[In the following essay, Ingram analyzes Brome's use of music in his plays, asserting that Brome had the ability to write musical scenes rather than just scenes with music added to them.]

Caroline audiences expected musical entertainment during their plays, but few of their playwrights were as adept as Brome at making the music serve any effective dramatic purpose. Playwrights too often relied upon a drably unimaginative use of convention: love scenes, whether romantic, gay, or melancholy, permitted, almost asked for, music to match their mood; pathetic singing of snatches of old songs was the regular embellishment of scenes of distress or madness; a tavern setting called for a lusty song, a brothel setting for a bawdy one; feasts and celebrations allowed for every kind of music. Brome subscribes to the same conventions, but handles them so expertly as to restore their vitality. He makes occasion demand music and not merely excuse it; he writes musical scenes rather than scenes with some music added to them. In his comedies music is a necessary delight.

Brome's musical art, like his dramaturgical art generally, is based on established forms and persisting conventions. His best critic, R. J. Kaufmann, has written of his consistent conservation in basic thought and dramatic method, but that daunting word does not mean that he was either timid or dull as a playwright.¹ For him, conservation was a source of strength, not a literary cripple's crutch. He was a traditionalist who proved a principle enunciated by Bertrand Russell: “although direct imitation is always to be deprecated, there is much to be gained by a familiarity with good drama.”² Brome's familiarity with good drama came in a very direct way—he had once been Ben Jonson's servant, a humble beginning his contemporaries did not allow him to forget. In some prefatory verses to the 1647 folio of Beaumont and Fletcher's collected plays, he wrote:

Y'have had your Jere: Sirs, no;
But, in an humble manner, let you know
Old serving-creatures oftentimes are fit
T'informe young masters.

This was no idle brag, for he had as much to teach most young Caroline masters as he himself had had to learn from Jonson. Not least, he could inform in the sprightly and inventive use of musical conventions, especially in comedy.

Brome's natural medium was middle-class comedy and for his characters music is primarily a social pleasure; there is an engaging air of practicality about it that nevertheless encompasses an element of satisfying emotional warmth. The musical range of the comedies is wide but generally aims at rousing delight and excitement rather than passion or intensity. Those qualities are more natural to the exotic world of Fletcherian tragedy and tragicomedy. Brome traveled three times to that world and demonstrates an able handling of its more overtly powerful musical effects rather than a wholehearted exploration of them. The strong and complex pressures exerted by such effects are as foreign to him as to the nature of his comedy (whose musical effects, however, are no less subtle and diverse). He is concerned with less exalted people in less perilous situations. Both forms of drama, however, drew on the customs of seventeenth-century society for their musical usages.³

Music pervaded society at all levels to a surprising degree. It was the natural accompaniment of work and play. In many ways it bore no less a part in life then than it does today, save that our music has become more of a background noise—it is switched on or piped in and is incidental music in the saddest sense. Perhaps for this reason it is sometimes thought odd that the characters of seventeenth-century drama so casually and unembarrassedly break into song: music-making that for us has something of the air of a too deliberately contrived performance was, in Brome's day, accepted as natural and unexceptionable behavior. Brome took advantage of the opportunities offered by this given background for slighter decorations in his plays as well as for major motifs in their design. Everyday impulses to music are skillfully turned to dramatic ends.

Thus the conventions of the day allowed the creation of characters who were especially musical in some way without making them seem awkward excuses for the introduction of music. Their sincerity or insincerity only adds to their dramatic appeal. One such group of characters includes those who by necessity of their calling or the bent of their minds sing when others would talk. Crack, in The City Wit, depends upon his musical abilities for his livelihood and so brings music with him whenever he appears. Constance, The Northern Lass, on the other hand, is noted for her beautiful voice and a propensity to express her emotions by singing. Hearty and Tallboy Oldrents, in The Jovial Crew, tend at times to find singing more congenial than talking, and the Jovial Crew of Gipsies themselves continually express their corporate views of life in festival music. Enthusiastic amateurs make up another distinctive group. They range from rich gentlemen like Letoy (The Antipodes) who can afford their own musicians to humbler, less-gifted, but more incorrigible devotees, such as crowd the stage in The Court Beggar, all of them anxious to realize secret musical dreams, amateurs relentless in the pursuit of music. Ambitious climbers sedulously aped such manners, and their purses were therefore readily available to confidence tricksters who ran bogus academies to impart the necessary social graces. Brome anatomizes such an establishment in The New Academy. Set up by Strigood under the alias of Mr. Lightfoot, it kept “both men and women, as I am inform'd, after the French manner, That professe Musick, Dancing, Fashion, Complement” (III.i:2.55).⁴ The timeless lure of anything French was irresistible to simple people like Hannah Camelion and tradesmen like Rafe. Strigood dazzles them with an easy flow of French and pseudo-French and even exhibits a likable boldness when, unabashed by the unexpected presence of some real Frenchmen, he cries out: “I feare no French flashes. Bear up Cash. If we cannot daunce them off o'their legs, our wenches can, I warrant thee. Musick be ready” (III.i:2.65).

The musical battles were not only between the dupes and the rogues; in Covent Garden Weeded the psalm tune strives with the pop tune. In that play Gabriel, sadly overflown with drink, begins to sing. Being of the narrow puritanical sort he chooses a psalm tune. Almost immediately he is interrupted by some tavern fiddlers outside, who are heard tuning their instruments. The psalm tune is momentarily put down as Gabriel pauses in his music-making to castigate the fiddlers: “Such cries as these went forth before the desolation of the great City.” He is a prophet ignored and, as they stand “Fidling rude tunes” (doubtless popular ones well known to the audience), he rants on: “O prophane tinkling, the cymbals of Satan, that tickle the eare with vanity, to lift up the mind to lewdnesse. Mine ears shall be that of the Adder against the Song of the Serpent … I will roar out aloud to drown your Incantations. Yea I will set out a throat even as the beast that belloweth” (II.ii:2.32-34). The fiddling accompanies this outburst, and Gabriel's efforts, first to shout it down, and then to raise his voice over it in some psalm or religious hymn, set up a gay musical situation that underscores his character and makes a neat commentary on the stricter puritan's aversion to popular music.

