SOURCE: “The Caroline Editorial Page,” in Richard Brome: Caroline Playwright, Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 47-66.

[In the following essay, Kaufmann explores topical allusions and references to contemporary events in four of Brome's plays, characterizing these works as the “newspapers” of the day.]

Because the Caroline realistic comedy is artistically tentative, its playwrights are experimenting with possible ways of digesting urgently needed corrections for social abuses without losing the advantage of a matured formal structure for their plays. They wanted to be contemporary without becoming trivial. When reading the comedies of this time, one is astonished at the function the drama is performing. The plays do the work of newspapers! They report, they advertize, they protest, they deplore, they frame social questions, they editorialize. This chapter will show how Brome created “newspapers” with four of his plays. There is probably no quicker way to distinguish the intimate—almost familial—interplay of audience, playwright, and social environment which is the special earmark of Caroline drama.

THE CITY WIT (1629-30)

The City Wit though simple, almost parabolic, in its main structure is the most promising of Brome's very early efforts. It is Brome's first direct attempt at social satire on a thematic level. Here for the first time he formulates an issue of social significance and traces it throughout his entire play, so that a single question—how the economic dishonesty generally acquiesced in is to be reconciled with personal responsibility—is the organizing principle of the action as well as of character relationships. What happens in the play happens because one of the characters, Crasy, having failed in business because he is honest, decides to investigate the advantages of deliberate deception. The play is unified in terms of the initial situation for which the remainder of the play serves as an area of logic expansion and experimentation.

Brome was fond of the tableau device on the stage,¹ that is, he translated into the dramatic medium the sort of static representation of vice and mood that one finds in the emblem books.² He evidently composed a number of crucial scenes in his plays with an eye to the total visual impact without regard to realistic action. Since a great deal of the more serious ethical thinking of Renaissance man was done in formalized, emblematic terms, this observation may be useful in trying to isolate the particular “flavor” of a play like The City Wit.³

The first thing one notices when re-examining The City Wit is how full and explicit the stage directions are for the opening scene. Crasy, recognizable only as a young man of the city, is placed at a table “with empty Money-bags, Bills, Bonds, & Bookes of accompts”; we are instructed that “He takes up the bils & papers”; then “He puts the Bills & Bonds into a Bag”; and finally that “He takes up a scroll” (I, i, 279-80). All this we are told in less than two pages and while the main spoken action is a soliloquy by Crasy on money.

How easie a thing it is to be undone,
When credulous Man will trust his state to others!

(I, i)

We discover partly through his talk and partly through the carefully composed stage business that he is bankrupt, and the importance of his having been financially so reduced is strongly impressed on our minds.

He distinguishes himself from the numerous bankrupts of the time by taking a moral position that is not to his financial advantage. He will not sue for composition of his debts,

All I have is lost,
And what I have not, sought to be forc'd from me,
I must take nimble hold upon Occasion.
Or lie for ever in the Bankrupt ditch,
Where no man lends a hand to draw one out.
I will leape over it, or fall bravely in't,
Scorning the Bridge of Baseness, Composition,
Which doth infect a City like the Plague,
And teach men Knavery, that were never born to't:
Whereby the Rope-deserving Rascall gains
Purple and Furre, Trappings and golden Chains.
Base Composition, baser far then Want,
Then Beggery, Imprisonment, Slavery:
I scorn thee, though thou lov'st a Trades-man dearly
And mak'st a Chandler Lord of thousands yearly.
I will have other ayd.

(I, i)

The effect of this initial situation is to create sympathy for Crasy's financial plight at the same time as it puzzles the mind. City types on the early seventeenth-century stage are nearly always foolish, greedy, fanatic, crass, and underbred—all of these or any combination thereof. Here we are presented with a city type who is alienated from the city's assumptions. Who is he? How did he get there? Is he really a city person? What can he do to revive himself? These questions do not press themselves on our mind urgently, rather they arouse a reflective interest. Most important of all, the method of presentation makes an association in our minds between the practical question of what action he will take—a dramatic question—and the reasons he can give for taking it—an ethical question. In short we are made aware that Crasy has both a problem and a conscience. Though The City Wit is simple, almost rudimentary, in technique it shows in embryo form the underlying patterns which distinguish critical, thoughtful, social comedy from theatrical and contentless entertainment. It also shows some of Brome's major preoccupations in relatively undeveloped form. If we follow his development of theme a little further we will see the characteristic techniques he employs. He uses his first act to set up the problem. The structure of the act is almost rhetorical: Crasy enters on the stage bankrupt; he scorns normal businessman expedients for redeeming himself; he is rejected by his wife's relatives who criticize his guilelessness; he confronts his debtors to collect money they owe him to apply against his debts; they, in a scene faintly reminiscent of Timon of Athens, offer him cynically prudential advice but no money; he resolves to test their advice. In examining the terms of this sequence we see how self-consciously Brome uses the medium to make it clear that the play is an examination of this abstractly formulated problem. He is saying in effect, “If one were not honest would he be better off” or perhaps, slightly differently, “Has the new economy made honesty obsolescent?”

Crasy, soon after the opening tableau, is joined by his mother-in-law, Pyannet, and other members of the family. Pyannet, who is very talkative and self-important, berates him, whereupon he replies,

Cra. All was but my kind heart in trusting …

Py. Kind heart! What should Citizens do with kind hearts; or trusting in any thing but God, and ready money? …

Cra. … May not an honest man———

Py. Honest man! Who the Devill wish'd thee to be an honest man? Here's my worshipfull Husband, Mr. Sneakup, that from a Grasier is come to be a Justice of Peace: And, what, as an honest man? Hee grew to be able to give nine hundred pound with my daughter; and, what, by honestie? Mr. Sneakup and I are come to live i' th City, and here we have lyen these three years; and what? for honesty? Honesty! What should the City do with honesty; when 'tis enough to undoe a whole Corporation? …

Cra. If my uncunning Disposition be my only vice, then …⁴

(I, i)

and he is interrupted and Mistress Pyannet is off again. Crasy replies, firm still, “Well: If to be honest, be to be a fool, my utmost Ambition is a Coxcomb” (I, i).

