Richard Brome Research Articles

The Late Lancashire Witches:

ABSTRACT In The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome depict witches and their work as intelligible, even mundane parts of a society replete with community rituals and ceremonies. In the county of Lancashire depicted in the play, one may find gallants hunting (1.1, 2.4), gentlemen dining and drinking together (1.1, 2.2, 4.5), an elaborate wedding featuring a feast and dancing (3.1, 3.3), and a skimmington ride to mock the conjugal mishaps of the couple married earlier (4.3). The presence of so many community rituals establishes the play's setting in Lancashire, a region that was notorious for its traditionalism due to its significant recusant community and proclivity for older festive practices, such as Morris dances and maypoles. By showing this community already employing a number of traditional practices, several of which are deployed to manage local problems, the playwrights argue that this community—which includes witches—functions perfectly well. Through the depiction of so many festive gatherings in their witch play, Heywood and Brome interrogate the hegemony and exclusion that so often defines witchcraft plays. Instead, The Late Lancashire Witches reveals how the chaos of witchcraft may be incorporated into social coherence.

Intended for the stage: Performance criticism in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes

This note focuses on the troubled relation between Richard Brome’s The Antipodes (1638) and its theatrical realisations, as mentioned in the author’s address to the reader in the Quarto of 1640 as well as has been the case in more recent revivals of the play. Criticism of early modern drama has tended to consider such plays as determined by their being written for performance, an emphasis which has sometimes entailed a dismissal of more textual approaches. However, in The Antipodes there seems to have existed (and continues to exist) some disconnectedness between the text of the play and its life in the theatre. I therefore propose looking at specific aspects of The Antipodes in relation to the challenges it poses in performance and to performance criticism, by continuously shifting between the Caroline theatrical context and the contemporary critical and theatrical context.

‘To sleep, perchance to Dream’: The Politics of Travel in the 1630s

This article explores the reasons behind the use of a particular generic feature in Caroline travel writing — the dream or dream vision — in two midto late 1630s texts, William Davenant’s generically complex poem ‘Madagascar. A Poem written to Prince Rupert’, which was published in 1638 as part of his first collection of poetry, Madagascar; With Other Poems, and Richard Brome’s play The Antipodes (performed 1638, published 1640). In ‘Madagascar’ Davenant’s fantasy of the establishment of an English colony on the island of Madagascar under Prince Rupert is described via the medium of an illness-induced dream vision. In Brome’s drama, the deluded would-be traveller Peregrine Joyless imagines he is in the Antipodes after being drugged by his doctor, thus carrying ‘him down to the Antipodes [...] but in a dream’, and his ‘cure’ is achieved by enacting a play-within-a-play, staged by a troupe of actors under the directorship of Letoy (described in the dramatis personae as ‘a fantastic lord’), in the apparently topsy-turvy Antipodes.1 In both texts a dream, or a dream vision, is central to the plot, but it is also important thematically; the travel described is presented as wholly imaginary which, paradoxically, I will argue, allows a searching critique of domestic politics (though it is nuanced in Davenant’s text). Each text uses travel as a vehicle to explore the unease and tensions created by the years of personal rule and some of the political difficulties it created for the king and his subjects, as well as offering suggestions of potential ways to defuse the situation. I suggest that Englishmen and women saw travel and travel writing in the 1630s as politically nuanced, capable of expressing a range of viewpoints as well as being used as a vehicle to express a variety of issues: it could be seen as both an expression of the glorious spirit of English expansionism, and an escape route from inglorious persecution at home. Before focusing on these texts by Davenant and Brome, it is important to situate them both against Caroline travel writing more generally, as well as in

Witches before Flying

This paper examines Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606), and The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, and considers in detail the witch scenes in both plays and their stage directions during their entrances and exits. The witches in the Jacobean Macbeth of the First Folio, do not explicitly fly in the stage directions. However, they do in the Restoration Macbeth, namely in Davenant’s second Quarto (1674). The question to be raised here is: what evidence is there in the pre-Restoration Macbeth that the witches flew? In order to explore this, we must consider what performance spaces were used for Macbeth in the Jacobean period. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Heywood and Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches form an interesting comparison since they were both revised by other writers. The Late Lancashire Witches has not received as much scholarly attention as the other witch plays discussed here. Therefore, as a comparative study, this paper will also discuss the joint authorship of Heywood and Brome in The Late Lancashire Witches and the stage directions of the witch scenes. Although it seems that the witches did not fly in Heywood’s and Brome’s version, there is evidence that the stage directions called for flight in The Lancashire Witches (1681), Thomas Shadwell’s later version. A further illuminating comparison between these plays is that the creatures we are considering here are sinister figures in Macbeth but comic figures in The Lancashire Witches. The audience can see that the three Weird Sisters enter the stage and then vanish into the air, but do not see them fly.