If genius were only the capacity for taking pains, Brome's status would be in no doubt. He is a careful craftsman, and not above remarking method to his audience: “Nay, mark, I pray you, as I would entreat and Auditorie, if I were now a Poet to mark the Plot, and several points of my play, that they might not say when 'tis done, they understood not this or that, or how such a part came in or went out, because they did not observe the passages” (Covent Garden Weeded, III.ii:2.50). This pleasure in taking pains is reflected in the tendency Brome shows to deal separately in his plays with particular aspects of theatrical music. A study of five plays will show this method in action as well as demonstrate the extent of Brome's achievement in musical comedy. The Northern Lass (1629)⁵ focuses attention on the comedy of song. There is also singing in The English Moor (1637), but Brome is chiefly concerned here with the masque as a structural element in the play. The Court Beggar (1640) ends with a masque, and the latter part of the play is organized around the preparation for and performance of it; but all of this is only a part, albeit a major part, of a larger exploration of the comic potentialities of extravagant and grotesque musical comedy. In The Antipodes (1636/37), Brome had made some experiments in the same general area but along slightly different lines. In this play Brome does not insert the masque into the design and exploit its fanciful elements; rather he begins with the masque and, maintaining its world of fantasy intact, extends it by fusing into it elements of regular satiric comedy. Finally, in The Jovial Crew (1641), he leaves the masque world and its fantasy for the world of romantic comedy, where matters are more farcical than fantastic and in which the musical events exist in something of the manner of a subplot while at the same time setting the mood of the play as a whole.

The Northern Lass, an amusing comedy of no great pretensions, probably owed some of its popularity to the recipe Brome followed: no comedy is more conventional in its ingredients: a pathetic heroine and her unpleasant guardian; a well-bred if somewhat obtuse hero; various vulgar, foolish, and idiotic suitors; a harsh-mouthed widow, witty servant, and other old reliables—all are shuttled briskly through the inevitable maze of misbegotten marriage and crossed love affairs to a happy ending. Recipes for popular success in the theater are not well-kept secrets, but there is more to writing a popular play than merely including ingredients that are known to be well liked. Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and Fletcher, in The Faithful Shepherdess, wrote plays that contained a good deal of musical entertainment, but their audiences, ignoring the widely held assumption that music was sop thrown their way to assure success, disdained both plays. We may well say that the audience was at fault in rejecting those two plays, but the point is that mere inclusion of music is not enough to ensure popular success for a play.

Brome could not have chosen more well-worn musical material to demonstrate how far sympathetic skill in placing it can go toward rejuvenating it. Plaintive love songs, a prostitute's bawdy ditties, singing and dancing for a wedding and a party, instrumental music to ease pain are what he uses. The amount and variety obviously contribute to over-all liveliness and appeal, but mere amount will not do everything. These must be an order to the variety; each item must contribute its own effect. There is a planned order and each musical scene aims at a particular impression. This is nowhere better shown than in the songs. A distinctive trait of the heroine's character is that she “sings and speaks so prettily northerly.” This promise is not made the excuse for a concert recital (such things were not unknown: Valerius, in Heywood's The Rape of Lucrece, had ten songs in the 1608 edition of the play, four were added in 1630, and five more in 1638; the Bard in Shirley's St. Patrick for Ireland [1639] was another relentless vocalizer; Cavendish inserted seven songs into one scene of The Variety [1639-1641]). Indeed, Constance sings only three songs, but two others are sung by a bawd who is mistaken for her. Thus the heroine's special vocal quality allows five songs but two singers. Brome further shows what dramatic context can do by making each of Constance's songs a plaintive love ditty, yet avoiding any sense of repetitiveness of effect as well as preventing his heroine from seeming too tearfully pathetic.

Constance's first song, “You say my love is but a man,” pins its effect upon its very unassuming typicality. Constance's musing upon her unrequited love for Sir Philip is interrupted by the news of his arrival. Actually, it is the obnoxious Anvile masquerading as Sir Philip. Trainewell, the suspicious old nurse, goes to fetch help, and Constance is told to sing in order to keep Anvile placidly waiting.

Naturally enough Constance chooses a love song:

You say my Love is but a Man,
          But I can find more odds,
'Twixt him and others than I can,
          Find between him and Gods.
                    He has in's eye
                    Such majesty.
His shape is so divine
That were I owner of the world,
                    He only should be mine.

(II.iii:3.31)

It is an unexceptional lyric; the important thing is that the words are sufficiently vague to suit Constance's frame of mind as aptly as they do the quite contrary one of Anvile. For Constance the song sums up what she has just been saying about Sir Philip: for Anvile, who thinks he is in a bawdy house (he is confusing the Northern Lass with the cunning whore, as Sir Philip had done in rejecting the true Constance and causing her melancholy), this is just the kind of enticing song he expects to hear in such a place. He interprets it according to his lewd hopes and calls it a “sweet prologue to the interlude.” In actual fact the song is the sweet interlude between the excitement caused by Anvile's arrival together with the discovery of his hoax and the violence of his ejection with Tridewell's boot behind him.