Crasy then confronts his debtors one by one. The first, a courtier, laughs at his credulity for lending money without bond. The second, a pedant, offers him philosophical counsel. His brother-in-law, who is being educated as a gentleman as the Sneakups climb stealthily up the social ladder, offers him some warmed-over Epicureanism, “Desire little; covet little … And you shall have enough,” and then adds, magnanimously, some man-of-the-world's advice, “Purchase Wit; Get wit (look you) wit … Prithee grow rich againe; and were good Cloaths, that we make keep our Acquaintance still.” In short, he tells him to exploit his wife's good looks at court as a means of rising again (I, ii). Another courtier reiterates this, “Prithee learne to have some witt. … Be rul'd by me, Get money, do, Get money and keep it; wouldst thrive? Be rather a knave then a Fool” (I, ii).

After more, much more, of the same “friendly” advice, Crasy is left alone.

Is this the end of unsuspicious Freenesse?
Are open hands of Cheerfull Pietie
A helpfull bounty, and most easie Goodnesse,
Rewarded thus?
Is, to be honest, term'd to be a fool?
Respect it Heaven. Beare up still merry heart.
Droop not: But scorne the worlds unjust despising
Who through Goodnesse sinks, his fall's
his Rising

(I, ii [italics mine])

Now, if Brome left us here we would have a concrete affirmation of the Christian principle that charity is its own reward, for that is what Crasy has been scorned for being—charitable—in both the basic sense of open-hearted sympathy and trust of one's fellow man, and in the more restricted sense of using money to alleviate others' distress. However, he does not leave it here. Crasy, understandably disenchanted, pretends a cynicism greater than he feels and advises his “'prentice” to choose wit when given the alternatives of wit and honesty:

If ever it be in thy possible ability, wrong all Men, use thy wit, to abuse all things, that have but sense of wrong: For without mersie, all men have injur'd thy mistrustles Master … Cheat, chosen [sic, cosen?], live by thy Wits: Tis most manly, therefore most noble … In briefe be a knave and prosper: for honesty has beggered me.

(I, ii)

The first act is drawing to a close when Crasy advises his “'prentice” Jeremy in this matter. They are going to put their heads together to outwit their abusers. The quality of self-conscious demonstration with which Brome is going to exploit the medium to make his points is now evident. Jeremy takes his leave, “Farewell Master, And if I put tricks upon some of them, let the end of the Comedie demonstrate.” Crasy, left alone, closes the act with a direct statement of the proposition,

The scene of our slight sports confess'd shall have,
That any may be rich, will be a knave.

(I, ii)

The rest of the play is a syllogistic demonstration of the truth of this proposition. Crasy, with the aid of Jeremy and innumerable disguises, proceeds through four acts to demonstrate that he is wittier than his abusers. He makes dupes and fools of them and he recovers his money and goods. He proves that his handicap was deliberate honesty not stupidity or ineffectuality. One is reminded of the story of the great Ionian philosopher, Thales of Miletus, who, tired of being told that he was a philosopher because he lacked ability to succeed in everyday affairs, cornered the market in oil presses and made a fortune which he gave away once his point was made. So Crasy after successfully mastering and embarrassing all the others, at the end takes off his disguise and enters to the assembled group “in his own habit, all hung with Chaines, Jewells, Bags of Money, &c” (V, i). He reads their advice back to them, and then after enjoying his triumph he closes the play by saying,

My honest care being but to keep mine owne,
What, by my slights, I got more than my due,
I timely will restore again to you.

(V, i)

Woven through the play is a series of unfavorable reflections on the self-gratifying habits of citizens and of the courtiers who live off them. The play displays no powerful insight or exceptional skill, but it is solid, coherent, unified, and, in a rather boisterous way, amusing. Its pattern of judgments illustrates Brome's characteristic beliefs. Crasy's alleged folly was not being “for himself” in the sharp, ceaseless battle of wits between men fighting for a larger personal share of goods. Brome rejects this allegation and uses comedy as his means to demonstrate his point that honesty and fair dealing are not the product of weakness but of an attitude superior to mere skill in achieving economic success which, he argues, is merely a kind of virtuosity in deception. This has been a theme of humanists in all ages—equally true and equally futile. The difference is that in the seventeenth century, before the triumph of the Hobbesian rationale for human relations, one might possibly still advocate it in the midst and not on the periphery of life. Brome's advocacy of the theme is one small strand in the pattern of his overall conservative adherence to a disappearing moral tradition.

THE NEW ACADEMY (1635?)

