butler, seems to offer an increasingly attractive hypothesis about Brome's attitudes and plays.²

No biography has been verified before the famous reference to Jonson's “man, Master Brome,” in the induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614). Because Brome had a penchant and an ear for dialects it does not seem unlikely that he came to London from the outlands. And because a Richard Brome is listed among the Queen of Bohemia's Players, it seems likely that he was once an itinerant player in a troupe traveling the provinces.³ He was thoroughly professional, and many of his friends were theater professionals. Jonson proclaimed and Brome took pride in his rare master's professional paternity; Dekker made the same claim; and Heywood collaborated with Brome twice. Ford and Shirley wrote commendatory verses for his plays, and he returned the compliment to Shirley. John Tatham, who succeeded Heywood both as the Poet Laureate of London for the Lord Mayor's pageants and as the principal writer for the Red Bull theater, traded commendatory verses with Brome. Other lesser literary figures, too, wrote to honor him: Robert Chamberlain, an apothegmatist; John Hall, a friend of Shirley as well as a pamphleteer commended by Cromwell. And Brome wrote to honor many of them: Shakerley Marmion, a boon companion of Suckling and the author of Cupid and Psyche; Thomas Nabbes, another playwright who was associated with the Salisbury Court theater; Humphrey Mills, a hack. Other friends apart from Stephen(?) Brome, his brother, and Alexander Brome, his unrelated editor, seem to stem from stage associations. His closest known friends, Christopher and especially William Beeston, father and son, were theatrical impresarios; the son risked, and got, censorship and reprimand with Brome. A double commender, C.G., if Christopher Goad, was a member of the King's Revels at Salisbury Court; he also praised Tatham. Most of these theater professionals were closer to the city than to the court.

After his initial success with the King's Men at the private Blackfriars as well as at the public Globe, Brome concentrated on less prestigious theaters and so on privileged audiences less likely to have been ranked with courtiers. After producing The Northern Lass (1629) and perhaps The Queen's Exchange (1629-31?), certainly The Novella and probably The Covent-Garden Weeded (both 1632) for the King's Men, Brome seems to have written primarily for a succession of companies at the Salisbury Court theater. Brome did his last plays, beginning with A Mad Couple Well Match'd (1639), for Beeston's Boys at the Cockpit in Drury Lane. While Salisbury Court and the Cockpit in Drury Lane were private theaters, neither proved as courtly or as prestigious as Blackfriars. And only the Cockpit presumed so high.

The final meager evidence about Brome's projected audience comes with two of his three dedicatees. To William Seymour, Earl of Hertford, Brome presented a manuscript of The English Moor (1637) and dedicated The Antipodes (1638). Hertford was appointed governor of the Prince of Wales in 1641 and he did ultimately support the king. But through the 1630s he was, as Butler shows, one of the nobles who criticized many of Charles's actions. Brome's most significant dedication was to William Cavendish, the Earl of Newcastle, that notable patron especially associated with Brome's mentor, Jonson, and with Shirley. To Newcastle, Brome dedicated The Sparagus Garden (1635) when he published it in 1640; and for Newcastle's comedy, The Variety (1641?), he wrote a commendatory poem. Butler recounts Newcastle's nostalgia for the Elizabethan court and his desire for reforms in the Stuart court. Similar sentiments compelled a number of privileged Carolines to express the need for changes in view of the future, not merely in retrospect on the past.⁴ There are indications, then, that Brome shared with much of his known audience a nostalgia for tradition combined with some dismay over the current court scrambling that thrived on absolutism and favoritism; moreover, such feelings could take the form of proposed changes. A similar tendency appears in Brome's revisionary adoption of dramatic traditions. Both inclinations are revealed in the ways Brome's plays repeatedly present problems requiring personal and sociopolitical change.

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL QUESTIONING

Situating Brome's political and social views, like characterizing his associations, is more difficult than for the other Caroline professional playwrights. Evaluations from Kaufmann's in the 1950s through Shaw's and Butler's in the 1980s have made clearer for Brome than for Massinger—much clearer than for Ford or for Shirley—that here was neither an evasion of the present nor a mirror of decadence. Brome presented pressing issues in a pressing time. His persistent concern with Caroline sociopolitics, like Shirley's, is indicated by the settings and subjects of his plays. All those extant present contemporary London or its environs, except for a few tragicomedies. The Queen's Exchange is set in British antiquity, The Novella in contemporary Venice, and The Love-sick Court (1633-38?) in a burlesque domain of current plays; The Queen and Concubine (1635-36) is set in Sicily but it comments on favoritism in sociopolitics and on adherence to hierarchy. Like Shirley and a few other Caroline dramatists, Brome employed local sites such as Ram Alley for A Mad Couple Well-Match'd; some of these are mentioned in his titles, as in The Covent-Garden Weeded and The Sparagus Garden.⁵ More often than Shirley's, Brome's plays target celebrities, such as Inigo Jones in The Covent-Garden Weeded, who is joined by Sir John Suckling and Sir William Davenant in The Court Beggar (1640).⁶ Brome serves social historians better than the other Caroline professionals do because he perpetually mentions new fads such as balconies, litters, men's pocket combs, and women's black bags. And he rivals Shirley's record for presenting contemporary institutions, such as The New Academy, or The New Exchange (1635?), The Damoiselle, or The New Ordinary (1638?), and the blackface masque in The English Moor, or The Mock-Marriage, as vehicles for themes.

Brome's contemporary allusions do not seem casual. His pointed albeit intermittent references to courts and legalities provide more than evidence of irritations that culminated in the well-known lawsuit over his contract with the Salisbury Court company. They indicate ire at authorities who abuse their positions and subjects who scramble for status to abuse. From The Northern Lass's aptly named blustering Bulfinch and overbearing, lecherous Squelch, who are attended by the larcenous Constable Vexhem, to A Jovial Crew's verbosely abusive Justice Clack, his portraits of justices show a Brome disturbed by peremptory, tyrannous authority. His recurring stories about victims of malicious and predatory lawsuits reveal a Brome anguished by the misuse of the courts. Yet legal suits in Brome can be atoned for. For instance, Meanwell and Rashley entangle The English Moor in their repentance for an unjust suit against decayed Winloss. And often in Brome the law's victims have counter-balances. Ruined Brookall, who rails against the law's inequities and refuses to perjure himself as a paid witness, contrasts in The Damoiselle with Justice Bumpsey, who maintains his family by shrewd generosity.

If there is plenty of evidence for what Brome took to be political and social problems in his era, there is little agreement in ours as to what attitudes he held. Kaufmann portrays a nostalgic conservative concerned to preserve Elizabethan values, Butler a radical political critic. Though contradictory, these views are not necessarily contrary. Recent historians corroborate that few of the political or social inclinations held by privileged Carolines as yet constituted oppositions. And visions of the past provided a primary source and motive for most of the era's calls for reform as well as for reaction. Peter Burke represents many students of the era: then “popular political consciousness was negative rather than positive.”⁷ Just so, Brome's predominant social and political targets are obvious, yet no consistent Brome platform is discernible. Apparently he saw no solutions apart from recognizing individual merit and granting mutual forgiveness. But he did come to suggest a way to try out change.

Brome's commitment to facing sociopolitical problems and his difficulty with offering solutions can be exemplified by what is often considered escapist, his last play before the closing of the theaters, A Jovial Crew: or The Merry Beggars (1641). Kaufmann was the first to reject a frothy Jovial Crew. He saw a “profoundly escapist” play that provided a dual moral: When the members of society become disenchanted they surrender to social dissolution. And only a few segments of society, probably particular extended households, can preserve Elizabethan values—by withdrawing into gentrified small gardens where each individual contributes to a tiny hierarchy.⁸ So the opening of Brome's prologue offers forthright melancholia:

The title of our play, A Jovial Crew,
May seem to promise mirth, which were a new
And forc'd thing in these sad and tragic days
For you to find, or we express in plays.
We wish you then would change that expectation,
Since jovial mirth is now grown out of fashion.(9)

There comes to be no question that vagabondage fails to provide any escape. From the time that two sisters propose to become vagrants with their suitors, idyllic retreat gets undercut. Meriel may rhapsodize about “Couchant and passant, guardant, rampant beggars” as “th'only happy people in a nation,”

The only free men of a commonwealth;
Free above scot-free; that observe no law,
Obey no governor, use no religion,
But what they draw from their own ancient custom,
Or constitute themselves, yet are no rebels.

[II.i.172-76]

But as she fantasizes, the young men discern a far different heraldry for beggarage: “current and vagrant … Stockant, whippant.” The runaways' public affirmations get confuted by their asides begging out. An oft quoted encomium extolls vagabondage as a conventionally utopian “wealth for public benefit” where “no grievance or perplexity; / No fear of war, or state disturbances. / No alteration in a commonwealth, / Or innovation, shakes a thought of theirs” (IV.ii.90-93, 98). But the interrupting “Of ours, you should say” corrects the Freudian slip, accentuating that each wishes the status on anybody else. This paean functions like the songs and dances that the beggars use to hide the anguished cries of a mother giving birth.

For beggars, freedom from responsibilities does not mean freedom from want, or from the struggle to survive by begging, prostitution, and theft, or from powerlessness before arbitrary threats, beatings, rapes, and imprisonments, or from the dread that drives many of them to bravado revelry and drunkenness. Economically it means they have nothing left to lose. Politically it means subjection to the arbitrary exercise of police power or ordinary force, to the wills of the physically and verbally domineering Justice Clack and his venal and vicious son Oliver. Butler recognizes here a reflection of the difficulties of gaining freedom without creating license, which confronted England during the short parliament of 1640.¹⁰ For if beggarage fails, so does Kaufmann's nostalgic escape into small preserves of idyllic Elizabethan gentility. The gentry get undercut by their patent self-indulgence: Tallboy's moping over the flight of his enforced bride, Oliver Clack's leering and lecherous threats of force, Justice Clack's capricious and willful misuses of prerogative, Hearty's irresponsible retreat in vinous revelry. More important, the play's agents of resolution get undercut: the runaways' father, Oldrents, whose name indicates his station, and the good steward of Oldrents's estate, Springlove, who returns each year to the beggars' commonwealth.

Springlove is one director in A Jovial Crew. Another is a vagabond poet. As the beggars celebrate the wedding of an impotent old man and a drunken old woman, this master of the revels proposes to “present a commonwealth: Utopia, / With all her branches and consistencies,” “The country, the city, the court, and the camp, epitomiz'd and personated by a gentleman, a merchant, a courtier, and a soldier,” plus three professions, “Divinity and Law” and learning (IV.ii.179-91). The roles in this induction are filled by beggars who have fallen from the estates they represent, with Springlove standing for a citizen merchant and a runaway lover for a country gentleman. The poet proposes for his plot civil strife concluding in a revolution: “I would have the country, the city, and the court, be at great variance for superiority. Then would I have Divinity and Law stretch their wide throats to appease and reconcile them; then would I have the soldier cudgel them all together and overtop them all. Stay. … A beggar … must at last overcome the soldier, and bring them all to Beggars' Hall” (IV.ii.207-17). This apocalyptic fantasy of the victory of disenfranchised beggars and disenchanted poets, Sidney's vates, may mirror the radical social prophecies promulgated among the increasing number of “masterless men” portrayed in Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down.¹¹ But in A Jovial Crew the fantasy never gets produced since the magistrates ride in, cut off the presentation, break up the assembly, then threaten, arrest, and impound the beggars.

What finally gets presented is an induction for Oldrents at Justice Clack's. Instead of projecting revolution Springlove's production recalls the inexplicable melancholy of the old country gentleman who typifies the malaise and the nostalgia of his caste. Oldrents balks at the original, empathetic titles for the inset, The Two Lost Daughters and The Vagrant Steward. Instead he consents to see The Merry Beggars, a prescription for escaping melancholy and a choice that implicitly indicts him for indulging in revelry so as to evade his responsibilities. The hedge-priest, Patrico, presents actors who play their own roles in Oldrents's life. So the performance dissolves the distinctions between the lives of the inset's characters and those of its onstage audience. Oldrents's masked runaway daughters and steward reveal their attempt to revive him by temporarily joining the merry beggars and thereby fulfilling without harm the fortune teller's sad prophecy. Springlove has directed a restorative comedy during which loyal daughters renew their patriarch's mirth and through which the good steward fulfills his perpetual promise: “this is your birthnight into a new world. And we all know (or have been told) that all come crying into the world, when the whole world of pleasures is before us. The world itself had ne'er been glorious, had it not first been a confused chaos” (III.i.34-38).