Theatre and/as Witchcraft: A Reading of <em>The Late Lancashire Witches</em> (1634)

Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood's The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) is a journalistic play so clearly inspired by judicial records of the contemporary trial that it has been characterized as a commission from the privy council, destined to further the case of the prosecution, but opinions diverge as to the authors’ obedience to or challenge of political authority. This close reading re-examines the ambiguous subversiveness of the play, highlights the pervasive destabilization of patriarchal authority, and shows how by equating witchcraft with theatre the play may expose the fictitious bases of the trial. On the other hand, the reciprocal notion that theatre is witchcraft epitomizes the playwrights’ exploitation and promotion of the public theatre’s resources.

'Wanton Females of All Sorts': Spectatorship in <em>The Antipodes</em>

Focusing on Richard Brome's presentation of the theatre in The Antipodes (1638) as a force for social stability and sexual regulation, this essay reads the play as a response to the attack on the stage in William Prynne’s 1633 Histrio-mastix , particularly in terms of the increasingly prominent female playgoer in the 1630s. Satirizing assumptions about the sexually predatory spectacle and the emotionally liquid playgoer that underlie anti-theatrical anxieties of early modern London, The Antipodes also suggests a larger model for relations between theatre audiences and theatrical spectacles. This model ultimately places authority with spectators rather than players or playwrights and imagines the audience, like the chaste and witty Diana, asserting its control over the private theatres of Caroline London.

‘Bound up and clasped together’: Bookbinding as Metaphor for Marriage in Richard Brome's <em>The Love-Sick Court</em>

Analytical studies of book production in dramatic metaphors most commonly make reference to printing technologies and book replication and dissemination. This essay reconsiders the new bibliography by extending its scope to include bookbinding, with especial attention paid to Richard Brome’s 1638 play The Love-Sick Court . In act 4, Doris the maid rejects Geron’s advances: ‘We are not yet one volume, both bound up / And clasped together’. I consider this claim in the light of courtship and marriage with particular analysis of the process of bookbinding (from personal practical experience) in relation to the sacrament of marriage. The essay pays additional attention to the close synergies between paper and clothing, and the trope of book/woman.

Hornpipes and Disordered Dancing in <em>The Late Lancashire Witches</em>: A Reel Crux?

This note considers a potential crux on the word 'reel' in Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome's The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), as referring to the country dance of the same name as well as a whirling or rolling motion. Contemporary references to witches' dancing alongside the dancing of reels and hornpipes are discussed, and previous editorial treatment of the play is considered alongside that of Shakespeare.

The Cambridge companion to Shakespeare and contemporary dramatists

1. John Lyly and the university wits: George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge and Thomas Nashe Arthur F. Kinney 2. Thomas Kyd and the Elizabethan blockbuster: The Spanish Tragedy Clara Calvo 3. 'The words of mercury': Shakespeare and Marlowe Richard Wilson 4. The dyer's hand: Shakespeare and Jonson Warren Chernaik 5. Urbane John Marston: obscenity, playfulness, co-operation Matthew Steggle 6. Thomas Dekker and the emergence of city comedy Darryll Grantley 7. Shakespeare: colleagues, collaborators, co-authors Ton Hoenselaars 8. Thomas Heywood: dramatist of London and playwright of the passions Jean E. Howard 9. George Chapman's learned drama Paul Franssen 10. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's tragicomedy as musical melodrama Catherine Henze 11. Thomas Middleton and the early modern theatre Michelle O'Callaghan 12. John Webster: collaboration and solitude Robert Henke 13. John Ford: suffering and silence in Perkin Warbeck and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore Lisa Hopkins 14. Philip Massinger: drama, reputation, and the dynamics of social history Rui Carvalho Homem 15. Richard Brome and the idea of a Caroline theatre Heather Hirschfeld 16. Troublesome histories: performance and early modern drama Elizabeth Schafer.

Refashioning language in Richard Brome’s theatre

This paper investigates the way the Caroline playwright Richard Brome used foreign languages and dialects in his works. On the one hand, in each play he re-proposed the variety of language typical of Ben Jonson, though in a personal way, experimenting with languages such as Latin, French and Dutch, while discussing through stereotypes and comic parodies of foreign accents the relationship between England and other European countries. On the other hand, Brome was able to produce convincing imitations of regionalisms, as in The Northern Lass (Yorkshire) and The Sparagus Garden (Somerset), which contribute to the dramatization of social dynamics while offering a vivid and disillusioned picture of the age. Keywords: Caroline theatre; dialects; foreign languages; stereotypes; refashioning

In Search of the English Sabbat: Popular Conceptions of Witches’ Meetings in Early Modern England