The New Academy was probably the first play that Brome wrote for the King's Revel's company after he signed his Salisbury Court contract in July, 1635. There is no title-page evidence for company or date of performance, and there are no known external references to the play. The dating must rest on internal evidence and on more general arguments about the theatrical and social milieu which surround the play. The play has a double title, both parts of which are exploited. Taking the second part first, The New Exchange refers to the New Exchange in the Strand as a reference in the play makes clear. Rafe Camelion, an uxorious citizen, intercepts a letter to his wife and reads the address: “To my deare daughter Mrs. Hannah Camelion, at her shop or house in or near The New Exchange” (II, i, 23). It would be convenient if we could say that the New Exchange was in fact new when the play was written. Actually it was built much earlier. After the stables of Durham house, facing the Strand, were pulled down,

On their site was built an exchange, called the New Exchange, which obtained some popularity. This was erected partly on the pattern of the Royal Exchange, and was opened by King James I. This, Strype tells us, “was for milliners, sempstresses, and other trades that furnish dresses.” The place was opened in 1609 by James I and the queen; it was called Britain's Burse. It became fashionable after the Restoration. …⁵

It was simply a place where people could foregather in Brome's London. It is interesting that the brief allusion quoted is the only one in the play. But at the end of the play, Brome has his conventional double pair of lovers discover they cannot marry each other in the combinations the play has established, so they are told “they shall exchange And marry in due order.” Whereupon Lafoy Junior, one of the two prospective grooms, very agreeably replies in his stage French accent, “we shall make. De exshange presently. A new exshange, De new Exshange indeed” (V, ii, 107).

The double stress here seems to be a verbal pointing at the play title, as was the not infrequent custom. There is, perhaps, a minor anomaly here which can be very readily accounted for. It has been recognized that there was a short-lived fad of place-realism comedies on the Caroline stage.⁶ Brome twice contributed to this fad in his The Covent-Garden Weeded (1632-33?) and his The Sparagus Garden (1635). The fad included Marmion's Holland's Leaguer late in 1631, Nabbes' Covent Garden (1632-33?) and Tottenham Court (1633), as well as Shirley's Hyde Park (1632). It seems quite probable that Brome added the subtitle, The New Exchange, to gain gratuitous appeal for his play from a fad well under way but not exhausted.⁷ The false justification of the title in the last scene adds to our suspicion of a specious plan of this sort.

Further pursuing this rather tenuous line, we turn to the internal literary problem of what sort of play it is and where its emphases lie. The play is a very routine hybrid with a fairly elaborate intrigue plot built on a realistic base, although the realism is not so heavily topical as Brome's usual practice leads us to expect, so that there are no intelligible specific allusions to secure a date. Even so there are an unusual number of references to the French. Matchil, a testy merchant, in a fit of temper turns out his daughter and his charge, the daughter of a French friend, saying, “leave my house. There's French enough in town, that may befriend you” (I, i, 10). The play takes its title from an academy where French manners and dances are taught by “Two young French Gentlemen. New come ashore” (III, ii, 59) who speak either in French or in a stage accent (ibid., pp. 63-65; 76-78; 85-86). Cash, Matchil's apprentice who absconds with money and dresses like a gallant, is described as “a brave gallant, one o' the Alamodes, Nothing but French all over” (V, i, 91).

Though there were a good many French in London all during the reign of Charles I, there was one French invasion of just the right sort to catch the theatrically alert mind which Brome shared with his master, Ben Jonson. Bentley provides the cue:

In February 1634/5 a distinguished troupe of French players came to England, and, as one might expect, attained high favour at court where the French influence was so strong in these years.⁸

The company evidently made a hit with the public. They were granted permission to use the Phoenix theater during Lent and to play “on the sermon daies, and gott two hundred pounds at least.”⁹ They were not content with their Phoenix successes for,

After they left the Phoenix the French players acted for a time on a special stage erected in the riding-school of M. le Febure in Drury Lane. A warrant for the erection of a stage, scaffolds, and seats in this riding academy was issued 18 April 1635, and less than three weeks later, on 5 May, a warrant was issued to the company allowing them to act in this new playing place “during pleasure.” The company was evidently still in London in December 1635 … Presumably the Frenchmen returned to Paris shortly thereafter, no doubt to the great relief of their English competitors.¹⁰

It seems to me the correlation between a French troupe performing in a riding academy and the stage presentation in satiric terms of an Academy where actors speaking in French stage-dialect are tutors in dance, song, manners and compliments is not too difficult to make. One wonders what sort of plays these Frenchmen could have put on for an English audience. It seems likely that to make money over a protracted period they would have had to depend on dancing and miming.

Brome's Academy, besides the usual emphasis on the art of compliment, features dances. They can offer,

for Corants,—La Miniard,
La Vemide, Le Marquesse, Le Holland,
La Brittaine, Le Roy, Le Prince, Le Montague,
The Sarband, the Canvries, La Reverree.
For Galliards, the Sellibrand, the Dolphine,
The new Galliard, the Valette Galliard, and lepees.

(III, ii, 65)

This long list of offerings is commented upon and the English people present undertake to dance with the Frenchmen, saying, “I feare no French flashes … If we cannot dance 'hem of [off?] o' their legs, our wenches can, I warrant thee. Musick be ready” (ibid., p. 65). The stage direction then specifies “Daunces”; so there were evidently a series of dances presented rather than the usual one.¹¹ This sort of cataloguing of specialized French dance names and the emphasis on dancing seems indicative of an unusual design. It is most easily explained by an ephemeral excitement such as was caused by the visiting French troupe.

Evidence of a different order can be produced for a date of 1635 rather than pre-1630. It is the most difficult sort of evidence to present in a compact and persuasive form, for it rests on generic similarities between plays. By drawing the parallels between this play and the others known to date from the late thirties, the fragmentary evidence we have adduced can be strengthened.