But recovery from unease may not seem reassuring. After the inset dissolves into the play Patrico reveals a family disease: he is the beggared grandson of one Wrought-on, whom Oldrents's grandfather “craftily wrought out / Of his estate” by unjust lawsuits (V.i.412-13, 320-26). Oldrents's estates are not so ancient nor so sound nor so secure as might be inferred from his name and status. As degree comes by lineal descent, so do sins. Moreover, Wrought-on reveals, descendants commit new sins: Oldrents sired a bastard on Wrought-on's sister, who died in childbirth. Following romance tradition, the lost child is recovered in the good steward, Springlove, and miraculously reconciled to the father he never knew. But despite reparation of this estate, Brome's play does not suggest any easy restoration of society. For that would require the incredibly charitable forgiveness of a Wrought-on, who for a tiny competence agrees to finish his days as Oldrents's “faithful beadsman,” and of a Springlove, who proves to be a saint.

The dissolving of distinctions between the inset, The Merry Beggars, and the play for a Caroline audience, A Jovial Crew, suggests that Brome's presentation reflected his society and warned it of its need to meet sociopolitical responsibilities. A Jovial Crew sketches a matrix of problems Brome attacked in domains political, social, and familial, including pervasive interests economical. In Brome's plays all three arenas of human interaction exhibit complementary problems: abusing and hustling power. In politics some people exercise arbitrary authority while others scramble for preferment. In society some take advantage of status while others assault the hierarchy. In families fathers compel their children's occupational and marital decisions while children use and deny their fathers. Brome's families further implicate interlocking sexual questions: a double standard of philandering lovers and husbands versus faithful maids and wives threatens gender relations; and the exploitation and dread of cuckoldry undermine families. But while Brome finds plenty of problems he also discredits potential programs for recovery. So no specific political or social responses, other than charitable forgiveness, ever get defined in A Jovial Crew. Too much here depends on Hearty's idea of human action and reaction for “the whim of it” and on the conclusion's impractical reliance on “great providence.”

Brome's plays are pervaded with precisely this same combination of an exhortation to face sociopolitical problems with an absence of principles on which change might be based or goals to which it could conform. His later plays became progressively more irresolute as Caroline dilemmas became more defined, and less avoidable. In sum, he consistently castigates oppressive authority and authoritarian abuses, thereby seeming subversive; yet he also adheres uneasily to inequitable received sexual norms and demonstrates inevitable human failures, thereby seeming traditional. Not atypical of the era, Brome is a subversive traditionalist whose plays, reflecting and satirizing human folly, damn no one. Had the aborted apocalyptic induction by the beggars' poet been performed, it might have suggested means of resolution. For elsewhere Brome proffers a process and a mood whereby tradition might be reformed.

Agreeing with Massinger's stance and opposing Ford's and Shirley's, Brome criticizes a monarch's use of authority for being tyrannical in two tragicomedies: his uneven variation of King Lear's ancient setting, state, and family in The Queen's Exchange (presumably early) and his unusual hagiographic The Queen and Concubine (apparently mid-career). In both Brome also features a target for all the Caroline professionals, the sycophantic scramble for unmerited preferment to royal favoritism. And in both he joins Massinger in presenting sociopolitical climbing as sustaining and being fostered by absolutism. Willful tyranny appears at the opening of The Queen's Exchange. The queen of the West Saxons, Bertha, imposes on her council her choice of a husband, Osriick of Northumbria, who is alien to her citizens by his absolutism as well as by his birth. Invoking divine sovereignty, Bertha demands that her advisers “rectify” their “scrupulous judgement” to her commandment. But Kentlike Segebert, pleading his oath to the late king, pledges loyalty to nationalist commonweal traditions. After Segebert is banished, the sycophancy of Northumbrians vacillating before the passionate, despotic Osriick is mirrored by one Jeffrey. Jeffrey's destructive zeal when celebrating the king's forthcoming marriage initially earns him promotion from village to court fool; reflecting court madness he mounts “the hobby horse of preferment” and gallops away from country virtues (II.ii).¹² Thereafter he points up the advancements for folly and the penalties for merit. He describes the bribery, purchase, backbiting, dealings, and wheelings of court fortune whereby the desertless rise by each others' falls (especially III/500-504). After miraculous tragicomic reversals, The Queen's Exchange concludes with a political homily: Osriick, who has been reawakened to responsible monarchy, praises the allegiance and care of his country's lords who counteracted his commands; and Bertha begs the loyal Segebert's pardon.

The Queen and Concubine presents a spectacle of mutually reinforcing tyrannical authority and sycophantic competition. Gonzago, an absolute, capricious ruler who envies recognition for anyone else, banishes his patient Griselda queen, Eulalia, and orders the execution of his victorious general, Sforza, on false charges of adultery; meanwhile he elevates the queen's protégé and Sforza's daughter, Alinda, to royal mistress, then queen, and he recalls Sforza's rival to be his commander-in-chief. Alinda, who has learned at court to seek preferment regardless of the price to others, leads a set of treacherous climbers. In one of several damning scenes she concludes instructions to her machiavellian accomplice with a stairway of ambition metaphor: she might pity her former protectress and her father “For being hew'd out and squar'd thus to my use, / But that they make those necessary steps / By which I must ascend to my Ambition. / They that will rise unto a supream Head / Should not regard upon whose Necks they tread” (I.ix/19-20). The banished queen, who remains faithful despite provocation and temptation, leads a loyally obedient citizenry. Attended by her fool and her councillor, she heals, teaches, and wins all the countryside of her plagued Palermo. Another opposition pits the chief sycophant Horatio, who labels himself with variations on the formulaic “old courtiers … still true to the Crown” and with his ludicrous imitations of his monarch's vacillations, against the rival generals, who make a pact to save the king from his own order to execute the crown prince. Alinda's and Gonzago's overweening conniving becomes so disgusting that they have to retire to separate religious retreats, leaving the body politic to the fit leadership of others.

Though other plays by Brome rarely focus on arbitrary rule as a specific problem, they criticize it implicitly for sponsoring, perhaps requiring, destructive preferment-seeking. Brome's ploy is aligned with the popular conservative subversion best known through Robin Hood: attack your king's agents as you declare your loyalty to and common cause with him.¹³ Brome's trenchant attack on the system of preferment, The Court Beggar, is potent because of the play's obvious parallels to current sociopolitics and its readily recognized butts. Scholars since Kaufmann have recognized that the play attacks the system of dissolute, rapacious patronage represented by Sir John Suckling—the personal vanity, lechery, gambling, and mad abuse of status, along with the public military ineptitude if not cowardice.¹⁴ Butler has specified and amplified the play's implications beyond its condemnation of the personal and social bankruptcy when courtiers beg the unmerited monopolies that buy them clout. The play pinpoints those political failures of the Caroline court that led to the double debacle of the Royal Expedition to the North during the First Bishops' War and of the Short Parliament of 1640. With Civil War looming, no wonder the Master of the Revels, presumably reflecting the king's fury, prohibited this play or any like it by Beeston's Boys and threatened the Cockpit players and their manager.¹⁵ Brome is hard on the complementary political evils of tyrannical abuses of authority and greedy, ambitious scrambling for preferment. He is even more antagonistic in his frequent satires of related manifestations in social domains that overlap with these.

Like many other Caroline plays, The Queen's Exchange and The Queen and Concubine highlight the contrast between a virtuous communal country and an arrogant absolutist court. In The Queen and Concubine the country's moral superiority appears in Alinda's transformation at court from “simple Countrey Innocence” to “comely Ambition.” The philandering king's arousal by Alinda's prostitution for advancement epitomizes his court's system of preferment: underlings get status, wealth, and power by offering themselves for use by their superiors. Poised against this violation of traditional ideals of social bonding is the loyalty of Eulalia's exiles and provincials. Though comic characters, their shrewd hospitality maintains a roughhewn country of honest thrift, prudent labor, and service to the hierarchical community. Brome's wittiest attack on courtly morals and sensibilities appears in The Love-sick Court (1633-34, 1638?). Since Kaufmann's analysis this tragicomedy has been recognized as a travesty on the extravagant platonic love and political courtship fostered by Henrietta Maria.¹⁶ Brome's hostile representation of court abuses and his occasional representations of country virtues, however, do not signify the embrace of country inferred by Butler. Brome's gentry, as in A Jovial Crew, cause significant problems. A more difficult problem is posed by the third major sociopolitical sphere. The commercial city, which is foregrounded by Brome as well as by Shirley, appears briefly in A Jovial Crew and often in Citwit's skirmishes with Courtwit and Swaynwit in The Court Beggar. Most of Brome's plays continue to display the ambivalence notable in the early Northern Lass's portrayal of the circle of Lady Fitchow, the ambitious and successful city widow. Against the country innocence of the title heroine, Constance, most members of Fitchow's circle seem grasping; but against the other Constance, the mercenary whore Holdup, they come off well. And Master Tridewell makes an appealing concerned citizen.

Brome's sociopolitical sets can be summed up in The Court Beggar's Courtwit, Swaynwit, and Citwit. These hangers-on, who earn their support by amusing the “humorous” widow, Lady Strangelove, are notable for both distinctive folly and individual potential. The fulsome Courtwit greases the social wheel. The cowardly backbiting Citwit evolves into a blustering reformer. The punitive enforcer Swaynwit makes a forthright traditional critic. Though their flaws must be taken into account, each is capable of contibuting to society. And though none is granted approval, their final mutual acceptance and dealings may intimate possible social consensus.

Although the potential for community among Courtwit, Swaynwit, and Citwit indicates that Brome represents London's spectrum of social types with more ambivalence than does Shirley, Brome's city particularly breeds sharpers. Especially in his topographical comedies and in The City Wit, The English Moor, and A Mad Couple Well Match'd, the prevalent upward striving and greedy grasping of London's citizens, combined with their endemic failure of courage, seem to be fostered by the city's environs. Brome's arraignment of the city appears in his early, then revised, genial satire The City Wit. An “honest” merchant has to turn to disguises and deceits to recoup his losses to lying, defaulting debtors. Scorned by his ambitious mother-in-law and rebuffed by his debtors, Crasy adopts their scams to earn “more in a weeks Cosenage, then in all [his] daies of Honesty” (V/357). He takes advantage of the ambition, greed, larceny, and lechery of representative estates: a driving mother-in-law, a compliant wife, and “a thrifty Citizen”; a witless court-aspiring brother-in-law and two other courtiers; and a pedant. Proving that knavery is as easy as it is profitable, he resents human ingratitude and feels disgust at the role he must play to gain respect (note V/357-58). Yet Crasy is typical of Brome's ambivalent presentations, for he proves both that gulls are not necessarily witless but perhaps generous, and he demonstrates that citizens can be selflessly forgiving.

In sum, through estates represented in London society Brome focuses on social abuses that are related to the political ones he attacked: the tyrannous use of power and the scramble for empowering status. The former appears most identifiably in his familiar satire on usurers.¹⁷ Quicksands, the aptly named, rapacious usurer in The English Moor, represents the unrepentant destroyer. He deserves the condemnatory humiliation arranged by his former victims when they try to cuckold him and when they publicize his idiot bastard. But Vermin in The Damoiselle is finally restored after initially refusing to help the decayed gentry he has cheated. His victims, including his prodigal son and his pawned daughter, who rebel against his parsimony and profiteering, generate so much social pressure that he is converted to giving them approval and aid; so they in turn accept him again. Thus, depending on a repentant reaction on the part of an offender, Brome presents an alternative ending to destructive socioeconomic tyranny. While the recalcitrant deserve ostracism, the reformed gain reconciliation.

The scramble for status is featured in Brome's frequent satire of academies for the aspiring. Typical is his presentation of the new ordinary, which caters to the “fashion sick” ness for new “French frippery” and new French “court carriage” that are taught by the new instructor for whom The Damoiselle is named. Academies provide the Caroline professionals with easy targets because they claim they can teach climbers how to parade the manners and styles affected by those who hold a coveted status. Just so, in The New Academy Strigood advertises “professors of court discipline” who are prepared to teach the French manners, posturings, and fashions, Platonic love and vacuous politeness, and musical and dancing accomplishments esteemed around Henrietta Maria's court.