Constance's second song, “Nor Love, nor Fate dare I accuse” (II.vi:3.39-42) is very similar to the first, but its setting as part of the masque of willow presented before Sir Philip and his new wife, widow Fitchow, and its result give it a quite different impact. The masque is heralded by a regular flourish of cornets and an irregular one of Fitchow's tetchiness: “Some of your old Companions have brought you a fit of Mirth: But if they enter to make a Tavern of my House, I'le add a voice to their consort shall drown all their fidling.” Notwithstanding, the masquers enter: “All in willow garlands, four men, four women. The first two pairs are Tridewell and Constance, Anvile and Trainewell. Before the Daunce Constance sings this song.” It is a self-deprecatory song in which she blames herself for choosing a love so far above her in station. Its pathetic appeal, combined with the gentle melancholy of the willow dance, causes Sir Philip to question his early rejection of Constance and realize his hasty mistake in so doing. It brings home even more sharply the folly of his marrying Fitchow on the rebound as it were (eventually the marriage is found to be invalid, the officiating minister having been Sir Philip's servant, Pate, in disguise). The fact that the masque is allowed to go forward shows that Sir Philip has awakened to Fitchow's contrariness. Constance's singing effectively contrasts with Fitchow's sharp-temperedness and, in the progress of the plot, marks the first clear turn of events in Constance's favor.

It is too early, however, for matters to swing decisively Constance's way, and she suffers more, this time at the hands of her guardian, Sir Paul Squelch, who badgers her to marry the idiotic Widgine, brother of Fitchow. With her fortunes at their lowest ebb, Constance falls into a melancholia akin to that of the Jailor's daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen, and when Nonsense, yet another foolish and obstreperous suitor, comes, thinking to humor her by pretending to be Sir Philip, she sings of the little bird she once had and of how it chirruped its name, Philip. The song is prettily adapted to her love's name. After it she chatters a little and leaves singing a sorry couplet from another old ballad. When she comes in again she is singing, in her northern dialect, another snatch asserting her refusal to go with any other man and her intent to be a maid to all but one. This is very reminiscent of other heroines melancholy for love and none the worse for that. The scene marks the nadir of Constance's fortunes and deliberately exploits her voice, her accent, and her situation. It confirms her character and within the larger musical pattern sounds the saddest notes, against which the music to follow will be heard with sharpened impact (III.ii:53-60).

The boldest contrast in the pattern follows on the heels of this mournful singing. It is the musical discomfiture of Fitchow, an apt business since her humiliation, as we have seen, began musically albeit quietly (III.iii:3.63-65). Her feeble brother Widgine, encouraged to take a stand against her, sings scornfully of the fate of the man married to a scold. His friends rally to him splendidly. The stage direction reads: “They all take hands and dance round. Widgine in the midst sings this song. They all bear the burden, while she scolds and strives to be amongst 'hem. Tridewell holds her off.” Eventually Fitchow breaks loose and flies at her persecutors, who exit in pandemonium, still singing. This boisterous finale to the act is virtually a parody of the willow masque and an instance of Brome's aptitude for balancing musical scenes against each other. The plaintive love song and gentle dance are replaced by a loud satirical song and a lusty masculine round dance, and instead of the lovelorn Constance there is the shrieking struggling Fitchow.

The two dance scenes are representative of what can be called musical action; in the last act the story of Constance and Sir Philip is happily concluded with music as background for action. A very simple example of this latter kind is found in The Novella (1632) when the titular heroine sings a trade song to attract customers: “Whilst she plays and sings above, Paulo waits below. Many gallants pass over the stage gazing at her” (I.ii:2.129). A much more subtle example is this earlier one. Pate, disguised this time as a doctor, persuades Constance to meet his master. Throughout their meeting “soft music” is heard. This is partly medicinal to help cure Constance's love-melancholy (her sad-mad singing when pestered by Squelch and Nonsense proves that her case is such as to need this traditional treatment), but its main function is to set the mood of tender reconciliation and love. When Squelch arrives to collect his ward, Pate tells him that she is in her room and that the music he can hear has been required to help her to sleep. The “Musick continues” and takes on a subtle satiric overtone as it now becomes the cover for the fleeing lovers, as well as for Pate who takes his chance to slip away while Squelch is kept in conversation by Constance's nurse, persuaded that so long as he hears the music his ward is safe (V.ii-iii:3.86-89). It provides, incidentally, a quiet interlude before the bustle of the denouement. The whole effect is typically Bromean in its simple means, its intricacy, and its deftness.

Two other songs are heard before this, in the fourth act, both sung by Constance Holdup, the whore (IV.iv:3.77-79). Widgine, duped into thinking she is the Northern Lass he covets, visits her pretending to be Sir Philip for whom, he has been assured, “Constance” has run mad. She enters singing a lullaby to a child which, it is intimated, is Sir Philip's. This mockery of a lullaby over, Widgine humors her, exchanges snatches of song with her and eventually wins her (it costs him £100 to break the contract at the end of the play). Before he leaves she sings once more, this time a true song of her profession, a smutty pastoral. The infatuated Widgine is too blind to see reason and goes happily away. Both songs are utterly unlike any the true Constance would sing, and they would take in only a beguiled fool like Widgine. The singing in this scene depends upon the establishment of the Northern Lass as a singer, the convention that people made mad by love sing, as well as the fact that whores sing as part of their profession. The lullaby drives home to Widgine the fact that the girl has been made mad by love as well as confirming to his feeble brain that she is the Constance he seeks. The insistence upon impersonation in the scene—everyone seeming to take off Sir Philip at one time or another while there is steady confusion in some minds as to which Constance is which—sets up situations which the music underlines and, indeed, helps to create. Songs of genuine love-melancholy are contrasted with forgeries: the simple song which Anvile took for a brothel item is contrasted with a pair that are very unsubtle in their double meanings. The blunt nature of Holdup's appeal causes the spectator to wonder how Constance could have been mistaken for her. The second song, “As I was gathering April's flowers,” is something of an “extra,” yet it is a legitimate part of what is an amusing scene of the gulling of Widgine. The way in which other actions have been stressed musically creates a pattern into which this scene, with its coarser songs, fits well.⁶

Brome's handling of music in The Northern Lass, early in his career, is confident and skillful, but it is not the best that he can do. In the four late plays, to which we now turn, Brome's mastery of musical conventions and his boldness in extending their inherent capacities as dramatic effects show to best advantage.