The subplot characters, Rafe Camelion and his wife, are Brome favorites in his later plays. In fact, Rafe is a finger exercise for the later more successful character, Saleware, in A Mad Couple Well Match'd. Both are uxorious citizens with small merchandizing shops. Both are nearly wittols—fondly trusting their wives and virtually coercing them into adultery by refusing to suspect or dominate them. Each is given a tag line. Camelion's is “honi soit qui maly pense,” and Saleware's “Sapientia mea mihi, Stultitia Tua Tibi.” The tags are exploited dramatically in similar fashion and, as can be seen, are when used by the wittol type of about equivalent force. There are other parallels between these two plays. Valentine Askal in The New Academy is a direct prefiguration of Carelesse in A Mad Couple Well Match'd; both are cynical, hard-mouthed rakes of a sharper-edged sort than Brome traditionally portrays. Nathaniel Banelass, the libertine in The English Moor, is a transitional characterization between them. Furthermore, Strigood in The New Academy is exceedingly like Moneylacks in The Sparagus Garden, the play which immediately follows it in this interpretation of the Brome chronology.

The idea of an Academy of compliments is utilized again in The Damoiselle (1638).¹² These are not vague, general similarities but a specific chain of reproductions. In a period of three or four years, Brome wrote The New Academy, The Sparagus Garden, The English Moor, The Damoiselle, and A Mad Couple Well Match'd; for that period he evidently developed a set of personal versions of the conventions of current Caroline realistic-intrigue comedy, so that elements of one play overlap into and form the undercoating of the next. There is not much similarity in tone, structure, and emphasis between The New Academy and the other known early plays—The Northern Lasse, The City Wit, The Novella, and The Covent-Garden Weeded.¹³ There was a definite shift in technique with The New Academy. What heretofore have been assumed to be the indications of early, undeveloped craftsmanship are more accurately explained as an uncertain feeling after a new style. The New Academy is a mediocre play—it lacks sharpness and coherence of structure, but it prefigures substantially the much more successful achievement of A Mad Couple Well Match'd and through it of much Restoration comedy.

THE SPARAGUS GARDEN (1635)

Probably the second play Brome wrote under his Salisbury Court contract was The Sparagus Garden, published in 1640 with the title page informing us that it was “Acted in the yeare 1635, by the then Company of Revels, at Salisbury Court.”¹⁴ The play was evidently seen through the press by Brome and contains a dedication to William, Earl of Newcastle, with whom Brome had obviously had some association, since the dedication is less impersonally flattering than a strictly conventional one. Newcastle was unique among the nobility who wrote plays, in that he admired and wrote in the vein of Jonsonian comedy and its derivatives rather than the “love and honor” mode. He evidently liked Brome's plays, for Brome says in this dedication, “My Lord! Your favourable Construction of my poore Labours commanded my Service to your Honour, and, in that, betray'd your worth to this Dedication.”¹⁵

There are two sets of commendatory verses, Jonsonian scene divisions, and a careful text. Obviously Brome thought well of this play, a contention further confirmed by his proud reference to it in the epilogue to The Court Beggar five years later: “And let me tell you he has made pretty merry Jigges that ha' pleas'd a many. As (le' me see) th' Antipodes, and (oh I shall never forget) Tom Hoyden o' Tanton Deane.” The second title alludes to a low comic rustic in The Sparagus Garden¹⁶ whose thick, Somerset dialect seems to have captivated Brome's audience, for we have noted earlier (in quoting from the contract proceedings) that the estimated proceeds from the play were £1,000. Whether or not this is a convenient exaggeration, the play's popularity is attested to by the citation, not merely by the monetary figure produced to bolster it.

This work, like the early The Covent-Garden Weeded to which it has only a general similarity, is quite full of topical reference. Since a precise dating of the play is of some importance in establishing the correct chronological sequence of Brome's canon, we shall examine one of his allusions closely.

Rebecca, the demanding wife of Brittleware (a harrassed and yielding husband, so favored as a type by Brome in this period), wants to have a baby and decides to indulge her cravings as pregnant women are permitted to do, thereby hoping to induce pregnancy as if by sympathetic magic. She expresses her craving: “I doe long to see the new ship, and to be on top of Pauls Steeple when it is new built, but that must not be yet” (II, ii, 134). Brome signed his Salisbury Court contract July 20, 1635. The allusion to the new ship would have been meaningless for several months thereafter, for Rebecca is referring to the ship Charles which is graced in the records of the period by the name of the “great ship.”¹⁷ The ship was being built at Woolwich and Rebecca evidently desired to be taken on a country excursion to see the marvel for herself. As late as September, 1635, the ship was not even begun, for there is a letter extant from the builder, Captain Pett to the King: “If the King's pleasure were signified for beginning the work, Pett made no doubt to have the ship finished in a year and a half.”¹⁸ A second letter from the same man in February, 1635-36 (o.s.), indicates that the ship is well under way. The necessary shipments of additional lumber should be expedited, he says, “that the works being already in great forwardness, may not be hindered.”¹⁹

It is improbable that the building of the great ship became a favourite haunt of London sightseers until the spring of 1635-36 when such outings would have been something to see. Whether this is acceptable or not, it would seem that the allusion suggests a date late in 1635 or in early 1635-36 (o.s.).

The other allusions further substantiate what we already know—that Brome wove fresh, current material into his plays and that with a few exceptions his allusions (when they can be traced down) are to specific recent events. He cleverly exploits the newly introduced sedan chairs in devising a denouement for his plot,²⁰ by having the gull of the play, Tim Hoyden, conveyed onto the stage in one of these curtained litters and emerge clad as a woman. He utilizes it like a moveable inner stage for a surprising and amusing disclosure. He has Rebecca express her craving to see a play, not just any play but, a little uncertainly, she asks to see “The Knight of the burning—what dee' call't,” and is answered, “The Knight of the burning Pestle.” This play was evidently undergoing a successful London revival about this time, for the record of a court performance by Beeston's Queen Henrietta's company on February 28, 1635-36 (o.s.), is extant,²¹ which, for a play that had previously been a failure, suggests a successful revival in public before taking it to court. In short, all identifiable topical allusions indicate that the play was probably composed several months after Brome joined the Salisbury Court theater and that in terms of our calendar it is a play of 1636 rather than 1635.