More distinctively, Brome takes as particular butts the gulls who enroll in academies for strivers. Striggod draws in plenty of pupils to learn absurdly elaborate, stylized conventions: the presumptuous Lady Nestlecock and her overprotected imbecile son, her melancholy suitor and his daughter, and Maudlin, her new sister-in-law and former maid to her half-brother. Often Brome targets country aspirants who are getting cheated by city slickers and court dependents. The Sparagus Garden spot-lights the leeching of Tim Hoyden by a gang of London conmen led by the shifty knight Mony-lacks. Hoyden's blood has to be drawn out and replaced by reputedly noble, aphrodisiac asparagus, while his country yeoman's manners need to be supplanted by the rudiments of “the severall carriages and deportments by garbe, by congy, complement, &c” (IV.ix/194) practiced by gentlemen. Mainly his purse needs to be drained of £400 until he becomes dimly aware that he is imitating forms as empty as it is. Similarly, in The Covent-Garden Weeded Captain Driblow employs forms of compliment and elevation to bilk ignorantly aspiring Mun Clotpoll. Clotpoll, notebook perpetually at hand for recording imitable acts and witticisms, seeks initiation into the Philoblathici and Philobattici, the Brotherhood of the Blade and Battoune, with its auxiliary Sisterhood of the Scabbard. These roarers' French balls (an adaptation of Jonson's “vapors”) and whores so parody court styles and ends that critics see Brome demonstrating that a society based on abusive authoritarianism and sycophantic favoritism brings forth cheating and whoring.¹⁸

Whereas other Caroline professional playwrights mainly relate politics to the family, Brome more often shows interactions between society and the family. Social and personal abuses reflect and inextricably reinforce each other as they parallel state abuses. Brome repeatedly features the clash of fathers forcing marital decisions on their children, thereby compelling these children into dilemmas and evasions. This pattern extends from The Novella, where two city and family fathers arrange a sociopolitical and economic match that would block both of their children's love choices, through A Jovial Crew, where Justice Clack propels his niece into running away from an enforced marriage he has proposed. Typically, patriarchal compulsion issues from greed, as when Justice Testy marries off his niece and ward, Millicent, to the usurer Quicksands in The English Moor, the usurer Vermin schemes about his daughter in The Damoiselle, or Sir Andrew Mendicant proffers his daughter in The Court Beggar. Usually the guardian's choice is a miser, a madman, or a booby unsuitable from any perspective other than the guardian's gain. Other familiar paternal tyrannies also appear through Brome: a father in The Sparagus Garden causes his son consternation by prohibiting his marriage, out of spite for the woman's family; and a father in The New Academy drives away his daughter, out of wrath against the family of his foster daughter. The frequency with which Brome's guardians take advantage of their rank suggests mutually supporting abuses of authority in all social domains.

The mutual support of abusive parental and social authorities compounds severe problems for children: in The Novella Pantaloni and Guadagni harry their children from quandaries and equivocations to subterfuges, and in The Sparagus Garden Sam Touchwood is driven from anguished guilt into deception. While Brome's plays generate great sympathy for adolescents, they also depict rebellion by the afflicted offspring as an unacceptable violation of traditional family norms. Brome's vilest villain appears in The Queen's Exchange; the ingrate son Ossa plays a betraying Edmund to Segebert's Gloucester and to his brother's Edgar. In The Queen and Concubine Alinda's ambition is condemned for the double perfidy against her father and against her queen and protectress, whereas the prince is honored for his loyalty in spite of his father's capricious sentence of execution. Yet the children in Brome's plays are often conditioned by repressions harsh enough and psyches burdened enough to sanction trickery as a means of gaining their fathers' sympathies and blessings. The plays allow such children the ruse of rebellion in order to evade their patriarchs' unfair use of power. When Joyce and Gabriella flee their furious patriarch in The New Academy or Wat and Alice flee their usurious father Vermin in The Damoiselle, they find new protectors who help them reform their fathers. Though the majority of offspring in Brome's plays remain obedient, some of their tricks threaten Caroline society. In The English Moor the ward Millicent and a host of Quicksands's victims suggest adultery as a response to her enforced marriage to the old usurer. But while her bawdy turnoff songs and her suitors' hymeneal cuckolding masque produce satisfying satiric discomfort for two old connivers, the means risk Millicent's integrity and threaten an audience left out of the con until late in the play. Brome's plays often emit an uneasy tone of subversion by children, which does not come to rest in received family practices nor to resolution in reform.

This complex of family relationships is summed up in The Covent-Garden Weeded, inside a complex set of multiple parallels in arbitrary royal sociopolitical regulations and arbitrary Puritan moral restrictions.¹⁹ Crossewill so enjoys opposing everyone, particularly his children, that he alters his goals when others concur with him. Since he requires that his children achieve his ends in his way, his daughter tries to box him into blessing either her beloved or her perpetual maidenhood, his distraught elder son flees to Puritan rather than patriarchal oppression, and his younger son escapes to London to practice gallantry under the pretense of learning the law. And since he delights in thwarting their widely praised inclinations, they manipulate him by reverse psychology, pretending interest in the opposite of what they want until they get him to recognize and reform his arbitrary willfulness. In the end all turn their inversions to their society's sense of rightside up. While this presents an odd notion of filial duty, the children's ultimate allegiance to social norms amounts to their ultimate obedience to their father's best instincts. Such inversions are typical of Brome's satiric attacks on the abuses of arrogant authority and ungrateful ambition. Such irresolute endings, both affirming and criticizing his society, leave no definite basis for ethical judgments.

The most vivid examples of Brome's (and satire's) propensity to attack abuses without providing consistent grounds for resolution appear in his presentation of two sexual relations that preoccupied the Carolines and their plays: the double standard and cuckoldry. From a masculine view he depicts almost all of his characters, both male and female, as accepting without question the double standard. But though he does not suggest Massinger's general reforms or Shirley's postmarital ones, neither does he mirror Ford's tacit approval. Instead, he often establishes a bivalent perspective that sets him apart from the other Caroline professionals and that alienates many critics because of its alleged “disgusting moral decadence.”²⁰ In Brome's plays a woman who commits adultery for socioeconomic advancement comes off badly. Often, however, a woman who commits adultery, or more likely perpetrates the ruse of committing adultery, is presented as understandably countering men's waywardness; so her case gains sympathy if not approval. While cuckoldry causes psychological stress for husbands, women might justly claim equal access to reciprocal or corrective adultery, and especially to the pretense of adultery. This position Ford never entertained, Shirley abhorred, and Massinger presented only one time, briefly, in The Picture.

Brome's sympathetic presentation of Sir Philip Lucklesse, the prize sought and won by Constance, the popular, innocent heroine of The Northern Lass, sets a double standard. Only tactics are considered during the extrication of this first of Brome's many prodigals from two misogynist nightmares: an entanglement with a “cunning whore,” his former mistress Constance, and an entrapment in a lucrative marital contract with a domineering widow, Mistress Fitchow. Sir Philip is the least objectionable of an ever wilder, more destructive line of familiar prodigals redeemed by some pure or “spoiled but loyal” lass. In The Covent-Garden Weeded roistering whoremaster Nick is married to Crossewill's niece. In The New Academy the braggadochio squire of city wives, Valentine Askal, is protected by his unrecognized half-sister, Hannah, whom he slanders. In The English Moor Nathaniel Banelass is saved by a bed trick arranged by the self-sacrificing Phillis Winlose, another maiden he has tried to train in whoredom. The ancient widower Striker in The Sparagus Garden is preserved by his housekeeper, Friswood, who has served him in bed for years. A marked increase in prodigal rascality shows up in A Mad Couple Well Match'd in the person of Carelesse. The dissolute heir is condemned not so much for his insulting attempt to seduce his virtuous young aunt, Lady Thrivewell, as for his ungrateful damage of her adulterous old husband, his benefactor. Carelesse's perversities win him the fortune of another type, the lecherous widow, Mrs. Crostill. Finally, the society of The Damoiselle disregard the whoremongering of Wat, the prodigal son of the usurer; but they castigate him for trying to pander his prospective bride and they convert him. This last case, of the one philanderer Brome's other characters condemn, also exposes the interlocking crux of cuckoldry.

From the early The City Wit Brome's plays, like many a Caroline's, are preoccupied with the anxieties husbands have about cuckoldry. Torn by his jealous love of his compliant wife, Josina, Crasy decides that his least anxious course lies in disguising himself so as to appear to pander for her and to cuckold himself. He thereby regains the debts owed him by two would-be courtiers and wins revenge as they beat each other; then he says he believes Josina recognized his disguise. Unsettling, The City Wit nevertheless comes the closest of Brome's plays to easing the fears roused by cuckoldry. The most bothersome cases, judged by the critical response, involve tradesmen and their wives. Contrary to critical assertions, such cases do not primarily condemn mercenary commercial greed and ridicule imitations of some licentious female freedom practiced as Platonism, as in The Love-sick Court. Kaufmann and Shaw consider Rebecca Brittleware of The Sparagus Garden a nag who reduces her husband to subservience.²¹ But she is hardly blameworthy. She desperately wants a child; so new man litters and St. Paul's steeple become as sexually laden as The Knight of the Burning Pestle she wants to see and the elite gardens of promiscuity she wants to visit. Moreover, Brittleware is so jealously possessive and terrified of cuckoldry that he confines her. Therefore, she tells her aunt, rather than getting revenge by acting out his suspicions she abuses his illusions in hopes of wearing out his cuckoldry “in conceit.” He comes to trust rather than own her. According to some critics, the problem of Rafe Camelion in The New Academy is timorous uxoriousness in imitation of Platonic court fashions; he supposedly allows his wife Hannah so much unscrutinized freedom that it destroys the “natural relationship” of a superior husband's protectiveness of his wife.²² Rather, Hannah, seeing her Camelion's neglect of her and his attraction to public amusements, needs assurance of his love. She seeks not protection (she capably guards her fidelity) but loving concern in front of a sexually cynical society eager to foul their reputations with intimations of wittolry.

The critical disapproval of the mores and art registered about these plays scarcely approaches the moral and critical wrath roused by A Mad Couple Well Match'd. Shaw approvingly quotes Sedge's, and presumably Kaufmann's, evaluation: “Brome's play clearly exposes the dangerous excess in feminism that can result from the Platonic non-jealousy ethic.”²³ Brome's attack on the cynical manipulation of Platonic courtliness seems obvious; the so-called “dangerous excess in feminism” seems mistaken. Lady Thrivewell is generally appreciated for saving her husband from a mercenary predator on his infidelity, but she is not so loudly applauded for fooling him into believing briefly that she has cuckolded him. As Shaw notes, he needs to recognize that “what is sauce for the gander can be sauce for the goose”²⁴; and he needs momentarily at least to suffer the anguish he apparently feels a wife is obliged to endure in silence. But Shaw's “can” signals the play's moral inconsistency. While reciprocity is remarkably presented as possible, understandable, and affecting, it is not approved. The Lady remains responsible for fidelity. Moreover, the parallel plots fail to show reciprocity. Saleware profits from the adultery of his wife Alice ([Ram] Ally), just as the Lady recoups her husband's payment by shrewd dealing. But rather than being commended for economic gains or for understanding his spouse's adultery, as Lady Thrivewell is, Saleware is predictably condemned for complacent cuckoldry. And this despite his wretchedness when Ally exploits his professed courtly trust and denies him the access others purchase. Likewise, Ally is utterly condemned for sexual profiteering whereas philandering and fortune hunting are amicably forgiven Carelesse, who is granted the guardian angel, Saveall, and who is rewarded by marriage to a rich widow—precisely for abusing her the way he does his whore Phoebe. The best deal for any woman in the play is the award earned by the ironically named Phoebe for her employment in Lady Thrivewell's bed trick on Carelesse: she gets married off to his man, with good riddance to Carelesse's past. In sum, Brome's radical suggestion about sexual equity is inconsistent. But the hint of women's equivalent sexual freedom sets Brome apart from his peers. And it rouses critical consternation from ours.

Brome's suggestions about family and sexual relations, like his suggestions about politics and society, combine a radical aversion to tyrannical authority with a strong disapproval of ambitious insurrection. His stance, then, is the hardest to characterize among the Caroline professional playwrights: he is similar to Massinger on the need for social and family reform but less sanguine than is Massinger's accommodation of tradition; he is like Ford in his support of traditions but more probing than is Ford's espousal of ideal absolutism; he is favorable to Shirley's role playing but averse to Shirley's embrace of court norms. Brome's radical tendencies were disallowed by critics, who annexed his increasing questions to normative positions; but Butler has resituated Brome's politics within a revisionist history that recognizes a negative sociopolitics of subversive traditionalism. Brome complicated the problems of his ambivalent perspective by his inconsistent applications, which morally uncomfortable critics compound into condemnation or frustrated defensiveness. Brome's inconsistency might be interpreted more usefully as an indication of his increasingly profound questioning and of his exploitation of satire's freedom from the need for a platform. My uneasy conclusion about Brome's values melds with an appraisal of his development of the techniques of parody and inversion into a process that taps a potential for fundamental reform.