This article explores the evidence for belief in the witches’ sabbat in early modern England. England is generally thought of as a country where the concept of the sabbat did not exist, and it was certainly largely absent from elite thinking on witchcraft, as displayed in the witchcraft statutes of 1563 and 1604 and Elizabethan and Jacobean demonological writings. But evidence entering the historical record mainly via deposi- tions taken by justices of the peace suggests that there was a widespread popular belief in the sabbat or in parallel forms of witches’ meetings, evidence that the concept of the sabbat existed in popular culture. In this, the English evidence seems to support Carlo Ginzburg’s model of the sabbat being essentially a popular construction in its origins. The article also examines a play based on one of the historical incidents analysed, Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood’s The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), and uses it as a starting point for a brief discussion of witchcraft motifs in contemporary drama, notably Shakespeare’s Macbeth .

The Original Salisbury Court Players of Richard Brome's The Antipodes

TWO seldom observed aspects of the legal battle between Richard Brome and the players of Salisbury Court are that (1) Brome testifies to the financial success of his Antipodes and that (2) the legal dealings record the state of the Salisbury Court players at two distinct instances in the development of the troupe’s company.1 In regard to the first of these points, Brome endorses the stage success of his Antipodes after a more overt promotion of his Sparagus Garden. He claims that he had intended a play—his Antipodes—for William Beeston but that the playing company of Salisbury Court ‘had it and acted it and by comon estimacon gott a Thousand pounds and vpwards by it’.2 In regard to the second point, the bill against Brome records the group of players associated with Salisbury Court both around 20 July 1635, when Brome initially signed over his services to the company, and the state of the company around 12 February 1640, when the suit was finalized by the players for settlement against Brome.3 These two aspects of the contract proceedings help to set the scene for an important new discovery of a cast list for the staging of Brome’s Antipodes.4 This cast list, which appears as a series of written names in a copy of the 1640 printing of The Antipodes, helps to illuminate the state of the Salisbury Court players in 1638, directly following the reopening of the theatres after several months of closures due to outbreaks of plague.5

Therapeutic Travel in Richard Brome's The Antipodes

Critics typically situate Richard Brome's The Antipodes (1636) in a satiric tradition of travel writing in the vein of Joseph Hall's Mundus Alter et Idem (1605), arguing that the play is "purely allegorical" and a "travel drama that is not about travel." This paper argues that The Antipodes is very much "about travel," but specifically about the psychology of travel, not the physicality of voyaging. Brome foregrounds travel tropes within the framework of Jonsonian comedy not merely for the sake of producing yet another entertaining quirk or eccentricity, but also so that the psychology of travel writing itself can be examined and the experiences of travelers and playgoers critiqued. Privileging the cultural role of the imagination and desire over the imperial and mercantile aspects of travel usually examined by critics, this paper addresses the principal concern of The Antipodes —the pleasures and risks of vicarious travel; a rich but relatively underappreciated aspect of travel writing in the early modern period.

A "Birthright into a New World": Representing the Town on Brome's Stage

England in the 1630s witnessed increasing hostilities between Puritans and Royalists as different religious and political groups competed to shape the way the English conceptualized the newly constructed town locales. During this period, sites such as Covent Garden, Asparagus Garden in Lambeth across from Whitehall, and the New Exchange in the Strand at Westminster, among others, emerged as contested spaces among the court, the city, and the country. (1) Most critics characterize the dramatist Richard Brome as siding with the town gentry and depicting these upscale districts in his plays as oppositional hotbeds to Charles's increasingly autocratic rule. While R. J. Kaufmann, Julie Sanders, Martin Butler, and, more recently, Matthew Steggle and Adam Zucker emphasize the setting in Brome's plays, they largely overlook the way these suburban developments were imagined as colonial ventures. (2) This essay examines how the establishment of the town, as represented in Brome's plays, is framed by European models of both internal colonialism and New World expansion. (3) Although my essay treats mainly Carolinian drama, I also discuss Ben Jonson's plays, in order to contextualize the ways in which Brome brings together two seemingly different functions of Jacobean drama: to familiarize recent arrivals to London to their fast-changing milieu and to marginalize an English underclass that cannot assimilate into the competitive marketplace of these new urban spaces. Teasing out the tensions of these two representational models, Brome identifies how elite speculators and the state collude as they attempted to increase profit margins and solidify their control of these expanding districts. By dramatizing how developers incorporate foreign architecture, install foreign workers in the town, and construct the town as an overseas territory, Brome lays bare an urban topography that upends traditional social relationships grounded in land ownership among the underclass, middling sort, and aristocracy. (4) In the first section of the essay, I analyze Ben Jonson's The Entertainment at Britain's Burse (1609), which registers the bewilderment of Londoners who have trouble comprehending the transformation of the western suburbs, as formerly remote green spaces became integrated into a global network of commerce. In this masque, which was performed before James I at the inaugural ceremony of the New Exchange in the Strand at Westminster, Jonson depicts this high-end shopping center as an initial foray into the town by developers who intended to displace the area's inhabitants. The New Exchange, one of the main developments of the West End, along with Hyde Park, Tottenham Court, and Covent Garden, specializes in luxury consumer items from the Far East--products from a region of the world that testified to Dutch trading supremacy. As I will demonstrate, because the Netherlands permeates the way the English conceive of the town, these sites come to be characterized as extensions of Dutch commercial activities, alienating the English from their homeland. (5) I then consider the construction of London's suburbs as a New World plantation that must weed undesirable elements in order to form a community fit for the nobility in Brome's topographical comedy, or placerealism play, The Weeding of Covent Garden (1633). Alternately called a forest and a lawless precinct inhabited by Amazonian trulls and tribe[s] of men and women, (6) Covent Garden contains an underclass thriving on the disorder inherent in this new suburb. Primarily, developers of the suburbs introduced foreign architecture to draw the city's elite to the area to maximize profits; in his study of this play, Zucker points out that the building of the Covent Garden piazza signaled the consolidation of the city's first neighborhood based on wealth. (7) As contemporary pamphlets demonstrate, this gentrification was disguised as a colonial venture--an inducement to nonlocals to settle in the area, but only if they strictly conform to the builders' image of the development as an exclusive setting designed for a new merchant elite. …