At the present time it is hard to account for the special popularity of The Sparagus Garden. It is a vigorous play with an abundance of Brome's special gift for natural, vigorous dialogue, and a varied and strenuous plot. Perhaps its great success lies in the lucid and amusing way in which it “literalizes in action,” a metaphor underlying any number of plays in the period. The problem is that of social climbing and the ambition of the yeoman or tradesman to become a gentleman. The metaphor is the perennial one of blue blood versus the more usual variety. Brome has Tim Hoyden, the young prosperous country innocent, fall in with the theatrically flyblown crowd of cony-catchers, but if they are timeworn as stage types their device for making him into a gentleman is not. They quite literally improve his “social strain” by draining off his base blood. Brittleware and Moneylacks, the dupers, persuade him of the necessity.

Hoy. But must I bleed sir?

Mon. Yes, you must bleed: your father's blood must out. He was but a yeoman, was he?

Hoy. As ranck a Clowne, none disprais'd, as any on Sommersetshire.

Mon. His foule ranke blood of Bacon and Pease-porridge must out of you to the last dram.

Hoy. You will leave me none in my body then, I shall bleed to death, and you go that way to worke.

Spr. [inge, a third coney-catcher as his name implies] Fear nothing sir: your blood shal be taken out by degrees, and your veines replenish'd with pure blood still, as you loose the puddle.

(II, iii, 143)

The dialogue continues along these lines for a considerable time. Brome exploits the snobberies and the foolish pretensions while deriving from the device the necessary plot stimuli. The building of a store of gentlemen's blood will require an expensive diet from which the conspirators will get their share, and eating a fashionable diet will bring the group to the “sparagus garden” which is necessary to unify the various plot elements. This blood-letting device has a dramatically effective quality that Brome mastered to an exceptional degree. It is the function of the comic dramatist to find concrete equivalents for expression of current interests. Brome could find homely, easily intelligible ways of embodying concepts and aspirations on the stage. The blood-letting device may seem a little crude and overfarcical for modern tastes. A little historical imagination can reconstruct the terms in which the audience must have received these scenes and can recover at least an intellectual grasp of their immense comic possibilities.

The Sparagus Garden exploited the run of interest in place-realism so noticeable in The Covent-Garden Weeded. The direct exposure of the profiteering of taverners so central to the earlier play is echoed in a scene between the proprietor of the Sparagus Garden and his wife in which they discuss coldly the outrageously high prices they have exacted of their patrons (III, i, 154-55). The exposé of the Sparagus Garden itself is much less fully worked out, but that it is only one step above a brothel, a place of assignations and brawls, is made clear in a few tableau scenes. Finally, to account for the popularity of the play, we simply have to believe that Tom Hoyden, the socially aspiring Tim's brother, must have been a joy to the Caroline audience. Just as Brome had exploited the novelty of a north country accent in The Northern Lasse, adapting the pathetic character of Constance to the melodies of the accent, so in The Sparagus Garden he capitalized on his sharply attuned ear to introduce the best Somerset dialect in years, adapting the open, forthright, simplicity of Tom Hoyden's character to the rustic imperfection and solidity of his speech. Congreve did the same thing later with great success with Ben in Love for Love. A close look at The Sparagus Garden has indicated how intimately factual, how close to the immediate activities of the city Brome's work is.

THE ANTIPODES (1638)

Brome's gay, imaginative, and spirited attempt to combine his instinct for theatrical pathos with a more generalized form of social satire in The Antipodes (1638) is not quite successful, for there is an intellectual awkwardness, a loss of proper proportion that attacks Brome whenever he becomes too abstract or intellectual. He thought in terms of actable metaphors and his discursive or choral amplification of what he perceives is usually inferior to his direct presentation of it in stage action.

Even so The Antipodes is Brome's most unusual play. It was published during his lifetime²² as “Acted in the yeare 1638 by the Queenes Majesties Servants, at Salisbury Court in Fleet-street.” The play was evidently a success, for besides speaking proudly of it in the prologue to The Court Beggar in 1640, Brome says in his epistle dedicating the play to William Seymour, Earl of Hertford, “If the publicke view of the world entertayn it with no lesse welcome, then that private one of the Stage already has given it, I shall be glad.”

In a strange note appended to the text of the 1640 edition, Brome addresses the reader.

You shal find in this Booke more then was presented upon the Stage, and left out of the Presentation, for the superfluous length (as some of the Players pretended) I thought good al should be inserted according to the allowed Original; and as it was, at first, intended for the Cock-pit Stage, in the right of my most deserving Friend Mr. William Beeston, unto whom it properly appertained;

We have noted earlier that Brome, while under contract to the Salisbury Court theater wrote a play or two for the Cockpit theater contrary to contract. Evidently he tried to submit this one to them, too, but was legally compelled to return the play to Salisbury Court. The opening passage of the play suggests that Brome perhaps composed this work for the reopening of the theaters during the long months of the plague closing. In the initial line of the play, Blaze welcomes Joylesse back from the country.