SATIRIC PARODIES AND INVERSIONS

Brome's parodic style presents his variation on the imitation of craft characteristic of the Caroline professional playwrights. Neither a regular collaborator with Fletcher and others like Massinger nor with Dekker and others like Ford, not an eclectic autodidact like Shirley, Brome devoted his apprenticeship to Ben Jonson. Jonson's commendation of this son on his first publication, The Northern Lass, in 1632, is so important that it was reprinted in 1659 at the head of the second posthumous collection of Brome, Five New Plays by “An Ingenious Servant, and Imitator of his Master, that famously Renowned Poet Ben. Johnson.” At first Jonson vented his envy of the success of his apprentice's “sweepings,” malicious wordplay that some of Ben's tribe perpetuated. Then he commended Brome's play, “often Acted with good Applause, at the Globe, and Black-Fryers.” Introducing “my Old Faithful Seruant, and (by his continu'd Vertue) my loving Friend: the Author of this Work, M. RICH. BROME” with his peculiar blend of sensitive consideration and perceptive arrogance, Jonson provides a broadly applicable principle:

I Had you for a Servant, once, Dick Brome;
          And you perform'd a Servants faithful parts:
Now, you are got into a nearer roome,
          Of Fellowship,
professing my old Arts.
And you doe doe them well, with good applause,
          Which you have justly gained from the Stage,
By observation of those Comick Lawes
          Which I, your Master,
first did teach the Age.
You learn'd it well; and for it, serv'd your time
          A Prentise-ship: which few doe now a dayes.
Now each Court-Hobby-horse will wince in rime;
          Both learned, and unlearned, all write Playes.
It was not so of old: Men tooke up trades
          That knew the Crafts they had bin bred in, right:

Jonson applauds the technique and aesthetics achieved by apprenticeship to a master; and he sneers at poets and dramatists who never learn the mystery. He also defines one base and suggests another for Brome's creation of new art by imitation. Brome the traditionalist practiced and extended the craft he inherited by creating variations on its ideas and techniques. Brome the opponent of ignorant courtly amateurs parodied, burlesqued, and inverted their very ruptures of old techniques, thereby creating new variations.²⁵

Despite recording their agreement that Brome did embody Jonson's principle of nurturing wit by imitating his master, critics have been less than specific about the nature of his imitation. All recognize that Brome often and obviously alluded to Jonson. The City Wit announces that it bears the “seal of Ben” before the apprentice's disguise as a conwoman recalls Epicoene, and his mention of an “Indenture Tripartite, and't please you, like Subtle, Doll, and Face” refers to The Alchemist (III.i/318). In emulation of “my Reverend Ancestor Justice Adam Overdoe” of Bartholomew Fair, The Covent-Garden Weeded's Justice Cockbrain proposes to uproot local enormities while wearing a series of disguises in which he gets duped and beaten. The Sparagus Garden brings in The Alchemist when Monylacks agrees to shift funds from a gull to himself and his partner, just like Subtle and Lungs; and old Striker's subterfuge through feigned diseases of exaggerated age recalls Volpone. Similar references reappear prominently: Epicoene's transvestism shows up in The New Academy and in The Damoiselle; so do a Cokes-influenced Nehemiah Nestlecock and the Overdone Bumpseys. Scholars have, however, neglected the middle ground of design between their annotations of specific echoes and inspirations and their assumptions that Brome reproduced Jonson's moral concerns in a flawed medium.²⁶ Brome's designs are supplied in part through his adherence to Jonson's principle of imitating from the best exempla available.

This principle is suggested by other poems that usher in The Northern Lass. One claim of paternity, “To my Sonne Broom and his LASSE,” is made by Dekker; his London settings and Middleton irony proved important to The City Wit, A Mad Couple, and Brome's various topographical satires, and his romantic comedies about the city's citizens are reflected in this play and others. Another commendation is made by Ford; his promotion of curative drama became a central principle for Brome. In a poem before A Jovial Crew fellow playwright John Tatham added Beaumont and Fletcher and Shakespeare as Brome's antecedents. These statements are confirmed by Brome's edition and reintroduction of Fletcher's Monsieur Thomas in 1639 and his employment of Fletcherian intrigue comedy in The Novella and tragicomedy in The Queen and Concubine. They are also confirmed by his early variation on Shakespeare's Gloucester plot in The Queen's Exchange.²⁷ In addition Brome later collaborated with Heywood (extant is The Late Lancashire Witches [1634]) and perhaps with Chapman. From the prologue to The Sparagus Garden to the epilogue of The English Moor Brome modestly affirmed his debt to English dramatic traditions and claimed never to trespass against the old “laws of comedy.” These facts corroborate both his outrage over the violations committed by unprofessional Sucklings and his ability to burlesque and invert the violations. Neither the commendations nor the acknowledgments indicate the freedom Brome expanded from a frequent imitation of folk game and song motifs, as in his Lass. The commendations do, however, consistently praise his ingenuity and ability to imitate “souls language,” apparently in appreciation of his playful prose of dialect and jargon, idiolect and character tag, quip and saw. And they universally praise his moral point, apparently in admiration of his satire.

One quality contemporaries regularly acclaimed in Brome is typical of the Caroline professionals: he manipulated complex multiple plots in the manner of the old masters. In a 1640 commendation prefacing The Sparagus Garden C.G. delights in the mazelike “designment” that encompasses plentiful variety within “proportion.” And in “To the Readers” of the 1659 Five New Plays the collector opens by praising the playwright's understanding of the “Proportions and Beauties of a Scene.” Brome developed this skill through imitation of the plotting conventions of traditional genres. By the revived, and likely early, version of The City Wit, he was mastering Jonsonian adaptations of the estates morality play. His city and topographical satires depend on reviews of stereotyped sociopolitical estates, from courtiers to citizen merchants, and of the professions of teacher, doctor, soldier, and lawyer to indict failures to contribute to the commonweal. The traditional morality play remains visible in The Queen and Concubine; the antithesis between the queen's saintliness and the whore's ambitions is augmented by parallel antithetical types—good councillor versus evil usher, country magistrates versus court politicians, and country clowns versus court knaves. The most characteristic of Brome's plot designs, as Shaw repeatedly demonstrates, links multiple plots around triangles of characters; usually these feature the intrigues and counter-intrigues of an antagonist with his cronies who block a sympathetic pair with their associates. While such exemplary plots as The Northern Lass, The Novella, and The Court Beggar do not maintain the restrictive social and moral hierarchies posited by Levin, Brome creates unity through the mutual personal associations and common locations, interdependently effecting events, and social and moral thematics of his plots.²⁸

In addition, Brome's mature craft was affected considerably by innovations in drama that repelled him and his fellow professionals. The prologue and epilogue to The Court Beggar express blunt antipathy toward those new “wits o' Court” who, by subsidizing performances of faddish, ghostwritten fluff and by bribing audiences, were destroying the professional dramatic heritage. He refuses to create “gaudy Sceane(s),” outline plots, or deploy facile sentiment even though his audience has “grown, / Deeply in love with a new Strayne of wit / Which he condemns, at least disliketh it.” So in the play he satirizes the courtly pseudo-dramatist/producers, Suckling and Davenant, who threaten his art as much as his livelihood.²⁹ Moreover, he burlesques their tragicomic mode, thereby clarifying his own characteristics. Kaufmann first identified Brome's The Love-sick Court as a burlesque of voguish courtly romantic productions.³⁰ The title puns on the maladies of two courts, the dramatic presentations that inflated courts and the histrionics and social predilections of the Caroline court. The play's typically twisting and surprising tragicomic plot turns on the friendship of two apparent brothers who compete for a princess enamored of both. This narrative provides a frame on which are woven ragtag clichés of courtly love and manners drama: self-sacrifice, the insidious plotting and miraculous conversion of a throne-seeking villain, an attempted rape, a quest for an ambiguous oracle, a mistaken identity arising from the ancient concealment of a baby, the insinuation of incest, the resurrection of a possum-playing protagonist. Types include righteous councillors and ambitious machiavels, a fickle populace, a possessive mother with a blackmailing old nurse, and a set of comic servants who travesty the royal plot. The characters ingratiate themselves in inflated courtly compliments and agonize over their choices in high-flown soliloquies. If emblems such as the duel (when the protagonists hurl themselves at each other in a feigned pass before each whirls round spreading his arms and baring his breast for his “brother's” deadly thrust) just slash, other burlesques prove fatal. Especially mordant moments include the old nurse Garula's interrupting leers over a titillating double identity, the pointlessness of its concealment, and her use of it to aid the pretensions of her idiotic son. The Love-sick Court exhibits the talent in adaptive imitation that Brome employed to create his own, freer style.

Brome's innovative, liberating forms evolved out of his imitation of traditions, particularly out of his extension of interpolated songs and masques, plays within plays, characters playing deceptive roles, native folk performances, and improvisations, all of which can point beyond any immediate scene. Prominent in the final A Jovial Crew, such devices constituted a repertoire that Brome developed from The Northern Lass, whose country heroine is characterized by lyrics about her innocent love-longing. These do as much to further her cause as the deceptive roles played by the city sharpers; and they appear the purer against Constance Holdup's bawdy songs.³¹ Her cause and the play's resolution are fostered by a marriage masque that thwarts one impropitious marriage and encourages two auspicious ones (II.vi/41-42). Brome's interest in dissolving a play in its climactic masque comes with The City Wit. Its late hymeneal offering evolves into bawdy songs, revelations of the multiple disguises and counterplots perpetrated by Crasy's crew, and a celebration of human venality's absolution in a general amnesty and communion of the erring—in the play and in the world.

The English Moor further expands masquings: a scoffing “Hornmasque” is presented by gallants ruined by the old usurer Quicksands so as to threaten him with cuckoldry, one of the “miseries of inforced marriage”; a later queen of “Ethiop” masque is mounted by Quicksands to disclose his chaste wife's protective disguise. These masques within the play give way to play acting as they provide opportunities for characters to manipulate roles so as to effect the heroine's escape, perpetrate a reclaiming bed trick, and reveal Quicksands's idiot bastard. Disguises and deceptions aid these and other character manipulations; they include the apparent mutually fatal duel of supposedly rival fathers, several transvestite appearances, and the racial masking of the title character. The practical ends of the masquers and the dissolution of the insets' boundaries inside the play's world are possible in part because Brome imitates another dramatic tradition—improvisation. The characters' manipulative play is warranted by a tradition of free play within specified dramatic situations. Cope makes a forceful case for Brome's adaptation of commedia dell'arte because the pedant introduces the masque in The City Wit as following “the fashion of Italy” in employing “extempore” speeches and because The Novella, which is set in Venice, uses names and roles transmitted by that tradition.³²

All these metadramatic devices—song and implied folk fest, masque and revel, role manipulation and extemporaneous acting—do more than blur if not obliterate boundaries between plays and life, inside Brome's plays. They help bring about Brome's well-known use of comedy as a moral and psychological curative. Besides alluding to extempore acting, Brome's prologue to The Novella requires his auditors to judge the play by laws, since understanding precedes an appreciation of his mirth. In “To the Stationer, on the publishing M^r. Bromes Comedies” Alexander Brome specifies that Brome's style “Makes us at once both serious, and smile. / Wraps serious truths in fab'lous mysteries, / And thereby makes us merry, and yet wise” (vii). His commendation praises Brome's “Instructive Recreations” (viii), which satirize vice and vanity while they praise virtue, so that they satisfy poetry's traditional goal of mixing profit with pleasure. This praise is duly repeated in the stationers' introduction to the 1659 edition. T. S.'s commendatory poem to the same edition uses a traditional trope to declare that Brome lances not men but manners; like a surgeon he binds people's wounds, concealing the patient's identity while he treats the sore. And C. G.'s commendation of the earlier The Sparagus Garden suggests that Brome's representations that purge humors or moderate neuroses are more effective than others that remove vices by surgery.

Critics have noted that Brome developed Ford's dreamlike metadramatic cures in The Lover's Melancholy into a central technique that Cope calls the “psychiatric manipulation of reality” for the good of characters.³³ Cope maps the technique from the entranced role playing and identity trade that relieve the king in The Queen's Exchange through a prelude in The English Moor, a center in The Antipodes, and a postlude in A Jovial Crew. To these should be added plays during which role playing in itself effects some cure. For instance, The Court Beggar's concluding masque unmasks the rapacious fraud of Sir Ferdinand. As Butler points out, when the representative court beggar Mendicant breaks in with his projectors, the scene turns into a masque that emblemizes a problem beyond the play: madness in England's court and society. It implies a national malady's desperate need of the kind of cure prescribed for many of the play's characters.³⁴ Though perhaps it reveals evidence of an epidemic, the intrigue play-acting in Brome usually treats onstage patients and effects a theater audience's pleasurable profit more than it prescribes to the nation. In The Covent-Garden Weeded, for example, Mihil produces an elaborate scene wherein whores and swaggerers act out complementary Puritan roles in a drunken party to disabuse, then revive, his brother from an extended stupor; and in The Damoiselle Drygrounds arranges an elaborate staging to heal relations in several families.

Although Brome's prologue to The Sparagus Garden reminds his audience “that to expect high Language, or much Cost, / Were a sure way, now, to make all be lost,” audiences have long recognized his linguistic ingenuity. Dekker called attention to it in commending The Northern Lass, his brother and F. T. made reference to it, Alexander Brome observed it before the 1653 plays and T. S. before the 1659 plays. Like the rest of his craft, Brome's style issues from imitation, particularly burlesque. Shaw has observed that while Brome's wooing verse is often couched in a stiff, dated Petrarchism, his frequent songs can achieve a lyric, if bawdy, grace. And his presentation of comic repartee and retorts, extended clichés, dialects, foreign accents, occupational jargons and social registers, stock character tags, and occasional series of balanced passages of account or abuse—that is, his parody—can be very effective.³⁵ Frequently he underscores mimicry by stacking absurd, heavily alliterated parallel gradations. Often he manages comic bawdry through the double sexual meanings inadvertently produced by innocents, like those by Rebecca in The Sparagus Garden. More often he creates caricatures like those in The City Wit, where the pedant Sarpego pours forth from his cornucopia inkhornisms, transmogrified translations, fragments of Erasmian adages, inept and inaccurate allusions, fractured etymologies, and corrupted conjugations, and Crasy as a doctor offers dubious prognoses and suspicious prescriptions. Brome produces clever imitations of regionalisms, as in The Northern Lass or in The Sparagus Garden's buffoonery of the traditional clown of Taunton Dean, Tom Hoyden.³⁶ And he mimics foreign accents, as in the pageant of suitors in The Novella.