The plot of The English Moor or The Mock Marriage could stand as a display piece of Brome's ingenuity and control. Two large-scale musical scenes, each including a masque, are vital to the plot. Perhaps “masqued dance” is a better term than masque, for only in The Antipodes does Brome utilize the trappings of the court masque and present anything resembling a miniature court masque of the kind that Fletcher, for example, inserts in The Maid's Tragedy. Brome liked to use a theme for his dancers and have them dressed in some unusual and attractive costume, but otherwise he avoids the formality of the masque. When he does cleave more closely to the accepted structure of the masque in The Antipodes, he still contrives something quite different. However, the question of nicely distinguished nomenclature for such entertainments is not one to be straightforwardly settled. We are more anxious than the seventeenth-century playwrights to classify drama: Brome called his musical entertainments of this sort “masques,” and in following him we must bear in mind the wide interpretation given names and titles in his day. It is a moot point whether their wide-ranging usage is any more convenient than the current tendency to sort everything out into countless subdivisions. The dance and masque had dramatic potentialities that many playwrights explored. Brome, as well as any, knew what a satisfying conclusion a dance made to a play. Geron and his country helpers have one ready at the close of The Lovesick Court: “some country sport” as Geron disarmingly calls it, adding:

A dance I have projected for the Princess,
Who ever marries her it shall serve.

(V.iii:2.159)

Any remaining ill-feeling at the end of The New Academy, dealing as it does with dancing lessons for the socially ambitious, among other matters, is swept away with “One frisk, one fling now, one cariering dance” aptly called “in English, Omnium Gatherum” (V.ii:2.110). Seven of Brome's fifteen extant plays end with some form of dance or musical entertainment: The English Moor, though it makes ingenious and rich use of masque and music, does not. Usurer Quicksands' authority and plotting having twice been undermined by musical means in the first and fourth acts, the fifth act concludes his undoing without any music.

Millicent, having been forced to wed Quicksands, dampens his ardor on the wedding night by an outrageous display of wantonness largely created by singing snatches of crude songs (I.iii:2.13-16). This relies on the association of loose women with songs such as those that Brome had used for different ends in The Northern Lass. In the same predicament as Millicent, Florimel, Fletcher's The Maid of the Mill (1623), uses exactly the same technique. If Brome took the idea from Fletcher, he asserts his individuality by using it as the prologue to an even livelier musical scene. Quicksands is quite dashed by Millicent's performance:

My edge is taken off: this impudence
Of hers, has outfac'd my concupisence.
Dasht all quite out o'Countenance!

But his trials have only just begun, “A sowgelder's horn blown” arouses fears that his manservant confirms:

Vizarded people, Sir, and odly shap'd
You'l see anon. Their tuning o'their pipes,
And swear they'll gi'ye a willy nilly dance
Before you go to bed, tho' you stole your Marriage.

Millicent delightedly simpers, “Some … to congratulate our honoured Marriage.” There is another flourish and Mercury leaps in followed by “four Masquers with horns on their heads: a Stag, a Ram, a Goat, and an Ox followed by four persons, a Courtier, a Captain, a Schollar and a Butcher.” Mercury makes sure the point of the masque is understood and, calling on the musicians to “strike aloud / The cuckold's joy, with merry pipe and crowd,” the masquers “dance to musick of Cornets and Violins.” The notion of a Horn Masque is very apt and brings Quicksands' marriage celebrations to a rousing conclusion. The whole sequence from the teasing songs and tormenting behavior of Millicent through to the stage full of leaping horn-decorated young roarers goading Quicksands to fury is splendidly carried out, and, although entirely dramatic as it stands, it strongly suggests, as other parts of the play will as well, its suitability for operatic treatment (I.iii:2.13-16).

The masque is quietly kept in the spectator's mind by a train of references to it during the play, culminating in its use by Quicksands as something that his Masque of Moors can answer. Brome methodically lets Quicksands explain the personnel:

Yes I have borrowed other Moors
of Merchants
That trade in Barbary, whence I had
mine own here,
And you shall see their way and skill in dancing.

(IV.iv:2.60)

Quicksands is hardly able to contain himself at this riposte to the young rakes:

          you shall see how I'le requite
The masque they lent me on my wedding night.
Twas but lent Gentlemen, your masque of horns,
And all the private jears and publik scorns
Y'have cast upon me since.

(IV.v:2.65)

The complexities and double-crossings that spring from this second masque testify to Brome's mastery of plot construction. Quicksands has given out the news that Millicent has run away but intends to amaze his gloating enemies by producing her at the masque and feast. His enemies, of course, discover this and lay their own plans accordingly. Both sides are delighted with what they conceive to be astute plots. Further duplicities have been planned by ladies previously deceived by the young men who also plan to use the masque for their own ends. Thus all the conflicts are brought together, and the disguises of the masque (especially the blacked faces) enable a whole set of turns of fortune to be mounted one after the other with great panache. The variety of plots and counterplots is an addition to the different musical entertainments offered during the scene. The Moors in the masque “dance an Antique in which they use action of Mockery and derision to the three Gentlemen.” Baneless, the leader of the young rakes, applauds the device and asks leave to dance: he is quite unusual in being specific about the music he wants:

Musick, play a Galliard,
You know what you promised me, Bullis.

