Richard Brome

Richard Brome, as he dedicates A Jovial Crew, or The Merry
Beggars to Thomas Stanley, claims  that his play had what he calls ‘the luck’ to ‘tumble last of all in  the epidemical ruin of the scene’: it was the last play staged  before the theatres closed in 1642 as the English Civil War began. But this dedication, written not when A Jovial Crew was performed at the Cockpit/Phoenix in 1641 or 1642, but when it was printed in 1652, gives the text a ‘certain poignancy which it would not originally have possessed’ (Butler, Theatre, 269). Put on at the conventional terminus of early modern drama, and published in the middle of a national crisis, A Jovial Crew is a work that has much to say about the history of theatre and the history of England.

The present study traces the discourses about the antipodes from Greek and Roman writings to recent Pacific Island literature and into the twenty-first century.  My focus on “discourses” draws on Michel Foucault who, we remember, describes a “discursive formation” as “a space of multiple dissensions; a set of different oppositions whose levels and roles must be described.” He emphasizes that a study of discourse will be of “transformations” in the sense that the aim is “to describe, for each discursive practice, its rules of accumulation, exclusion, reactivation, its own forms of derivation, and its specific modes of connexion over various successions.”  This investigation of antipodean discourse embraces the ambiguity of the word antipodes in the sense of the initial contingency about where exactly the other side of the world is and the relatively undetermined topography of the antipodes. It also takes up other “dissensions” and “oppositions.” The antipodes are at times singular, and they are multiple in the Greek sense of the plural “opposite feet.” They sometimes exist in the northern hemisphere though they come to be associated with the Southeast. They are one or more islands (part of the sea), they are a continent and islands (they dominate the sea), or they are principally the sea itself. They are our opposites, and yet beyond the question of who and where “we” are, the relationships one might have with the antipodes are not so clearly oppositional. One can travel to them, one can be near them, one can remain in them, and one can leave from them. One can imaginatively reach out to them and physically reach them along a number of very different routes, and the antipodes can also reach out to and reach “us.” They correspond to us, but they also correspond with us. It is this rich texture of the antipodes that I explore—their quizzical as well as their comical appearances—in a way that might come near them even if they are evanescent and disorienting. At times their opposite feet will touch the bottoms of our feet in a bodily and uncanny fashion. At other times peoples of the antipodes might walk upright in our midst so that it seems to be we who are on uncertain footing. At still other times we will sail within antipodean waters and set up house on an antipodean beach to look out at other places across the earth.

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.

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.