To me, and to the City, Sir, you are welcome,
And so are all about you: we have long
Suffer'd in want of such faire Company
But now that Times calamity has given way
(Thankes to high Providence) to your kinder visits.(23)

(I, i)

The very unforeshadowed and unexplained nature of this allusion argues that Brome, like Jonson in his Alchemist, intended to make his play immediately contemporaneous by reference to the plague and the consequent evacuation of the city. This becomes even more likely when further along in the play we find a reference to the absence of stage activity in London. Discussing the preparation for the play within the play with its setting in the Antipodes,

          it will be possible
For him to thinke he is in the Antipodes
Indeed, when he is on the Stage among us.
When't has beene thought by some that have their wits,
That all the Players i' th' Towne were sunke past rising.(24)

(II, ii)

It seems possible that there was a period during the long plague closing when, after the dissolution of the King's Revels group and before the reformation of Queen Henrietta's men, the Salisbury Court theater had no company.²⁵ During that time, Brome, as a playwright contractually tied to the house, would have had had no outlet. He might have agreed under such circumstances to prepare a play for Beeston's opening at the Cockpit with his new company, Beeston's Boys,²⁶ only to be restrained from doing this by the legal opposition invoked by the Salisbury Court management. Consequently the play, though written for a reopening which happened to fall in October, 1637,²⁷ could have been delayed by legal difficulties until 1638.²⁸ That the play was performed in 1638 is supported by allusions in the prologue to the recent courtier plays “that carry state In Scene magnificent and language high; And Cloathes worth all the rest, except the Action [i.e., the acting].” This refers almost certainly to Suckling's Aglaura that was acted some time during the long Christmas season of 1637/38 (i.e., December, 1637 and January, 1637-38 [o.s.]). A contemporary letter dated February 7, 1637-38 (o.s.) from George Garrard (whose job it was to keep up with current news) to the Earl of Strafford, says,

Two of the King's Servants … have writ each of them a Play, Sir John Sutlin and Will. Barclay, which have been acted in Court, and at the Black Friars, with much Applause. Sutlin's Play cost three or four hundred Pounds setting out, eight or ten Suits of new Cloaths he gave the Players; an unheard of Prodigality.²⁹

The time sequence implication in the phrasing of the prologue, where Brome speaks of “Opinion, which … has of late” embraced these new spectacles in preference to the older style of plays, does not lead one to suppose that his prologue was written immediately after Suckling's play was performed. It is more a considered reference to the recent past. In any case, Brome's prologue asserts that he is attempting in his own play, The Antipodes, to follow the path of the great dramatist of the past, “Who best could understand, and best devise Workes, that must ever live upon the Stage.” He will in his humble way labor to keep true comedy alive. In asserting this, Brome comes as close as he ever does to stating his credo and justifying his service to the stage.

Pardon our just Ambition, yet that strive
To keep the weakest Branch o' th' Stage alive.
I meane the weakest in their great esteeme,
That count all slight, that's under us, or nigh;
And only those for worthy Subjects deeme,
Fetch'd, or reach'd at (at least) from farre, or high:
When low and home-bred Subjects have their use,
As well, as those, fetch'd from on high, or farre;
And 'tis as hard a labour for the Muse
To mouve the Earth, as to dislodge a Starre.

When the persistence of a humble vitality in Brome's best comedies is contrasted to the utterly sterile and embalmed quality of the most ambitious Cavalier efforts, his resistance is mightily vindicated. Contrary to the many proclaimers of the decadence of the theater in the Caroline period, it seems apparent that the creative high road for the dramatists of the period coursed through the area of a spacious traditional achievement. Theatrical conservatism was healthy and potentially productive—the most radical and theatrically unrooted innovations are the major indicators of decadence.³⁰

The Antipodes is conceptually a simple play, full of good fun and homely, broad farce with a social satiric bias.³¹ The device around which the play is organized is, I believe, quite original. Perigrine, a young, naïve country youth, has read so excessively in travel literature that he has lost his grip on reality. His young wife, Martha, has been totally neglected so that their marriage has never been consummated and she has fallen ill of love melancholy. She has a neurotic fixation on having a child. Out of this unusual postulate, Brome builds a play.

Letoy, “A Phantasticke Lord” with a lot of money, has the eccentric hobby of producing plays in his own house for his own entertainment.³²

Stage-playes, and Masques, are nightly my pastimes,
And all within myselfe: My own men are
My Musique, and my Actors. I keepe not
A man or boy but is of quality:
The worst can sing or play his part o' th' Violls,
And act his part too in a Comedy. …
I love the quality of Playing I, I love a Play withall
My heart, a good one; and a Player that is
A good one too, with all my heart: As for the Poets,
No men love them, I thinke, and therefore
I write all my playes my selfe, and make no doubt
Some of the Court will follow
Me in that too.

(I, v)

Doctor Hughball, who after Corax in Ford's The Lover's Melancholy (1624) is, to my knowledge, the first practicing psychiatrist to appear on the English stage,³³ undertakes to cure Perigrine and through him his wife by utilizing the strange hobby of his strange friend Letoy. Together they stage a play-within-the-play which pretends the conveyance of Perigrine to the Antipodes where his abnormal appetite for incredible novelties is satisfied by the acting out of a sequence of vignettes on this topsy-turvy world. His poor wife, Martha, plays the Queen whom he woos and wins, while the inverted values of the Antipodean state are introduced as a broad satiric commentary on Brome's London. Of course the method effects the cure and all is blissful at the finale.