(IV.v:2.67)

If nothing else, Baneless had musical taste in using music by John Bull.⁷ Despite this carefully chosen music, Baneless “dances vilely,” according to the stage direction, and Quicksands is moved to raucous laughter at his ineptitude. Deliberate or not, it makes a good contrast with the previous dance. After Baneless has danced away with his partner—his ludicrous performance was possibly meant to take attention away from this purpose which he had—Buzard, a dismissed servant of Quicksands, enters pretending to be the idiot son whom Quicksands keeps hidden in the country. Buzard sings crazily to maintain his disguise: “He sings and dances and spins with a rock and spindle.” The contrast between these two turns is also explicitly marked in the stage directions: “Enter Arnold like a Countrey man and Buz[ard] like a changeling, and as they enter, exit NAT [Baneless] … the musick still playing.” The music is Bull's. The two fantastic dances taken together might almost be an antimasque to the Masque of Moors.

Such is the fecundity of Brome's imagination that, as it were in passing, he mentions another idea for a superb comic scene which, we must assume, he felt the design of his play did not permit him to use. On the morning after the horn masque, Baneless, leader of the rakes, comes in and tells of another musical torment inflicted upon Quicksands.

This morning, early, up we got again,
And with our Fidlers made a fresh assault
And battery 'gainst the bed-rid bride-grooms window.
With an old song, a very wondrous old one,
Of all the cares, vexations, fears and torments,
That a decrepit, nasty, rotten Husband
Meets in a youthful, beauteous, sprightly wife:
So as the weak wretch will shortly be afraid,
That his own feebler shadow makes him Cuckold.
Our Masque 'er night begat a separation
Betwixt'em before bed time: for we found
Him at one window, coughing and spitting at us;
She at another, laughing, and throwing money
Down to the Fidlers, while her uncle Testy,
From a third Port-hole raves, denouncing Law,
And thundring statutes 'gainst their Minstralsie.

(II.i:2.23-24)

It is a sparkling scene that might have come from a Rossini comic opera.

Completely different from the rest of the loud gay music of the play is a little song that Lucy has a boy sing to cheer her up. She calls it a mournful song but her brother is angry at the singer, calling it a “wanton air.” Lucy demurs:

I know not brother how you like the air,
But in my mind the words are sad, Pray read 'em.

(IV.iii:2.56)

He does so and agrees that “they are sad indeed.” The song is more an interlude than most musical events in Brome; even so there is the suggestion that Brome makes something of it, for if both speakers are right it may be that sad words have been put to a well-known air used for a popular bawdy song or loose ballad, and an incongruous comic effect gained in this way.

Musical humor of this extravagant kind is the particular mark of The Court Beggar. Musical fantasticalness is made a basis of Sir Ferdinando's character. He has run mad for love, and whereas Constance in a similar state displayed quiet melancholy he displays the frantic side of the affliction. Such musical madness traces back to Ophelia and the Jailer's daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Brome's twist is to try the effect in a man and, at the same time, extend the theatrical virtuosity of the dance. Twice Ferdinando exhibits his madness in what amount to vaudeville turns. First “he Dances a conceited Countrey Dance, first doing his honours, then as leading forth his Lasse. He danceth both man and womans actions, as if the Dance consisted of two or three couples, at last offering to Kisse his Lasse, hee fancies that they are all vanish'd” (IV.ii:1.241). Later he attempts to get out of an awkward situation by further musical madness: he “sings part of the old Song, and acts it madly” (IV.iii:1.247). The old song probably was “The Battle of Musleborough Field,” which had just been alluded to and would provide ample scope for a mad histrionic singer.⁸

This kind of humor is found even in the slighter musical parts of the play. Not all of it is very subtle: Sir Ferdinando's doctor undergoes a mock gelding that is accompanied by a sow-gelder's song intended as a crude anesthetic (IV.ii:1.243). Two catches are also heard: one offstage in the second act at Lady Stranglelove's that merely suggests the nature of the house but dramatically is hardly more than a tuneful connection between the two halves of the scene (II.ii:1.209); the other, a part of Ferdinando's antics before his first turn (IV.ii:1.241). To offset the casual nature of these entertainments Brome offers one of his best demonstrations of how to make a masque part of a play. In the second act Lady Stranglelove mentions a masque she intends, asserting that Court-Wit “shall performe the poetical part, your servant Cit-Wit the Musicall … Dancers and speakers I have in store” (II.i:1.212). However, her optimism turns out to be founded upon intention rather than performance and, very late in the day, she admits to having done nothing more than invite the guests to watch the masque. With ostentatious modesty, Court-Wit, when she casually asks for a masque to be run up, murmurs: “I have cast the designe for't already Madam. My inventions are all flame and spirit. But you can expect no great matter to be done extempore or in six minutes” (V.ii:1.259). Swayne-Wit takes a more bucolic and placid view of the matter: “What matter ist so wee skip up and downe? our friend Jack Dainty here, Mr. Cut-purse dances daintily tho'.” Happily, Dainty has the sparks of the born organizer in him. He swiftly takes charge and soon the others are stirred to action. He himself will be choreographer and “give you all the footing.” The stage direction reads, “Practise footing”: here, as so often in Brome when some special effect is intended, the directions are so full and carefully arranged that it is easy to realize his intentions. The doctor is hauled in to make up the numbers in the dance and seizes this chance to satisfy secret ambitions of composing music: “What think you of this tune sir for your dance?” he asks Dainty, and he begins to hum, “Tay, dee, dee, &c.” Dainty is pleased: “I'll borrow a Violl and take it of you instantly.”