Characterization through parodies of social registers is particularly significant in Brome. In A Jovial Crew he marks off the beggars' cant by the failure of the gentrified begging of the four disguised runaways; they know not how to “duly and truly pray for you.” Brome exploits social register in his satire on usage by the upwardly mobile court apes who try out the “single rapier complement” and the “Back-sword complement” or “swipe” taught in The Sparagus Garden. And social register is given particular heed in the epilogue after Citwit's absurd challenges in imitation of Swaynwit in The Court Beggar. Brome's telling burlesque style is perhaps most effective in the many character tags that reinforce his social themes. Illustrative are the false nonchalance in the tag of the disturbed wittol, Saleware, “Sapientia mea mihi, stultitia tua tibi,” and his groveling punctuation, “ant like your Lordship,” during a conference with his wife's master, Lord Lovely, in A Mad Couple Well Match'd (V.i/84-85). An early tag, the pedant Sarpego's empty-headed if well-meaning salutation “salvete salvetote,” and the last, Justice Clack's overbearing interruption “if we both speak together, how shall we hear one another,” reverse the order of Brome's stylistic development. His linguistic parody becomes more potent as it escapes from oppressive authority into blessed release.

As in his stylistic burlesque, which dissolves as it designates social boundaries, Brome more than any other Caroline professional playwright expanded rigorous imitation of traditional masters and genres. He notably expanded Jonsonian estates morality and citizen intrigue comedy through multilevel plots to extemporaneous play, generic parody through travesty to topsyturvydom, interpolated songs through drama-dissolving masques and plays within plays to folk carnival, manipulative role performance to curative audience participation. Brome's craft developed from traditional discipleship to independent inventiveness, from imitation to discovery in The Antipodes.

GENERATING EXPERIMENTAL REFORM IN THE ANTIPODES

As much as any other Caroline professional play, from prefatory commendations through concluding antimasque and masque, Brome's The Antipodes (composed 1636, played 1637, printed 1640) proclaims its heritage. C. G. tells censorious critics that poets need not elegize Jonson since his mode “sojourns” in Brome's traditional comedy. “The Prologue” says that this servant, then journeyman, and now master “cannot court” new writing fads but instead emulates old mentors:

The poets late sublimed from our age,
Who best could understand and best devise
Works that must ever live upon the stage,
Did well approve and lead this humble way,
Which we are bound to travail in tonight.(37)

The puns on traveling and toiling, enduring agony and birth pangs signal a play that stages a fantasy voyage to the Antipodes, topsyturvy anti-London, to cure mad Peregrine Joyless, a young gentleman so taken with The Travels of Sir John Mandeville that he has not yet bedded his wife of three years, and to cure the troubles of the rest of his family, the lord who presents the inset play, and perhaps all of society. Typically, in concluding the prologue Brome claims that his old-fashioned play and its “low and homebred subjects have their use” beyond any amateur high-flown, pastoral, tragicomic theatrical in vogue at court; moreover, he offers his audience delight, perhaps renewal.

Critics have investigated the implications of this prefatory matter to discover how Jonson's comic traditions work in The Antipodes. Its inversions of tropes and of types from estates moralities, for example, have been mentioned by Ian Donaldson and developed by Martin Butler.³⁸ The most influential critics have focused on Brome's use of Jonsonian enhanced metatheatrics in inset plays, role-playing, antimasque and masque for satire and Fordian cure. In his part of the epilogue Doctor Hughball, the psychiatrist who helps direct such devices, signals the importance of metadramatic extension. He begins a traditional plea for applause by confessing, “Whether my cure be perfect yet or no, / It lies not in my doctorship to know.” Thus, however fully he has explained the traditional attempt to cure through play-acting, he leaves the results open to question. This opening Joe Lee Davis has exploited in a seminal essay describing Brome's curative drama. Davis demonstrates that the play's satire does much more than expose vices to correction. Through the play within the play and the concluding masque, satire provides therapeutic psychological catharsis and realignment by “engrossing [characters] in a world more incongruously out of balance than they” are.³⁹ Modified in Haaker's introduction and Shaw's discussion, Davis's insights have been focused on the multiple neurotic audiences of The Antipodes, for the circles of sickness expand around Peregrine to take in his family, the disturbed couple Blaze and Barbara, Hughball and his patron, the impresario Lord Letoy, and the Salisbury Court audience. Then they have been extended in opposed directions by Donaldson and Cope.

Donaldson employs some traditions of topsyturvydom, a functional explanation of holiday by anthropologist Max Gluckman, and a related dramatic hypothesis by C. L. Barber. He sees sharp contrasts between virtue and iniquity, normality and absurdity. For him, then, the exposure of audiences to extremes during holiday release reinforces conformity to the normative hierarchy during work days, since it facilitates the restoration of controls or grants new clarification.⁴⁰ The most convincing emblem for Donaldson's interpretation is Letoy's concluding presentation of a Jonsonian antimasque and masque. To “A most untunable flourish” Discord ushers in a retinue she presents in a “SONG IN UNTUNABLE NOTES”:

Come forth my darlings, you that breed
The common strifes that discord feed:
          Come in the first place,
my dear Folly;
          Jealousy next, then Melancholy.
          And last come Madness; thou
art he
          That bear'st th'
effects of all those three.

[V.xi.12-17]

After their dance another flourish announces an encompassing song and dance by Harmony and her train. Letoy explains their actions:

See Harmony approaches, leading on
'Gainst Discord's factions four great deities:
Mercury, Cupid, Bacchus, and Apollo.
Wit against Folly, Love against Jealousy,
Wine against Melancholy, and 'gainst Madness,
          Health.
Observe the matter and the method.
And how upon the approach of Harmony,
Discord and her disorders are confounded.

[V.xii.1-8]

Letoy thus claims that the discord and antipodal world his players presented to Peregrine and the other audiences were temporary; they revert to control. But the condition of restoration may not be reversion. Since Hughball questions the suitability of this presentation in the first place and since Letoy disclaims any insight into what form of good the presentation will effect in Peregrine, restoration may include change. Hence Cope's emphasis.

Cope engages a tradition where dreams and play(s), particularly metadramatic improvisations, release participants and observers from maladies. He focuses on the tradition of freeplay represented by the leading actor in Letoy's troupe, Byplay or Extempore.⁴¹ Byplay's very name evokes both the theme of sexuality and the potential for change despite the governance of directors or social norms. Cope's idea of technique is especially appropriate to an Elizabethan theater Steven Mullaney has since emphasized in The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England. Elizabethan theaters were situated on physical and sociopolitical boundaries that dramatists and players could exploit as liberties, undefinable or variably defined margins freed for vicarious experiment.

Even many critics who are fixed on setting a more constrained situation and a stricter definition than Cope and Mullaney propose practically concede that the normative function theory of metadrama is not able to define, to delimit, The Antipodes. Davis cannot discover any stable satiric target; Kaufmann perceives “a loss of proper proportion”; and Haaker finds affinities with Rabelais's disorienting Gargantua and Pantagruel.⁴²The Antipodes' characters themselves note the inset play's remarkable likenesses as well as contrasts to their society. When a gentleman in the inset tells his servingman how to wear his cloak so as to display its showy lining, Peregrine remarks that he has seen this fashion and so Letoy claims that the custom “was deriv'd from the Antipodes” (IV.ii.15); later, antipodal projectors appear favored and antipodal lawyers ultimately accept fees, like their London counterparts. Butler uses such parallels to show Brome's indictment of current politics. From passages such as Diana's naively shrewd estimate of anti-London, which implicates that in London too “Courtiers are the best beggars” and churchmen are usurers, Butler draws a convincing conclusion: “Anti-London is not always an inversion of normality but a revelation of what normality ordinarily hides; inversion—sickness—is part of ‘normal’ life,” at least under Charles I. His serendipitous Cokayne seems less a saturnalian safety valve than a “radical critique.”⁴³ Butler further describes Brome's dedicatee, William Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, to whom Brome also dedicated his only extant manuscript. Seymour was reputedly a plain lord who was disaffected despite his royal posts—like Letoy. Finally Butler implies connections between The Antipodes and popular broadside and likely dramatic traditions of satiric emblems, which were aimed at practices associated with Charles's court.⁴⁴ He could have extended his context to include antipodal and festival emblems in popular culture that differ from Donaldson's. Furthermore, he could have taken comfort in a revisionary anthropological hypothesis about liminal and antipodal revelry that counters Gluckman's and also in a revisionary thesis about festive folk drama that modifies Barber's.

In “World Upside Down: The Iconography of a European Broadsheet Type,” David Kunzle catalogs popular printed images of inversion from the early Renaissance through the eighteenth century.⁴⁵ Just as many of these depictions invert predator and prey, human and animal, so Hughball prepares Peregrine for his dream voyage: “Our hawks become their game, our game their hawks. / And so the like in hunting: there the deer Pursue / the hounds … one sheep worr[ies] a dozen foxes … their parrots teach / Their mistresses to talk” (I.vi.152-54, 159-60). But the predominant broadside scenes, like The Antipodes, invert social and gender roles. In the broadsides maids and servants rule mistresses and masters, children teach their elders, and the old seek childish amusements; just so Hughball describes “here (heaven be prais'd) the magistrates / Govern the people; there the people rule / The magistrates. … As parents here, and masters / Command, there they obey the child and servant” (I.vi.118-27).

Particularly pertinent to The Antipodes, women in these broadsides rule men and hunt combat, playing duelists and roarers, whereas men obey and prove physically passive, playing sempsters and man-scolds. Hughball's introduction to such role reversals is tellingly confused. He claims that feminine-masculine gender roles are natural, but his testimony demonstrates that they are social:

Doctor.                                         Nay,
lady, 'tis by nature.
Here generally men govern the women—
…
But there the women overrule the men.
Diana.                                        But
pray, sir, is't by nature or by art
That wives o'ersway their husbands there?
Doctor.                                                                                           By
nature.
Diana. Then art's
above nature, as they are under us.
Doctor. In brief, sir,
all
Degrees of people, both in sex and quality,
Deport themselves in life and conversation
Quite contrary to us.
Diana.                                         Why
then, the women
Do get the men with child, and put the poor fools
To grievous pain, I warrant you, in bearing.
…
Doctor. No, lady, no; that
were to make men women,
And women men. But there the maids do woo
The bachelors, and 'tis most probable,
The wives lie uppermost.

[I.vi.121-42]

Despite Hughball's denial and Joyless's ineffectual interruptions to control his wife by invoking traditional prerogatives of authority (omitted here), Diana perceives more through topsyturvydom than the men concede, perhaps more than they conceive. Traditional popular inversions in revelry can offer satiric critique and illuminating vicarious trial of subversion just as well as they can provide temporary release, clarification, and reversion to repression.

More evidence and interpretation is supplied by Natalie Zemon Davis and other social historians. “The Reasons of Misrule,” on customs of festive carnival, masking, and misrule, primarily concerns French charivari, but “Women on Top” draws on extensive English materials.⁴⁶ Davis concludes that fests, particularly those associated with adolescents, not only reinforce traditional norms, they also offer alternative mores and social structures. Comic and festive inversions of women's roles can particularly be seen to provide a mode of protest and to suggest political and social innovation: “Play with various images of woman-on-top, then, kept open an alternate way of conceiving family structure.” Historians of popular English culture have documented that revelry considered amusing diversion by authorities did at times erupt into rebellion, particularly on the traditional carnival days, Shrove Tuesday, Ascension Day, Mayday, Midsummer, and Saint Bartholomew's Day.⁴⁷

Looking for support from social theorists, Davis considers revisions of Gluckman's hypothesis that holidays serve as instruments of repression. In “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period of Rites de Pasage,” Victor Turner taps some of the revolutionary potential latent in Arnold van Gennep's middle stage of ritual passage between separation and incorporation.⁴⁸ And in Carnival and Theater; Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England Michael D. Bristol combines this modified hypothesis with Mikhail Bakhtin's influential study of the radical popular backgrounds of festivity, Rabelais and His World. He thereby puts Elizabethan, primarily Shakespearean, drama in a frame very different from the conservative setting of folk carnival promulgated by E. K. Chambers and C. L. Barber. He concludes that traditions of disrespect, which represent spiritualized sociopolitical and moral norms as bodily, bawdily material ones, supply a plebeian counter to official consolidations of authority and tendencies to tyrannize; they provide a “second culture's” resistance to absolutism. In sum, instead of a normative theory of how festival functions in society, these scholars focus on how festival can produce unpredictable outcomes.