The play has an unusually small number of standard roles and a large number of small parts. It was designed quite evidently to meet the special needs of Beeston's new company with its greater than normal number of children, some of them perhaps not yet fully trained.³⁴ The play is fresh, original, and even today has considerable homely charm for a reader. Its satire is too dull-edged and generalized to reveal anything. It is directed against the more obvious abuses—greedy lawyers, underpayment of the artist, and monopoly begging by courtiers. Almost all the materials satirized were treated elsewhere with greater control and more intimate detail by Brome.³⁵

By now what is meant by the stage as newspaper is apparent: tableau cartoons on money corruption, rehearsals of local scenes with mild corrective intent, exposure of particular vices in public servants, unwittingly parochial attempts to generalize the consequences of changes in observed behaviour. All this is familiar in theme and format, only the mode of execution is premodern. We can be sure that the demanded role of dramatist as attentive editor of popular behavior found an energetic recruit in Brome. It is everywhere in his work and undoubtedly the exact, well-researched, reportorial quality of his dramatic commentary on the increasingly complex movement of London life accounts for some of his popularity. Our preoccupation with the obviously “escapist” aspect of much Caroline drama has blinded us to just how socially engaged the better plays were. There is hardly a play in Brome's canon which makes the point more variously than The Covent-Garden Weeded. …

Notes

1. He used this tableau or “living emblems” technique very fruitfully, for example, in The Damoiselle for placing his leading character, a usurer, at the outset and for condemning his lack of charity in the fourth act. See Chapter X in this book.

2. This is in a sense, of course, similar to a device the morality plays must have exploited in the use of highly abstracted figures and symbolic costume and properties.

3. This subject is too complex to pursue here. I do think that Douglas Bush's Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis, 1932), and The Renaissance and English Humanism (Toronto, 1939); R. Tuve's Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago, 1947), and A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago, 1953), as well as work by Hardin Craig, E. M. W. Tillyard, Samuel L. Bethell, L. C. Cormican, Muriel C. Bradbrook, and Lily B. Campbell, Madelaine Doran and many others have only begun to be applied really fruitfully to the ways in which drama and theater were conceived. I have never seen it suggested, for example, that the Elizabethans whom we have lauded for their acutely developed auditory sense (for listening to spoken poetry) probably also had a highly developed sense of visual form induced by habits of little reading of words and much contact with emblems, pageants, symbolic masques, conventional insignia and carving, type and class costumes, etc. Donald J. Gordon, in his studies of Jonson's masques, has demonstrated some of the subtler and more learned possibilities.

4. In this sequence I have made some cuts, but (by count) Brome reiterates the words “honesty” or “honest” fourteen (14) times in less than two pages of text—the violent underscoring of theme is evident.

5. Sir Walter Besant, London North of the Thames (London, 1911), pp. 316-17. He adds that Restoration plays are full of allusions to the place. The New Exchange may have begun to become fashionable before the Restoration. Regular allusions to it began to appear in the Domestic State Papers after 1635.

6. Cf. Theodore Miles, “Place-Realism in a Group of Caroline Plays,” Review of English Studies, XVIII (1942), 428-40, and Richard H. Perkinson, “Topographical Comedy in the Seventeenth Century,” English Literary History, III (1936), 270-90.

7. It is possible that the scenes between the citizen Rafe Camelion and his wife might have been staged with minor props to suggest a booth at the New Exchange.

8. J. and C., I, 233. Bentley's source is Joseph Q. Adams, Dramatic Records (New Haven, 1917), p. 60.

9. Cf. Bentley, J. and C., I, 234, quoting Sir Henry Herbert.

10. Ibid., I, 235. See Malone Society Collections, II, 375, 378.

11. Earlier, Rafe Camelion says in passing, “I saw last night Your new French daunce of three, what call you it?” and his companion answers, “O the Tresboun” (III, ii, 57), They dance it (p. 50).

12. James Shirley used the Academy device as early as 1625 and there are numerous other examples. But I am here arguing from Brome's own carrer and the sort of phasal self-repetition that characterizes most minor artists.

13. Alfred Harbage in his interesting article, “Elizabethan-Restoration Palimpsest,” (Modern Language Review, XXXV (1940), 287-319) argues that two of Dryden's plays are reworkings of lost plays by Brome, and defines a formula for Brome's comedies (pp. 304-5) that runs from the early City Wit and Northern Lasse through Covent-Garden Weeded and The Sparagus Garden right up to the late Mad Couple, Damoiselle, and Court Beggar. If his arguments were comprehensive they would be in contradiction to my contention of a change in technique around 1635. It seems to me however that Harbage refers to the persistence of minor themes and repetitions of characters standard throughout Caroline drama—rather than to matters of technique and tone which treat of what a dramatist does with such types and what kind of attitude he takes towards them.

14. The play was very popular and is reported to have earned £1,000 for the company (Andrews, Richard Brome, p. 14). This figure is probably an exaggeration in the tradition of deposition claims, but even with great modification it gives testimony for the play's success.

15. It seems possible to read this passage as an indication that Brome, a highly competent professional craftsman, rendered the “Service” to Newcastle of helping him in the construction of his plays.

16. A. Harbage mistakenly thought that Tom Hoyden o' Tanton Deane was a separate play; see his play list in Cavalier Drama (New York, 1936), p. 269, under the date 1639. He corrected this error in his Annals of English Drama, 975-1700 (Philadelphia, 1940).

17. Thomas Heywood with his alert journalist's instinct exploited popular interest in the ship with a pamphlet, A True description of his Majesties royal ship built at Wooll-witch (1637). There as throughout the Calendar State Papers, Domestic, for the period it is regularly called “the great ship.”

18. Calendar State Papers, Domestic, Chas I (1635), VIII, p. 388.

19. Calendar State Papers, Domestic, Chas. I (1635), VIII, p. 257.

20. They were introduced into England only the previous year (1634), by Sir S. Duncombe (Encyclopedia Britannica, XXIV, 576 [11th ed., 1911]).