The amateurs lose no time in abandoning themselves to their art, so that when Sir Raphael happens upon them in his search for Sir Andrew, the master of the house, he is sure he has wandered into some madhouse. No one has a moment to spare for his questions. Court-Wit is “creating,” scribbling poetic fancies down, “sometimes scratching his head, as pumping his Muse.” “Cit-wit Dances looking on his Feete,” “The Doctor stretches his Throat in the Tune,” while Swayne-Wit, in acceptable bucolic vein “whistels & Dances Sellingers round, or the like.”⁹ Dainty reappears with the viol, and Sir Raphael turns hopefully to him only to be dashed, for Dainty “fidls to him & the 4 Dancing and singing practise about him.” Turning to Philomel, the chambermaid, he gets his first answer, but to no purpose as she only “speaks in a vile tone like a Player” and spouts fustian at him:

O by no means, we must speake Charon
Or Hee'l not waft us o're the Stigian Floud
Then must we have a sop for Cerberus
To stop his yawning Chaps; Let me alone
To be your Convoy to Elizium.

She and the Boy rant wildly on, “Dainty playes softly & Doctor with him aside,” and the absurd comical counterpoint goes on. The rehearsal is believable and so it is funny, because earnest amateurs such as these are the funnier the more seriously they pursue their elusive art. The entry of the disengaged Raphael provides a hub of normality round which the merry-go-round of fanciful comedy revolves with added zest. In some ways it is like a musical version of the last act of Gammer Gurton's Needle, where everyone argues violently about what they think has lately happened in the village while in their midst the sober figure of Baily stands trying to sort matters out. The scene is one of Brome's funniest pieces of “musical” comedy.

The masque is performed almost immediately, and the hasty preparation and sparse rehearsal result in something that is akin to the Show of the Nine Worthies. Nonetheless it successfully concludes the play. The Boy, Cupid to Philomel's Venus, botches his lines. An ill-sorted group of representatives from the Pantheon enter and dance: “After they have Danc'd a while, Enter Projectors, breakes 'em off.” They introduce a sort of antimasque crowned by the appearance of Sir Andrew himself “attir'd all in Patents; a Windmill on his head, and the other Projector.” Sir Andrew, quite taken in by the Projectors, has notions as wild as Sir Politick Would-Be's. Dainty saves the day by having the music carry on: “They all Dance. In the Dance they pull off his Patents; And the Projectors Clokes, who appeare all ragged. At the end of the Dance the Projectors thrust forth.” Thus Sir Andrew is cured and all swiftly comes to a destined happy end. The dance is restarted by the indefatigable Dainty, and during it the last threads are unraveled and it turns into a traditional grand-dance finale to celebrate a wedding (V.ii:1.265-269).

In this last act Brome brings together a number of traditional devices and entertainments—the dance finale of comedy, the masque and antimasque, the amusing clumsiness of amateurs in rehearsal and performance, the sudden and complete unveiling and expulsion of villains, the saving of good folk—and makes of them one hectic yet carefully controlled comic scene. The Court Beggar is a perfect union of dramatic and musical entertainment; none of the individual elements is new, but the manner of bringing them together and the emphasis given to the fantastic and extravagant in their handling is fresh and lively.

Fantasy is the mark of The Antipodes, an attractive play possessing that rare Caroline quality of distinctive individuality. There is much music in the play, but it is used more to illustrate the theme than as plot material in the manner we have seen in other plays. If elements of the grotesque usually associated with the antimasque might be said to have been a leading motif in the handling of music in The Court Beggar, then the general atmosphere of the masque as a whole, its exotic and unreal nature, permeates The Antipodes, and this applies not merely to the musical parts of the play. Whereas in plays such as Cartwright's and Strode's the static tableau effects of the masque tend to dominate, Brome manages a much more subtle infusion of masque and drama.

The action takes place in the home of the eccentric Letoy, whose many servants can all act and play some musical instrument; he is entertained by them nightly with plays and masques. Peregrine, the hero, suffers from what might be called Mandeville-mania and dreams his life away in quixotic fantasies of travel (incidentally neglecting his wife to such an extent that she declines into melancholy). He is drugged and awakes at Letoy's where the players are already performing a piece which has to do with the Antipodes, the totally topsy-turvy world. Each act is introduced by flourishes, and toward the end of the play Peregrine is so carried away by it that, like Don Quixote before Master Peter's Puppet show, he takes part in the action and, after a rising in the tiring room, proclaims himself King of the Antipodes. He is greeted with the shouts of the people, “drums and trumpets,” and the “loud harmony” of the city waits on “hoboys.” Upon the heels of this raucous noise comes the “soft musick” and gentler song of welcome that the court brings to Peregrine. The scene ends with the return of the loud music of the “hoboys” (IV.x:3.313-315).¹⁰

In the masque that follows on the conclusion of Letoy's play (which has effected a cure on Peregrine, and hence on his wife), contrasts are worked out in terms of discord and concord. The plot is not advanced by the masque, but the way in which it matches the mood of the play and focuses sharply on the essential theme of the whole action makes it securely a part of Brome's design. There is an amusing and perhaps tongue-in-cheek explanation of its presence. The play-within-the-play had been broken off by Peregrine's entry into it. For completion it apparently needed a musical finale:

My lord gave order for't last night.
It should ha'bin ith'play: But because that
Was Broke off, he will ha't today.