The aptness of considering The Antipodes as resistance and vicarious experiment with the unpredictable can be seen in various ways—from the play's language of physical bawdry to its antipodal extemporaneous forms. There is only one memorable scatological reference, when Barbara misunderstands Blaze doing “two mutes” (V.v.24-27). But Brome's customary sexual bawdry pervades the play from its opening, particularly in references to cuckoldry: Blaze plays nothing; Martha makes naively telling remarks, even unwittingly suggesting lesbianism (I.iv.55-58); the man-scold is forbidden the “use” of his chiefest “natural members … that man takes pleasure in, / The tongue!” (IV.v.19-22); gentlemen and schoolboys get mad about the license masters take with the “behinds” of their students, suggesting homosexuality (IV.vi, vii); Joyless mistakes Barbara's euphemistic references to Letoy's “daughters” (V.ii, iii).

Characters also turn specifically to popular culture for relief and sanction. A threatened Joyless whistles the common “Fortune My Foe” (III.v.61); when Peregrine attacks Letoy's tiring house he follows the apprentices' traditional Shrove Tuesday demolition of whore houses (III.vi); Byplay and Letoy find precedents for extemporaneous play in Tarlton's and Kemp's jigs (II.ii.43ff). Charivari's treatment of apprehensions about May-December weddings (a normative practice in anti-London [I.vi.179-83]) provides a setting for the cure of old Joyless's insane jealousy of his young wife. Topsyturvy festivity provides a new clime for the passage beyond the prolonged adolescence of Peregrine's mad exploration to escape parental controls and beyond Martha's married maidenhood and withheld motherhood. Topsyturvy festivity also provides the opportunity to restore Diana to her biological father after his years of paranoia over her legitimacy.

The Antipodes shows the necessity of a healing reform beyond the necessity of some release from tyranny. Moreover, it shows that necessity in three arenas: an oppressive social hierarchy that requires self-destructive climbing, an unjust political tyranny that compels sycophancy and leads to frustrated rebellion, and a family patriarchy that drives both the authoritarian father and the subject children and wife mad. But The Antipodes refuses to specify reforms, presumably because that would institute new oppressions. Instead it exemplifies a process of extemporaneous free play, of improvisation, of vicarious trial of potential reforms whereby tradition suggests and initiates change.

The first act and the beginning of the second act set the terms of The Antipodes. Blaze welcomes Joyless to London after the “time's calamity,” the eighteen-month plague of 1636-37, which oppressed the population and led to the prohibition of vicarious release at theaters. But now the restrictions, “Thanks to high Providence,” have been removed and a doctor approaches who can cure the “sorrow” “In the sad number of [Joyless's] family.” Hughball performs miraculous psychological cures in a desperately stricken society. Blaze's litany of recoveries and chant of variations on “I name no man; but this / Was pretty well, you'll say” outlines major social and political plagues that parallel major family and personal ills. The doctor has cured a bankrupt country gentleman so that he plays the profligate gallant with the best. He has cured confused magistrates so that they “can now distinguish / And know both when and how to take of both” bribes and fees so as to increase their security and wealth (I.i.68-70). He has cured a woman mad from studying how to love her husband till “now she lies as lovingly on a flockbed / With her own knight as she had done on down / With many others” (I.i.61-63). The impressive result in terms of numbers, desperate need, and efficacy is his cure of “horn-mad” husbands, authoritarian guardians of their families, “by the dozens.” Blaze even lets slip that he credits Hughball with his own recovery. Hughball depends for his cures on a popular tradition: a festive performance that “begets both wonder and delight / In his observers, while the stupid patient / Finds health at unawares” (I.i.26-28). Everything indicates that the time that plagued has come to foster health and that progress in Hughball's cure of the Joylesses would promise a mode of curing authorities who abuse a stricken society.

Joyless's authoritarianism suppresses play. He has deprived his son of travel; so Peregrine has been mad the five years since he turned twenty:

                                                                                                    His mother and
Myself oppos'd him still in all and, strongly
Against his will, still held him in and won
Him into marriage, hoping that would call
In his extravagant thoughts; but all prevail'd not,
Nor stay'd him, though at home, from traveling
So far beyond himself that now, too late,
I wish he had gone abroad to meet his fate.

[I.ii.46-53]

The density of restrictive signifiers, “oppos'd,” the repeated “still,” “hold,” “would call in,” “stay'd,” forbidding the son's “will” to wander in “extravagant” “traveling,” parodies paternal repression. Thus confined, the son named for a roving hawk can escape only through madness. His madness includes sexual abstinence, which has left his deprived wife Martha “full of passion.” Joyless's fear of cuckoldry threatens his new wife's sanity and his own. From her first appearance he keeps threatening to banish her to isolation and imprisonment:

And let no looser words, or wand'ring look,
Bewray an intimation of the slight
Regard you bear your husband, lest I send you
Upon a further pilgrimage than [Hughball]
Feigns to convey my son.

[I.vi.19-23]

Masculine husbandry, oppression of the wife, threatens the same madness that paternalism has visited upon the son. Joyless indeed.

The Joylesses are not an isolated case. Blaze is often disturbed and Barbara can be stung by bawdry, which is innocently introduced by Martha. To Barbara's guilt-stricken conscience Martha's incredulity about husbands procreating hints at a slur about adultery. So when this “poor piece of innocence three years married” wonders “what a man does in child-getting” her request unwittingly accuses: “Pray take me for a night or two, or take / My husband and instruct him but one night. / Our country folks will say you London wives / Do not lie every night with your own husbands” (I.iv.67-70). Brome's bawdry is most telling among The Antipodes' women. Martha, who like Rebecca in The Sparagus Garden is preoccupied with having a baby, makes unwitting bawdry. But Diana, also like Rebecca, employs bawdry to purge her husband's jealousy; following Hughball's prescription, she tries to “spur [Joyless's] jealousy off o'the legs” (II.i.38). And Barbara uses bawdry to express revelry and to maintain her sexual independence.

Their bawdry confirms the central preoccupation of The Antipodes. Barbara states the problem succinctly in response to Martha's funnily pathetic query about whether Barbara really has two children or her husband lied: “I am sure / I groan'd for mine and bore 'em, when at best / He but believes he got 'em” (I.iv.26-28). The play's central issue is precisely the male's anguish and insecure tyranny, which rise from his pride in the power of patrilineage despite the fact that he can possess only uncertain faith that he perpetuates and governs his own family's traditionally continuous identity. This predicament Hughball undertakes to cure through participatory role playing among Letoy's troupe: “[These] Shall all be your guests tonight, and not alone / Spectators, but (as we will carry it) actors / To fill your comic scenes with double mirth” (II.i.42-44). Just earlier the healer assured Letoy of Diana's entry wearing Letoy's ring, a taunting emblem of the men's predicament in its sexual connotations of foreplay and consummation, marriage and free play. When Letoy sent it to Diana by Blaze it disturbed Blaze's memories: “Tell [Hughball] it wants a finger? My small wit / Already finds what finger it must fit” (I.vi.91-92). Ironically, perhaps inevitably, although Letoy's ring harasses Joyless throughout the play and even though Letoy serves as an agent for the cure, Letoy also proves to have been the sickest patriarch.

His first appearance is marked by anxiety over the issues of genus. For he recognizes in his tribe or family, his gens, the root or origin that identifies stock or generations and their continuity in begetting or generating by genitalia. As he enters he is questioning Blaze, the emblazoner of his coat of arms:

Letoy. Why, broughtst thou
not mine arms and
          pedigree
Home with thee, Blaze, mine honest herald's painter?
Blaze. I have not yet, my lord,
but all's in readiness
According to the herald's full directions.
Letoy. But has he gone to the root;
has he deriv'd me
Ex origine, ab antiquo?

[I.v.1-6]

Letoy's fixation on genus becomes increasingly obvious when he cites family precedents and insists on untrammeled prerogatives as he “toys” with Joyless's fear of cuckoldry. Near the end, after he has fulfilled literary tradition by testing Diana's virtue, he reveals that at one time his obsession with his family's past plus his concern for his current ego and his family's future purity intensified into mania. Out of a groundless suspicion of cuckoldry he madly denied his daughter, who was rightly christened Diana:

Now shall you know what mov'd me, sir, I was
A thing beyond a madman, like yourself
Jealous; and had that strong distrust, and fancied
Such proofs unto myself against my wife
That I conceiv'd the child was not mine own,
And scorn'd to father it; yet I gave to breed her
And marry her as the daughter of this gentleman
(Two thousand pound I guess you had with her);
But since your match, my wife upon her death bed
So clear'd herself of all my foul suspicions
(Blest be her memory) that I then resolv'd
By some quaint way (for I am still Letoy)
To see and try her throughly; and so much
To make her mine, as I should find her worthy.
And now thou art my daughter and mine heir,
Provided still (for I am still Letoy)
You honorably love her, and defy
The cuckold-making fiend, foul jealousy.

[V.vii.30-47]

Letoy's success in facing his angst over genus is limited and retrospective. Thus his mixed motives in trying to cure Joyless's malady.

Joyless's terrified oppression of himself and his family is repeatedly revealed to be destructive rather than generative. The disastrous outcome for both his wife and his son is perhaps most graphic when Diana, trying to cure her husband by participating in the play for his son's benefit, identifies the symptoms of Joyless's madness:

Joyless. Diana, yet be wise;
bear not the name
Of sober chastity to play the beast in.
Diana. Think not yourself, nor
make yourself a beast
Before you are one; and when you appear so,
Then thank yourself. Your Jealousy durst not trust me.
…
Joyless. I now could wish my son
had been as far
In the Antipodes as he thinks himself,
Ere I had run this hazard.
…
Diana. Why should you wish so?
Had you rather lose
Your son than please your wife? You show your love both ways.

[III.vi.50-63]

Joyless's jealous possessiveness and paranoid ego do worse than bar love; they threaten to end his family. His oppressiveness seems to prohibit enjoyment with his new wife, thereby cutting off more progeny; at the same time it continues to render his heir impotent to continue the line. Hughball's and Letoy's cure of horn madness, the phobia of cuckoldry, compels the patient to accept the threat.

Apparently the physician and the layman practice the radical method of confirming the jealous husband's worst fears. Blaze and Barbara, Hughball and Letoy hint at the cure. Barbara describes it when she loquaciously agrees with Letoy's vaunt of having “wrought” more than twenty cures: “You [Letoy] were the means to make me an honest woman, / Or (at the least) [Blaze] a contented man. … I know what was done first, if my lord took / That course with you as me. … Content! So was my husband when he knew / The worst he could by his wife” (V.viii.1-19). Barbara continues, despite Letoy's attempts to silence her, to implicate Letoy's biological daughter since “old whoremasters … call their wenches daughters.” Letoy's practice seems antipodal to his preoccupations with genus, except for two psychological comforts prevalent in western societies: misery loves company and, perversely, masculine pride can issue from cuckolding others as well as from remaining unhorned. Letoy's understanding plumbs deeper than Joyless's interest in a buff woman who is capable of dominating any old husband (III.iv).

The traditions of his house have left Letoy anguishing over a dilemma. Despite his fear of failing to maintain the purity of his venerated line, his very family heritage has made him acutely aware that pride in the past and the present can stifle continuity. Since the Letoys have led in sponsoring innovation, he is acutely aware of his responsibility to promote the change that is necessary to maintaining generation. He tells Blaze that “My ancestors and I have been beginners / Of all new fashions in the court of England / From before Primo Ricardi Secundi / Until this day” (I.v.15-18). Letoy is the antipodal lord of his society. Unlike other lords he dresses like a peddler while he supports a company of actors who dress like lords. Whereas other lords run into debt with shows too often ghost written by impoverished poets, he “write[s] all [his] plays [him]self” (I.v.76). And he underwrites, produces, and directs a magnificent repertoire of pleasurable, healthful stage plays. But if in his post of impresario he exercises control, in living up to his name of Letoy he recognizes the importance of improvisation, of innovation. Thus he creates a liberty in which people can act out vicarious roles; he thereby frees them to experiment with social change without facing horrendously damaging consequences.

When Hughball predicts acclaim for the social physician and the “lord of fancy” who restore the healthful mirth of their participating audience, Letoy claims that his “antiquity” dates from “Ages before the fancies were begot, / And shall beget still new to the world's end” (II.i.7-9). He is declaring his legacy of control; but he is also using sexual metaphors to suggest possibilities beyond that control. While he aims to achieve specific goals and maintains strict directorship in some ways, he also acknowledges the necessity of promoting free play with its unpredictable potential. Estimating that his actors are “all perfect / But one,” Letoy admits that Byplay's “shifts extempore, / (Knowing the purpose what he is to speak to) … moves mirth in me 'bove all the rest” (II.i.15-19). And Hughball realizes that Byplay's improvisations will prove invaluable as the spectators become interlocutors. Still, free play incurs risks few will venture. Exhorting his troupe Letoy corrects the absurdly formal speeches and mannered posturings that violate the decorum required by his style of directing. Then he berates Byplay for overgoing directorial attempts to overcontrol:

But you, sir, are incorrigible, and
Take license to yourself to add unto
Your parts your own free fancy, and sometimes
To alter or diminish what the writer
With care and skill compos'd; and when you are
To speak to your coactors in the scene,
You hold interlocutions with the audients—
Byplay. That is a way, my lord,
has bin allow'd
On elder stages to move mirth and laughter.
Letoy. Yes, in the days of Tarlton
and Kemp,
Before the stage was purg'd from barbarism.
…
Tonight I'll give thee leave to try thy wit.