21. See Bentley, J. and C., I, 236, and Herbert, Dramatic Records, p. 56.

22. London, 1640.

23. All references are to the 1640 quarto edition.

24. Further evidence that Brome was thinking about these things during the 1636/37 (o.s.) plague closing is afforded by his verses for Thomas Nabbes's Microcosmus published in 1637. Addressing his fellow dramatist, Brome says, “Were the restraint ta'ne off, our eares and sight / Should fetch new shares of profit and delight / From this thy worke or World / … And friend I hope the stage agen will shine, / In part for mine owne sake as well as thine.”

25. See Bentley, J. and C., I, 238-41 on the breaking up of the old and the reformation of the new Queen Henrietta's company; and ibid., I, 296 for his brief speculation on the fate of the dissolved King's Revel group.

26. We know that Beeston had reformed his new company soon enough after his Queen Henrietta's group dissolved to act plays at court in February 1636/37 (o.s.) (Bentley, J. and C., I, 324-25).

27. Ibid., II, 665.

28. This does not conflict with the prior statement that The English Moor was probably the play which opened the Queen's Men's career at Salisbury Court after the plague abated in 1637. Brome had seventeen months to prepare for this reopening and doubtless did not expect the closure to persist for so long. He could easily have prepared two plays. In fact, the relative apparent effort expended on the two plays, The Antipodes and The English Moor, make it suggestively possible that the following happened: Brome carefully composed The Antipodes with a young company and Beeston in mind, the plague closing allowing time for careful composition. Then he tried to turn the play over to Beeston, but met legal interference by Heton, his employer at Salisbury Court; so, disappointed in this he “cobbled” together a play for the Salisbury Court reopening, hoping thereby to temporize and ultimately to avoid delivering The Antipodes to Heton, a plan later thwarted by legal action. This is speculative and undocumented but does offer a plausible correlation of the facts.

29. Quoted by Bentley, J. and C., I, 58 from Strafforde's Letters, II, 150.

30. For a contrary argument, see Alfred Harbage, Cavalier Drama, p. 124.

31. The Antipodes has been written about slightly more often than most of Brome's plays. In addition to standard histories of the drama see Andrews, Richard Brome, pp. 112-34 for a study of sources of satire; George P. Baker's introductory essay on The Antipodes in the Charles M. Gayley edition of Representative English Comedies (New York, 1914), III, 417-29; and Joe L. Davis, “Richard Brome's Neglected Contribution to Comic Theory,” Studies in Philology, XL (1943), 520-28 which treats the play from the standpoint of comic catharsis and therapeutic laughter. He points out quite rightly that The Antipodes resembles Randolph's The Muses' Looking Glass (1630).

32. Although Mildmay Fane, Earl of Westmorland, is not known to have put on his annual entertainments at Apthorpe before 1640 (after The Antipodes was written), the sort of home theater diversions Brome describes are similar to what we know of Fane's theatrical projects. For an account of Fane, see Harbage, Cavalier Drama, pp. 198-202; and Mildmay Fane's Raguaillo D'Oceano 1640 and Candy Restored 1641, ed. by Clifford Leech (Louvain, 1938), pp. 7-59.

33. Dr. Hughball anticipates by more than 300 years Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly who performs a similar function in Eliot's The Cocktail Party. It is true that as early as King Lear state doctors prescribed some therapy for mental illness, but Ford's play and Brome's after it are the first to build a whole layer of a play on the bases of diagnosis (in systematic terms) and treatment of an illness. Ford following Burton was much more interested in what we would call psychosomatic medicine. See The Louers Melancholy, III, i, 11. 1249-1669, for Corax's diagnosis and treatment. See also S. Blaine Ewing, Burtonian Melancholy in the Plays of John Ford (Princeton, 1940), pp. 32-46. Brome had used mental illness and its treatment as a minor element in several earlier plays, notably in The Northern Lasse (1629) and The Queen's Exchange (1633/34?). Cf. Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing, 1951), pp. 123 and 167-68.

34. Cf. Bentley, J. and C., I, 324-25, n. 1, for the most authoritative conjectures on the “puzzling” composition of this company. That Brome originally intended it for Beeston's company is explicitly stated in a note to the reader at the end of the 1640 edition of The Antipodes.

35. The satire may be more particular than we can now understand, for Brome in the 1640 edition closes his dedication of the play to “William, Earle of Hertford,” by requesting that if the play “meet with too severe Construction I hope your Protection.”

Bibliography of Brome Criticism

Adams, J. Q. “Hill's List of Early Plays in Manuscript,” Library, XX (4th Series: 1939), 71-99.

Andrews, C. E. “The Authorship of The Late Lancashire Witches,” Modern Language Notes, XXVIII (1913), 163-66.

———.Richard Brome: A Study of his Life and Works. (Yale Studies in English, Vol. XLVI.) New York, 1913.

Bentley, Gerald E. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Oxford, 1941–. Vols. I-V.

Davis, J. L. The Realistic Comedy of the “Sons of Ben,” 1625-1642. Unpublished University of Michigan thesis: Ann Arbor, 1934.

———.“Richard Brome's Neglected Contribution to Comic Theory,” Studies in Philology, XL (1943), 520-28.

Harbage, Alfred. “Elizabethan-Restoration Palimpsest,” Modern Language Review, XXXV (1940), 287-319.

Miles, T. “Place-Realism in a Group of Caroline Plays,” Review of English Studies, XVIII (1942), 428-40.

Perkinson, R. H. “Topographical Comedy in the Seventeenth Century,” English Literary History, III (1936), 270-90.