Narratives of Value in Richard Brome’s Dispute with the Salisbury Court

The bill and answer for the 1640 court of request proceedings constitute the extant evidence of the terms of two contracts between Richard Brome and the Salisbury Court, one signed in 1635 and the other drafted in 1638 but unsigned. Inferring from these documents key differences between the contracts, this essay argues that the first contract left crucial ambiguities about the value of Brome’s labour, and the company attempted to resolve these ambiguities to its advantage through the second contract and the bill of complaint. This evidence suggests a primarily antagonistic relationship between Brome and the Salisbury Court from 1636.

Swift, Gulliver, and Travel Satire

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) stands in a long tradition of travel satire that emerged in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Travel and the travel book represent essential, constitutive elements of the story, serving as vehicle as well as subject matter for satirical treatment. Swift draws on established attacks on the traveller’s identity and how it becomes dislocated in travel, and the accusation of lying often levelled against travellers. Swift’s genius lies in taking this critique to a new extreme, and by structuring the story in a way that makes the form of travel writing collapse in on itself. His forebears include Thomas More, Rabelais, Ben Jonson, Richard Brome, George Etherege, and a host of critics writing on the art of travel (ars apodemica), like Joseph Hall and James Howell.

Utopia and the Enclosing of Dramatic Landscapes

This article focuses on the enclosing of the land as depicted in More’s Utopia (1516); the anonymous domestic tragedy, Arden of Faversham (1589); and the Carolinian play, A Jovial Crew (1641), by Richard Brome. It discusses how the relationship between the multiple resulting changes in the environmental, social, and economic landscape gave rise to important points for action and social debate in early modern English fiction, in which the customary pre-Reformation past is as irreconcilable as a fictional utopian world. This article argues that the emerging profitability of the newly and increasingly enclosed topography as imagined in Utopia appears in Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, and its initial consequences are disclosed in the anonymous Arden, only to spread through generations of social displacement in Richard Brome’s Jovial Crew, by which time an absurd realignment of the relationship between beggary and ideal worlds is taking place in drama. Cet article se penche sur le phénomène d’enclôture des terres tel que Thomas More le décrit dans l’Utopie, dans la tragédie anonyme intitulée Arden of Faversham (1589) et dans la pièce carolinienne A Jovial Crew (1641) de Richard Brome. On montre d’abord comment les différentes conséquences environnementales, sociales et économiques ont donné lieu à des mouvements et des débats sociaux au sein de la fiction anglaise moderne, où la l’histoire convenue du passé précédant la Réforme paraît tout aussi éloignée que la fiction d’un monde utopique. On avance que les possibilités de profit qu’offre la nouvelle topographie de terres de plus en plus clôturées, ainsi que l’imaginait l’Utopie, sont évoquées dans la pièce The Unfortunate Traveller de Thomas Nashe, que les conséquences de ces changements apparaissent dans la pièce Arden, et que les déplacement sociaux qui y ont fait suite pour des générations se retrouvent plus tard dans la pièce de Richard Brome ; à cette période, le théâtre procède à un absurde réalignement du lien entre les mondes idéaux et la mendicité.

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

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.