(V.iv:3.323)

Discussion accompanies the various parts of the concluding masque for which Brome gives characteristically precise directions (V.viii-xi:3.335-338). “A solemne lesson upon the Recorders” brings on the actors. Peregrine “seemes somthing amazed,” and only when all is ready does this preliminary music cease. Its sweet harmony is abruptly contrasted with “a most untunable florish” that announces the masque proper. There enter “Discord attended by Folly, Jealousie, Melancholy and madnesse.” Discord, again “in untunable notes,” sings a song, after which a dance (obviously a fantastic one according to their music and character) follows. “After a while they are broke off by a flourish, and the approach of Harmony followed by Mercury, Cupid, Bacchus and Appollo. Discord and her faction fall downe.” Harmony's cutting across of the dance before it is finished stresses the opposition between the kinds of music. Harmony then performs her group's song. “After a straine or two, Discord cheares up her faction. They all rise, and mingle in the dance with Harmony and the rest. Daunce.” Here, having made music the subject of some of his best comic scenes, it might be said that Brome makes it the subject of his masque. It stands in relation to his play much as a moral does to a fable.

The feeling remains that The Antipodes is an interim play, an experiment in a mode that might have been fruitfully developed had not the closing of the theaters ended Brome's career. A Jovial Crew also looks toward a later mode of drama but it is a more self-contained play. It is a mixture of romance and reality. Notwithstanding the jovial music of the crew (their music-making largely is their joviality), there is a certain ambivalence to the atmosphere of the play. It provokes smiles rather than laughter; a thread of nostalgia runs through it.

It is not a play with songs and music so much as a musical play. Behind it lies the tradition that any group generally considered to be rogues and vagabonds need only be singers in order to become thoroughly jolly fellows: thus Brome's crew join with Gay's beggars and Gilbert and Sullivan's pirates. The crew celebrate all their social events with music, and it is typical of Brome's method that he explains their notable gifts in this line by the presence of several runaway musicians among their number. They are usually heard singing offstage before being discovered to the audience. Their first song sets out their philosophy:

From hunger and cold who lives more free,
Or who more richly clad than wee?

(I.i.3.365)

Even in the countryside they call to each other in imitated birdsong. They contribute a variety of musical entertainment. When Oldrents is saddened by his daughter's running away from home, his reactions are interestingly played against a background of the crew's offstage singing (II.i:3.386-392). They sing to cover the cries of one of their women in labor and then to welcome the birth of the child, while Oldrents talks sadly of his loss. Once discovered, they attempt to cheer up a well-loved patron with a cant song. Then drunken Autum-Mort sings “This is Bien Bowse,” at the end of which she tumbles over and is carried out. The song is a straightforward entertainment, comic relief of a farcical kind contrasting with the prevailing romantic feeling, the songs of near nostalgia for the country and the cant song. The whole show, for such it is, concludes with a dance by the Clapper Dugeons and the walking Morts. The crew are heard no more until the fourth act when they make a great festive music at the wedding of two of their number. Three poems of praise are read aloud, and the invitation of the second of them to begin a dance is accepted. The festivity is abruptly ended by the entry of the watch to arrest the revelers, and this prevents the possibility that “If there were no worse, we might have a Masque, or a Comedie” (IV.ii:3.423-433). The crew does perform a play in the fifth act and the ending of their play-within-a-play is merged with that of the play proper in curious and lively fashion. Their performance is introduced by “A Flourish of Shalms” which one of the audience recognizes; “Heark!—the Beggars' Hoboys. Now they begin.” There is, however, no musical finale to this last play of Brome. Possibly he thought that the closing display of bewildering revelations of long-lost relatives and friends and the mingling of his two plays was sufficient. As with the mock aubade in The English Moor, which is only described, he proved he was quite capable of resisting what might seem obvious occasions for music if he was in search of other dramatic effects.¹¹

The crew belong to that band of specially musical people in drama that has already been mentioned. Accepting them in the play means accepting their music. Indeed, they form a subplot that is completely musical. The main plot is not without some music for Hearty, a kinsman of Beaumont's Merrythought, regularly sings but keeps to one topic, the virtues of sack and old songs. Eventually he persuades to his creed, Tallboy Oldrents, who loses himself in feeble melancholy for a while and even attempts on one occasion to sing a conventional love-melancholy song but breaks down. This is a cameo musical entertainment, the elderly man acting the part of the sad lover which is traditionally that of the young man: the scene is admirably rounded off by his abjuring such efforts and turning to drink and singing a riotous round, “The Singers are all Graybeards” (IV.i:3.419). Old men need not necessarily avoid either love or boisterous drinking songs, but Brome makes play with the cheerful incongruity possible in the idea.

Such a small instance, however, well illustrates Brome's skill in making comedy that is musical. His craft allowed him easily to extend his effects over long scenes, and even, as we have seen, allowed him to forgo the opportunity for them when he felt it right to do so. He is a playwright very hard-served by relegation to the study: his liveliness and clever handling of character and movement, and of musical sound, need the appreciation best offered by live performance. his faults are obvious: if it is a fault to set out to entertain rather than to teach, then this marks him: indeed the lack of intellectual stuff in his work is possibly reflected in the way one falls naturally to discussing his work in terms of craftsmanship, accepting playwriting as a “trade” for Brome. There is a certain sameness of situation and character in his work. He had nothing memorably poetic to say, though he had some delightful songs. However, he knew his limits and was wise enough to keep within them. In choosing to stay in this naturalistic world rather than move into that rarefied one in which much Caroline drama in his own time was suffocating, Brome kept in the main line of English tradition. Caroline masque drama, as exemplified in such pieces as Cartwright's The Royal Slave or Strode's The Floating Island, might be said to incline toward opera seria and thence to grand opera, an art form that has always been alien to the English spirit. Brome's drama inclined more toward the opera buffa and light opera that stretches in rich line from the ballad opera to Gilbert and Sullivan and is the only operatic domain where the English spirit has comfortably settled. Operatic and musical analogies come quickly to mind when considering Brome. Baker remarked in the preface to his edition of The Jovial Crew that it was a “farce Gilbertian in its whimsicality,” well planned and well sustained; he also noted its approach to ballad opera.¹²