[II.ii.39-54]

Three sanctions in this release to curative extemporaneous play assuage Letoy's fear of surrendering some direction to experimentation. First, the circumstances virtually require it; whoever gives up control must recognize dire need. Second, the release is for a specific temporary occasion; whoever gives up control tries to limit the period of vicarious trial. Third, tradition itself provides a precedent for trying change by improvising and sets rules for opening opportunities to salutary reform. All three imply carnival. All are potentially radical in both senses of maintaining a society's roots and of changing a society at root. Letoy expresses a principle of The Antipodes and a principle Brome held to throughout his playwriting career.

The inset play increasingly involves the spectators, who are drawn in by Byplay's dominating, role-shifting performance until, with only general direction by Letoy, it dissolves into The Antipodes. “Hoyday! The rest will all be lost,” Letoy tells Joyless, turning to instruct Byplay to entice Peregrine to his state marriage with Martha. “We now / Give over the play, and do all by extempore / For your son's good, to sooth him into's wits” (IV.x.116-18). Perhaps recognition of good physic as well as wise counsel (after Brome's fantasy) causes anti-Londoners to richly reward their poets, those antipodal Puritans. Extempore playing proves efficacious in healing and reforming—not as a program, but as a process. The inset play's progress, which encourages vicarious social, political, and finally personal experimentation, takes up the center of The Antipodes.

The Antipodes' inset play, though it provokes interaction with everyone, is primarily aimed at relieving Peregrine's mad Mandevillian escape from Joyless's paternal oppressions. In doing so through the commonplace analogy, it extends patriarchy from the absolutism of the family through the arbitrary hierarchy of society to the capricious tyranny of the state. There can be little question of the focus on law in the inset play. Each section of the inset, which begins with Quailpipe's prologue (II.v) and concludes with the marriage masque for Peregrine and Martha, the king of the Antipodes by conquest and its queen by inheritance (IV.xi), opens with a legal concern. The first begins with a gentleman chasing two sergeants who refuse his plea to be arrested and arraigned (II.vi); after a brief intermission the second begins with an unlikely conference between an impoverished lawyer and his rich client, a poet (III.ii); after Peregrine's entry into the play by attacking the performers' tiring house and declaring himself king, the third section begins with an absurd court hearing presided over by Byplay (III.vii); finally, when the Joyless entourage retire still further from the play, Peregrine gathers intelligence so he can judge and correct enormities in his kingdom (IV.i). The opening of each section manifests temporary escape from arbitrary authority. More, the last section indicates the necessity of change in the sociopolitical order, following the popular Renaissance stage tradition of the investigative disguised prince, lynx-eyed Haroun-al-Raschid, Jonson's imitative Justice Overdo, and his descendant, Brome's Cockbrain. Most, the central break is supplied by Peregrine storming the tiring house, taking “strict survey” of the actors' properties, and laying claim to dominion over anti-London, in imitation of the London apprentices' Shrovetide revelry.

Other factors contribute to an atmosphere of carnival exploration of family, social, and political reform through the play set inside The Antipodes. In one series of releases the inset's sections progressively focus first on an inverted family and educational system, next on an inverted social hierarchy, then on a perverted judiciary's enforcement of an arbitrary social structure, and climactically on Peregrine's assumption of authority to “reduce” Antipodean mores to English manners. But as Peregrine discovers what are for him abnormalities, he senses how arbitrary manners and mores can be. So he begins his demand for his new subjects' “submission” and “conformity” with mercy. In another pattern of releases, through the insertions Byplay doubles roles, increasing his command of the stage by taking the parts of ever more arbitrary, capricious, and zany authorities. In a final release the inset play's first two sections, which proceed to Peregrine's takeover, lead to the inescapable conclusion that the arbitrary absurdity of anti-London in many ways resembles that of London. And the inset's concluding two sections suggest, by a review of inverted power relationships through the extended family, the society, and the magistracy, that many current inequities need redress.

The opening section of the inset presents a rather straightforward inversion of domestic relations. Habits, manners, even grammar illustrate how servants command mistresses, who rule their husbands; the servants get increasing bonuses, the wives make jointures, the husbands bring dowries. But since in the Antipodes the old normally marry the young, some relations seem to represent London's practices that violate its professions. Gentlemen there are required by their wives to increase family estates by serving as gigolos who satisfy the wives of aged merchants and beget their children; and maids who bear families for aged ladies take precedence over their mistresses. The role of rake there is compelled on unwilling gentry, just as the role of bait is popularly forced on unwilling wives by greedy London merchants. In this odd manner, there patrilineage is reinforced by economics and fiat. What seems askew is not the mores but the moral approval of the Antipodeans. A similar pattern appears in youth ruling age and young women serving as tutors, particularly to senile men. Indeed, Peregrine urges the actors to agree that wisdom comes primarily from the beardless, not the greybeards.

The second section of the inset initially features an “honest lawyer, and though poor, no marvel,” who astoundingly counsels mediation rather than litigation to a “spruce young captain” who seeks escape from the feathermaker's duns to not pay his account and needs relief from his coachman's beatings. This section increasingly emphasizes the closeness of apparent oddities in anti-London to abuses in current England. A buff woman, who wins a decree permitting her duel, forces the lawyer to accept a fee rather than a thrashing. “He will take money yet / Rather than blows; and so far he agrees / With our rich lawyers, that sometimes give blows, / And shrewd ones, for their money,” Diana observes (III.v.27-30). The entry of a beggar trailed by a gallant who is begging from him suggests a remarkable set of likenesses. Not only do beggars and courtiers prove interchangeable in their insatiable search for funds but “politic young student[s]” prime the pump for larger allowances with gifts to their parents and grandparents. Direct commerce appears through the anti-charity of anti-London lawyers who collect beggars' fees to pay off London lawyers who curse the burden of poverty cases. Direct correspondence is discovered in the universal hypocrisy of usury, particularly among “some that pass for grave and pious churchmen” (III.v.92).

A change of focus from family to state commences with the third section of The Antipodes' inset, when the conqueror, Peregrine, admires the adjudication of a “point of justice” by an arbitrary, capricious, and confiscatory judge, Byplay. The greedy male magistrate's domineering enforcement of arbitrary morals parallels London's mores rather than its professed ideals. This “jeering judge” interrupts with sarcastic remarks, refuses to listen to charges or lawyers, and hears the defendant before the plaintiff. Mainly he bullies the citizen into a sycophantic obeisance that recalls Saleware's subservience (“An't please you, sir, my lord, an't like your honor”) under the threat of the swordbearer whose place “is to show correction” (III.ix.12). The citizen has brought a breach of promise suit on behalf of his wife against a gentleman who was given clothing to service her. He presents two arguments for his demand that the gentleman “satisfy” his wife: as his commander she makes him a whole tradesman; and gentlemen need to sire children (particularly sons) of citizens who will become the new gentry inheriting the estates their biological fathers lost to citizens. This custom rings familiar tunes satirizing London. But the gentleman antipodally creates discord by accepting imprisonment for violating anti-London's profession and London's practice of the double standard. He chooses to remain faithful, not “stand out with all men's wives / Except mine own” (III.ix.45-46). As a citizen the judge refuses to allow so dangerous a breach of “city custom, / By gentlemen's neglect of tradesmen's wives” and as a gentleman and representative of a rapacious state he abhors letting wealth get away. So he determines to seize the wares and satisfy the wife himself: “I'll do't, and set all straight and right: / Justice is blind, but judges have their sight” (III.ix.75-76). “And feeling, too, in the Antipodes.” And in England.

In the final section of the inset, Peregrine, following Hughball's advice, dons a disguise so as to “perceive / What to approve, and what correct” (IV.i.4-5). Resolving to “cherish, or severely punish,” he investigates family, social, and state hierarchies, values, and mores. As he discovers these to be wrongheadedly arbitrary and capriciously greedy, he decides to use authoritarian compulsion to right them, that is, to reduce them to London's ideals. But since many reflect London's normative practices or invert them so that suppressors and suppressed merely exchange roles, what gets revealed is the necessity not of revolution, a 180-degree spin, but of reformation. It would begin with the recognition of the irrational basis for many common practices and with the forgiveness of fallible humans. For arbitrary repression in The Antipodes requires the release of merciful amnesty. Just so, Peregrine gets released from his father, Joyless's family gets released from a destructive, jealous paternalism, and London gets released from a sociopolitical plague. Thus what gets prescribed is a process.

The first two scenes recall antipodal family and gender hierarchies that suggest parallels in London. A drunken old woman plays hooky from her lessons to enjoy bearbaiting; a gentleman indulging in ostentatious consumption fears to offend his servingman; then a lusty maid insultingly tries to pick him up. As this scene inverts the anticipated roles of sexual harassment, it modulates into a set of scenes showing the state's intervention in family and social habits. When a constable enters, the aggressor accuses the gentleman and his servingman of being street-walkers assaulting her virginity. She thereby initiates a paradigm of the problems produced by the authoritarian enforcement of customs that are all too often as inequitable as they are arbitrary. For the constable refuses to hear the gentleman's protests because women by virtue of their antipodal gender role perforce take precedence; he compounds the problem by accepting her word because of her superior social status. He further proclaims that one witness is more credible than two (though he is wary of self-interest) and that the law should always support the weaker side (despite the contradiction of his previous arguments). When he orders the two men off to prison, Peregrine is dismayed: “Here's much to be reformed” (IV.iii.25). Thus the scene's first point, the arbitrary and unjust nature of customs and their authoritarian enforcement, comes by way of the shock of recognition during role inversions. The scene's second point follows when Peregrine orders the gentleman freed and the maid jailed. At Hughball's prompting the new, just monarch grants clemency and release because “They are an ignorant nation, / And have my pity mingled with correction” (IV.iii.32-33) and because this may be her first offence. Then he advises her to follow his example when her truant grandmother returns from bearbaiting. Peregrine provides no solution to the shocking problem, only an understanding, forgiving process for its resolution: “Go and transgress no more” (IV.iii.38).

The next crucial scene reaffirms both lessons as the Man-scold indicts the law and his punishment of ducking: “The law's a river, is't? Yes, 'tis a river, / Through which great men, and cunning, wade, or swim; / But mean and ignorant must drown in't” (IV.v.7-9). Again, Peregrine is appalled by the reversal of gender roles wherein a man is denied speech or a female brandishes a sword while a male plies a needle: they are “so contrary / In all that we hold proper to each sex,” “'Twill ask long time and study to reduce / Their manners to our government” (IV.v.31-32, 34-35). The scene implies recognition, again through gender role inversion, of the unfairness of the sentence and the arbitrariness of what is proper. It also implies recognition that “reducing” the mores of others, through the claim of leading them back to proper mores, involves compulsion. And it implies that vicarious topsyturvy role playing can create an understanding that offers the potential for valuable reform, though making changes in an enforcing social hierarchy will be much harder to effect than making changes in these “low” domestic concerns, which are “easy to be qualified” (IV.v.36).

The next scenes, which present a parodic inversion of courtiers who talk and roughhouse like lowlifes with carriers who compliment like sophisticates, provide transit through questions of social mobility to concerns of state. The courtiers prove “rude silken clowns” who wrangle over petty gambling, sleazy clothing, and cheap food in sexual bawdry punctuated by small oaths; their flytings lead to slapstick buffetings; their interests are told by broadside ballads. But the transporters emit high-flown compliments, offers of mutual aid, and proposals for a fine lunch graced by conversation about correspondence from the Continent, new ideas at the universities, and politics at court. Since carriers are intellectual but courtiers illiterate in anti-London, Peregrine decrees that “Before I reign / A month among them, they shall change their notes, / Or I'll ordain a course to change their coats. / I shall have much to do in reformation” (IV.ix.35-39). He recognizes the need for meritorious achievement; holders of high status should at least be educated. Such reforms of the social hierarchy have great implications for the state.