The Making of the Images of Englishmen in Caroline Drama 1625-1642

This paper gives an account of the images of Englishmen and European foreigners in the English setting of Caroline drama, and provides cases in which Caroline dramatists present with the self-criticism new approaches to the depiction of Englishmen in relation to European foreigners. Exemplary cases are an English aristocrat in Spanish disguise in Richard Brome’s The Northern Lass (1629), a French dancing instructor in James Shirley’s The Ball (1632), and an English-born son of a Dutch immigrant in Henry Glapthorne’s The Hollander (1635). These three plays are suggestive of social and political issues that reflect on the alliance between England and its traditional enemies such as Spain, France and Netherlands. The national traits of characters are determined by international affairs swinging between the breakdown of the alliance and its restoration. These three plays are no longer rooted in the Elizabethan xenophobic and patriotic sentiment, and foreign characters are more fully accepted into Caroline social life. The satire previously aimed at European foreigners is now turned against the folly of English characters. It works as the device that reassesses the Englishman’s self-image and his notion of the European other, and that has the effect of challenging the conventional concept of stock national traits. Both English and European characters are portrayed satirically. The new type of satirical drama serves to redefine the self-deceptive nature of English national identity, and to present European foreigners in a less prejudiced comparison with Englishmen.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Reading Early Modern Food

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Reading Early Modern Food

The Space of Identity and the Identity of Space in The City Wit by Richard Brome

My paper examines The City Wit (1629-1632), a city comedy by Richard Brome revolving around the unscrupulous trade world, where all the characters aim at social recognition, even trampling on feelings and moral values. My objective is to investigate the play as one of the earlier examples of strategic use of space in Brome’s dramatic production. Firstly, I will consider the function of space in relation to the identity of the single characters. Secondly, I will show how space can be manipulated for the re-fashioning of a new identity, as in the case of Jeremy, a male servant disguised as a widow, who builds up a fictitious Cornish identity. Finally, I will analyze the geography of the play focusing in particular on the scene set in the Presence Chamber of Whitehall.

Bringing Richard Brome Online

This review essay assesses Richard Brome Online , an online edition of the collected works of Richard Brome, in terms of the design, functionality, and usability of its features.

Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642. Jean E. Howard . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 276.

<i>Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642</i>. Jean E. Howard . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 276.

Mastering Masques of Blackness: Jonson's Masque of Blackness, The Windsor text of The Gypsies Metamorphosed, and Brome's The English Moor

This essay discusses the impact of blackface paint upon three early modern performances of racial change or racial masquerade: Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness (1605) and The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621) and Richard Brome's The English Moor (1637). Each production is shaped by the medium's often unruly materiality. When used as a device for disguise, blackface carries with it the possibility of aborted transformations, of misrecognition, of theatrical unpredictability—and, given early modern conceptions of the body, of worrisome physiological change. In The Masque of Blackness“the daughters of Niger” wish to change their skin color from black to white; the women remain black, however, at the masque's conclusion. This failure to show a racial transformation haunts Jonson's later and more successful masque, The Gypsies Metamorphosed. Richard Brome's The English Moor functions in effect as a comic revision of both of these earlier productions. Containing a failed “masque of Moors,” the play shows Brome adopting the very “parodic strategy” associated with his former master, Jonson: the subsumption of a rival playwright's use of theatrical convention—in this case, black face—for his own “exaltation.” (A.S.)