It must not be thought, however, that such analogies and such suggestions about the direction of development mean that Brome had any notions of opera in his mind when he was writing, that he was consciously striving toward some such form. What needs to be emphasized is his conscious effort to make music an integral part of his plays' structure: he wanted his music to be essential, not merely incidental. He wanted something of the union that Letoy had in the musician-actors he kept in his home:

Stage-playes and Masques, are nightly my pastimes.
And all within myselfe. My owne 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.v:3.245-246)

Brome attempted to make music act its part in his comedies: with vigor and liveliness he tried to make the action and music flow on together just as the musical notes followed one another. He sought the results that Letoy wanted when the latter was talking of words and action, meaning, by “action,” dancing and music:

… words and action married so together,
That shall strike harmony in the eares and eyes
Of the severest, if judicious Criticks.

(II.ii:3.259)

The copious and careful direction for the large-scale musical scenes underlines Brome's intentions; he aimed always at the ears and the eyes; his effects are conceived absolutely in terms of stage performance. This consistent and careful aim gave him his success. In a time when most writers were content with a dazzling but uneasy and clumsy yoking together of action and words, Brome frequently succeeded in making a harmonious marriage of the two.

Notes

1. R. J. Kaufmann, Richard Brome Caroline Playwright (New York and London, 1961).

2. Bertrand Russell, “Portraits from Memory,” quoted from The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell 1903-1959, ed. R. E. Egner and L. E. Dennon (London, 1961), p. 65.

3. Space prevents setting this sketch of Brome's musical usages in a detailed frame of reference to seventeenth-century musical beliefs and practices. Fortunately such details are readily available. “Ideas of Music in English Poetry 1500-1700” is the subtitle of John Hollander's The Untuning of the Sky (Princeton, N.J., 1961); also valuable on this topic is Nan C. Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities (Norman, Okla., 1958). J. S. Manifold, The Music in English Drama From Shakespeare to Purcell (London, 1956) is a convenient introduction to the musical resources of the theaters and the significance of the individual musical instruments. Two incisive and different books on general social background and music are E. D. Mackerness, A Social History of English Music (London, 1964), and Wilfrid Mellers, Music and Society (New York, 1950).

4. All references are to the only edition of the plays, The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome, 3 vols. (London, 1873). I cite act and scene followed by volume and page.

5. Dates are those given in A. Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975-1700, rev. S. Schoenbaum (London, 1964).

6. Brome's lively handling of the “Constance songs” contrasts interestingly with Fletcher's equally lively handling of the song of the courtesan who is mistaken for the heroine, Constantia, in The Chances (1625). Fletcher's courtesan sings a seductive song quite unsuited to Constantia's character but put down, by those anxiously searching for her, to “some strange melancholy she is laden with.” The quietness of the song and the nervous attention of the listening searchers is amusingly shattered by an outbreak of fighting in the singer's room and the discovery of a termagant instead of Constantia. This scene, and Fletcher's own experiments in dealing extensively with a particular musical usage in a single play, are discussed in my essay, “Patterns of Music and Action in Fletcherian Drama,” in Music in English Renaissance Drama, ed. John H. Long (Lexington, Ky., 1968), pp. 75-95. Brome was obviously familiar with Fletcher's plays and is the only Caroline playwright whose inventiveness and skill with musical conventions can compare with Fletcher's.

7. John Bull (ca. 1562-1628), organist, member of the Chapel Royal, and one of the most famous musicians of his day, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth. Which galliard Baneless wanted is unsure: there are some by Bull, for example, in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book.

8. Sir Ferdinando is a satirical caricature of Sir John Suckling whose notorious cowardice at Berwick during the First Bishops' War of 1639 is very likely glanced at in the choice of material for this second musical display. Court-Wit takes off Davenant who had, at the time of the play (early 1640), won plaudits as a royal masque-writer which he was not very modest about. Kaufmann has an excellent discussion of this play in chap. 9 of his book.

9. Sellinger's Round was an immensely popular cheerful dance tune of the period (originally probably a country maypole dance). It marks Swayne-Wit's musical taste as clearly as Baneless's calling for a galliard of Bull's marks his.

10. “Loud” music generally meant the reed instruments, brass and drums; “soft” music was played by the strings, recorders, and flutes (the latter could be heard in “loud” music also). “Loud” music might roughly be equated with outdoor, public, festive music, “soft” music with indoor, domestic, more private occasions. Manifold has some useful remarks on this matter.

11. Jonson may have given him an example for this. The New Inn (1629) has reference to a drinking school of singers most dramatists would have been pleased to bring on the stage for a scene or two. In the epilogue, however, Jonson says:

    He could have hal'd in
    The drunkards, and the noyses of the Inne,

    In his last act; if he had thought it fit
    To vent you vapours in the place of wit.

    Jonson, of course, was a notorious harper against what he considered improper dramatic entertainment, the more so at his career's close when he was less popular. In a transient mood of bitterness at the contemporaneous failure of The New Inn and the success of Brome's The Lovesick Maid, he had meanly written:

    Broomes sweeping doe as well
    Thear as his Masters Meale.

12. G. P. Baker in the prefatory essay to his edition of The Jovial Crew in Representative English Comedies, ed. C. M. Gayley (New York, 1937), III, 426.