As Peregrine improves at identifying madness, Hughball signals that the inset is proceeding “Beyond the line.” He introduces Byplay ironically, as “A statesman, studious for the commonwealth, / Solicited by projectors of the country” (IV.ix.56-58). Byplay's entry, amid clamoring projectors grasping bundles of proposals, initiates the inset's presentation of correspondences. It also introduces Brome's customary concern over the waste that results from arbitrary tyranny and its concomitant sycophantic scrambling for status, wealth, and power. Having approved a number of foolish projects, the “statesman” particularly commends increasing wool “By flaying of live horses and new covering them / With sheepskins” (IV.x.16-17). Descending from absurdity to vice, this favorite supports aid for a broke young gambler, a collection for a broken old bawd, and relief for thieves, burglars, conmen, and pimps; meanwhile he advocates the punishment of their victims for permitting damage to the “weal public”—all these apparently caricatures of current state abuses. At each discovery Peregrine becomes more indignant, until he breaks in on plans to take up a collection for a palsied “captain of the cutpurses”: “I'll hang ye all.” But Byplay leads a chorus who implore mercy, “Let not our ignorance suffer in your wrath / Before we understand your highness' laws; / We went by custom, and the warrant which / We had in your late predecessor's reign,” and pledge obedience (IV.x.86-95). Again Peregrine responds with forgiveness: “My mercy / Meets your submission. See you merit it / In your conformity” (IV.x.96-98).

Peregrine is virtually cured, wanting an easy return to London via the marriage masque. So Letoy explains to Joyless how Hughball has directed Peregrine's progress from madness to folly to sanity. Yet all is not done. The last act of the play produces a different cure through still more role playing. Diana, who has associated curing with role playing all along, wonders if Hughball's prescription for Joyless's son might help Joyless:

But 'tis the real knowledge of the woman
(Carnal, I think you mean) that carries it.
…
Nay, right or wrong, I could even wish
If he were not my husband's son, the doctor
Had made myself his recipe, to be the means
Of such a cure.
…
Perhaps that course might cure your [Joyless's]
          madness, too,
Of jealousy, and set all right on all sides.

[IV.xiii.22-29]

Diana turns the play back to the issue that haunts Blaze, Joyless, and Letoy, the issue that haunts Brome's plays, the issue of issue and patriarchal ego, the issue of cuckoldry.

Throughout the insets Diana and Joyless, as well as Peregrine (and occasionally Martha) have been responding to Hughball, the troupe, and Letoy, to the playing, role playing, and free play which can lead to vicarious experiment and cure. Diana and Letoy have also concentrated on curing Joyless's insanely patriarchal jealousy. Ever after Diana accepted Letoy's ring, their repeated show and talk of it have prodded her old husband's dread of having “fallen through the doctor's fingers / Into the lord's hands” (II.iii.58-59). Letoy's psychosocial pressure has barely countered Joyless's attempts to banish his wife from her first play, since Joyless has feared Diana's collaboration with Byplay, both the actor and the action, during Letoy's frequent intermezzos of feasting and courting. “Kissing indeed is prologue to a play, / Compos'd by th' devil, and acted by the Children / Of his Black Revels,” he anguishes (II.v.30-32). He is horrified by Diana's empathy for the antipodean custom of contracting with young gentry to impregnate the wives of impotent oldsters. Such experiments in thought, much more Diana's pretense of putting in for a “share amongst” actors who “may want one to act the whore” (III.v.51,54), severely threaten old Joyless. So for his cure Diana risks experimenting with the condition of her own name: “Your jealousy durst not trust me / Behind you in the country, and since I'm here, / I'll see and know and follow th' fashion; if / It be to cuckold you, I cannot help it” (III.vi.54-57). She stresses both the power of custom and the potency of experiment. Here reform and cure are, at the least, analogous. Both threaten Joyless as the antipodal play within the play dissolves into more role playing and scene setting in the final act of The Antipodes.

After the inset Joyless finds that he has been locked up for the night and that his host and his wife are missing. Possessed by mad folly he puts The Antipodes' crucial problem poignantly: “Why, rather, if [Letoy] did intend my shame / And [Diana's] dishonor, did he not betray me / From her out of his house, to travel in / The bare suspicion of their filthiness?” (V.i.10-14). But even if a husband does not face such an incident and even if his disease is in remission, his dread of cuckoldry remains incurable. Joyless will always face the dilemma that Hughball and Letoy cannot do away with but can try to resolve by compelling a husband onto one of its two painful horns. The perfect resolution can be achieved by their typical cure—let a husband, like Blaze, know that the worst has transpired. More psychologically amenable, but less sure, is to get a husband to trust that his wife is in deed a Diana. Impelling a husband onto this horn is much harder. Since suspicions are rife and the proof of innocence is impossible, credence in this case is ever precarious. To be reasonably sound, then, a husband (or a wife) can either forgive or he (she) can trust the spouse. Letoy and Diana propose the latter cure for Joyless.

The treatment commences with letting Joyless believe the worst and concludes with disabusing him. Charivaresque comedy opens the last act of The Antipodes, when Joyless, feeling the horns of his dilemma and his cuckoldry, appears in anguish. Barbara regales Joyless with news of the bedding of Peregrine and Martha, unaware that he suffers the news with reference to Letoy and Diana. Then a taunting and comforting Byplay, having allowed Joyless to purge considerable passion, enters to save Barbara or Joyless or both from the hornmad husband's knife and to usher him to another staging: Letoy's theater-proven testing of Diana. Joyless witnesses their parodic debate. In aphorisms phrased as capping couplets the faithful Diana resists the worldly wise Letoy's successive offers of riches instead of comfort, sensual satisfaction for aged impotence, and vengeance for jealous possessiveness. After the witness exalts his wife's “invincible” fidelity, he realizes that Letoy had Byplay bring him to this testing scene. He might have seen only an act:

                                                                                Stay, stay, stay, stay;
Why may not this be then a counterfeit action,
Or a false mist to blind me with more error?
The ill I fear'd may have
been done before,
And all this but deceit to daub it o'er.

[V.vi.18-22]

His observation is exact. Letoy's confessional revelation to keep Joyless from “falling back again” (that he is testing his own daughter out of toying with his own madness) does not in itself assure. Joyless's ultimate tolerance and belief must come from internal reform. For his own health he must accept play, improvisation beyond his control.

In the end Letoy tries to reassert his directorship and paternalism by confessing his part in the role playing and scene setting. He has tested his daughter Diana. He has arranged for her adoption by Truelock. He calls in the Antimasque of Discord and the Masque of Harmony. But, if he wants to succeed, Letoy too has to surrender some control to extemporaneous play. Verification of whether his and Hughball's “cure be perfect yet or no” is granted only by society's applause for whatever reforms issue from improvisation. Such vicarious social experiment may resemble satire's correction in order to restore norms, and it can function to allow temporary release in order to effectively reinstitute received mores. But it can also lead through traditional ways to salutary changes in the family, the society, and the state. The faith and forgiveness that underlie improvisation, carnival, and May-December charivari, all of which promote thinking about the unthinkable and trying the untryable, can encourage reforming the recalcitrant, realizing the unrealizable.

Notes

1. Kaufmann's valuable Richard Brome, Caroline Playwright, despite placing Brome in what now seems an obsolescent view of his times, incisively interprets his works; particularly observe 1-16. McLuskie, in The Revels History of Drama in English, ed. Potter, 237-48.

2. Sedge, “Social and Ethical Concerns,” 330. I rely on Catherine Shaw's review of relevant data about Brome's life (Richard Brome, 17-33) and use her comprehensive treatment of his works. Brome plays a major part in Butler's Theatre and Crisis.

3. Shaw, Richard Brome, 18, 149 n.5.

4. For both lords see Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 193-98. For more about Newcastle see my account of Shirley's audience, above.

5. See Richard H. Perkinson, “Topographical Comedy in the Seventeenth Century,” Theodore Miles, “Place-Realism in a Group of Caroline Plays,” and Shaw, Richard Brome, 87.

6. See Shaw, Richard Brome, 77-78 and 70, Kaufmann, Richard Brome, 151-68, and John Freehafer, “Brome, Suckling, and Davenant's Theater Project of 1639.”

7. Burke, “Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century London,” in Barry Reay, ed., Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, 48.

8. Kaufmann, Richard Brome, 168-74.

9. For A Jovial Crew I cite and quote the edition by Ann Haaker.

10. Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 274.

11. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 32-45, especially 39.

12. Because of its fullness and availability, the edition I cite for the act.scene/page of all Brome's works apart from The Antipodes and A Jovial Crew is John Pearson's inadequate The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome. I correct the text from original editions.

13. For examples see Barry Reay's “Introduction” and Bernard Capp's “Popular Literature” in Reay, Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, 21, 209-11.

14. Besides Kaufmann, Richard Brome, 151-68, and Freehafer, “Brome, Suckling,” see Sedge, “Social and Ethical Concerns,” 252-54, Shaw, Richard Brome, 68-74, and Tricomi's caveats in Anticourt Drama, 182-84.

15. See Bentley's The Jacobean and Caroline Stage 1: 332-34, along with the biographical accounts already cited. For Butler, see Theatre and Crisis, 220-29.

16. Kaufmann, Richard Brome, 109-30. For a catalog of the attributes that were commonly ridiculed see the gleanings of George F. Sensabaugh in “Love Ethics in Platonic Court Drama 1625-1642.”

17. Kaufmann's useful discussion of Brome's stage usurers (Richard Brome, 131-50) omits the tradition of Renaissance stage usurers and fails to acknowledge that Brome sometimes offers reform as well as condemnation to loan sharks.

18. See ibid., 67-87, Shaw, Richard Brome, especially 79, and Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 155-57.

19. See Kaufmann, Richard Brome, 68-74.

20. For the tone of these see Haaker's bibliographical essay in Logan and Smith, The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists, 185, and Shaw's summation in Richard Brome, 136-37. For responses see Shaw's individual readings.

21. See Shaw, Richard Brome, 58-59 and 81.

22. See Shaw (ibid., 85), who quotes with approval Sedge, “Social and Ethical Concerns,” 171.

23. The quotation (Shaw, Richard Brome, 174) caps a discussion beginning at 171; Kaufmann's agreement is suggested on 56; Shaw sums up uneasily, 87-92; she also provides a helpful survey of previous critics.

24. Ibid., 88.

25. My view of Brome's appropriative parody focuses more on its employment to attack social problems and it deals less with literary questions than do Robert N. Watson's helpful ideas about Jonson's appropriative imitation. See his Ben Jonson's Parodic Strategy: Literary Imperialism in the Comedies.

26. Kaufmann's discussion, which has dominated criticism, provides an important example of the problem (Richard Brome, 36-46). His moral assumptions about Brome, 37-38, seem to lead to foregone conclusions about artistic demerits when Brome's presentation does not seem as conservative as Kaufmann postulated.

27. For suggestive criticism on his debts see ibid., 36; for specific parallels see Joe Lee Davis's The Sons of Ben: Jonsonian Comedy in Caroline England, 148-50, 152-56, 188-90.

28. See particularly Shaw's discussions on 35-37, 57-58, and 68-69 of Richard Brome.

29. See the accounts in Kaufmann, Richard Brome, 151-68, and Freehafer, “Brome, Suckling.”

30. Kaufmann, Richard Brome, 109-30. Although Kaufmann's interpretation seems obvious now, the fact that for three centuries the play was apparently accepted as a cheap imitation of the voguish pattern of courtly tragicomedy indicates how hyperbolic this subgenre became.

31. On Brome's use of songs generally see R.W. Ingram's “The Musical Art of Richard Brome's Comedies.”

32. See Cope's argument in The Theater and the Dream, note 4, 297-98.

33. The quotation appears on 135 of ibid.; the discussion extends to 169.

34. Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 224-27, sums up his analysis of this play's implications when seen through the masque.

35. Shaw, Richard Brome, 139-43. As I do in my general characterization of the style of each Caroline professional playwright, I defer detailed commentary until the exemplary play, The Antipodes.

36. See Charles Read Baskervill's The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama, 198, 319.

37. For The Antipodes I cite and quote the edition by Ann Haaker.

38. See Donaldson on The Antipodes and its tropes in The World Upside Down, 78-98, and Butler on estates, Theatre and Crisis, 210-14.

39. Davis, “Richard Brome's Neglected Contribution,” expanded in The Sons of Ben, 65-80; the quotation appears on 75.

40. For Donaldson on The Antipodes and on Gluckman, see World Upside Down, particularly 96-97, 14-16. For Barber's seminal formulation see Shakespeare's Festive Comedy.

41. Cope, Theater and the Dream, 147-59.

42. Davis, Sons of Ben, 71-74; Kaufmann, Richard Brome, 61; and Haaker, “Introduction,” The Antipodes, xiii.

43. The quotations, from Theatre and Crisis, 214 and 220, virtually frame Butler's discussion.

44. For the first, see ibid., 194, 207, 219; for the second, 228-33ff.

45. In The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. Barbara A. Babcock, 39-94, particularly 41-52. The tradition of adynata issuing from Virgilian tradition, popular sources, or both, may overlap. See Ernst Robert Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 94-98.

46. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 97-123, 124-51; my subsequent quotation appears on 143.

47. See Reay and Burke in Reay's Popular Culture, 21 and 34-39.

48. Turner, The Forest of Symbols, 93-111, and van Gennep, The Rites of Passage. For a helpful account and bibliography of this revision by Turner and others see Babcock's “Introduction” to Reversible World, 13-36.

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