Richard Brome

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Richard Brome (born ca. 1590?—died 1653) (pronounced "Broom") was an English Caroline dramatist.

Virtually nothing is known about Brome's private life. Repeated allusions in contemporary works, like Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, indicate that Brome started out as a servant of Jonson, in some capacity. Scholars have interpreted the allusions to mean that Brome may have begun as a menial servant but later became a sort of secretary and general assistant to the older playwright. A single brief mention of his family's need seems to show that he had a wife and children and struggled to support them.

He may have had some experience as a professional actor: a 1628 warrant lists him among the Queen of Bohemia's Players. Yet he had already started writing for the stage by that date: an early collaboration, A Fault in Friendship (now lost) was licensed in 1623 for Prince Charles' company; a 1629 solo Brome effort, The Lovesick Maid (also lost), was a success for the King's Men. The Northern Lass (1632) was another success, and made Brome's reputation.

Due to the survival of various legal documents, much more is known about Brome's professional activities than his personal life. Once established as a dramatist, Brome wrote for all the major acting companies and theaters of his era—for the Blackfriars theater; for the Red Bull, then highly reputed; and from 1635 onward, for Queen Henrietta's Men at the Salisbury Court theater. Brome's Sparagus Garden was a huge success at the Salisbury Court in 1635, earning over £1000. As a result, Brome signed a three-year contract to write three plays annually for the theater, at a salary of 15 shillings per week plus one day's profit per play. The contract fell through, however, when the London theaters were closed due to bubonic plague. In need of money, Brome resorted to Christopher Beeston, actor, impresario, and owner of the Cockpit Theatre (also known as the Phoenix). In August 1635 Beeston loaned Brome £6, and in return Brome committed to write Beeston a play. Salisbury Court tried to lure Brome back with a £10 payment for a new play. But Salisbury Court fell behind in its payments and Brome turned again to Beeston.

Salisbury Court appealed to Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, to settle the dispute; Herbert decreed that Salisbury Court play Brome six shillings a week and £5 for each new play, the payments to continue even when the theaters were closed. The plague diminished enough for performances to resume on October 2, 1637; at Salisbury Court the reorganized Queen Henrietta's Men commenced the new season, it is thought, with Brome's The English Moor or the Mock-Marriage.

When Brome's 1635 contract with Salisbury Court ended in 1638, new disputes arose among Brome, Beeston, and Salisbury Court; the theater filed a Bill of Complaint against Brome, though the outcome of the case is unknown.

It seems that once the Puritans closed the theaters in 1642, Brome struggled more severely. He may have authored an entertainment, Juno in Arcadia, for Queen Henrietta Maria's arrival at Oxford in 1643. He wrote commendatory verses for the Beaumont and Fletcher First Folio (1647). In 1652 he edited a volume of elegies, titled Lachrymae Musarum, on the death of Henry Huntingdon, Lord Hastings; and in the same year, in a dedication to Thomas Stanley in a quarto edition of his A Jovial Crew, Brome described himself as "poor and proud."

Alexander Brome, no relation to the playwright, edited two collections of Brome's works in 1652-3 and 1659, both, curiously, titled Five New Plays.

The plays Brome wrote were certainly, and strongly, influenced by Jonsonian comedy (Brome was not a tragedian). He was, admittedly and unambiguously, one of the Sons of Ben. The canon of his extant plays includes:

The City Wit (ca. 1629?, revived 1637, printed 1653).
The Northern Lass, (performed and printed 1632).
The Queen's Exchange (ca. 1629-30?, printed 1657).
The Novella (performed 1632, printed 1653).
The Weeding of Covent Garden (performed 1633?, printed 1659).
The Sparagus Garden (performed 1635, printed 1640).
The Damoiselle or the New Ordinary (ca. 1638?).
'The English Moor, or The Mock Marriage (performed 1637, printed 1659).
The Antipodes (performed 1638, printed 1640).
A Mad Couple Well Match'd (performed 1639?, printed 1652).
The Lovesick Court, or The Ambitious Politic (registered 1640, printed 1659).
The Court Beggar (ca. 1639-40, printed 1653).^[1]
The New Academy, or The New Exchange (registered 1640, printed 1659).
The Queen and Concubine (ca. 1635-9?, printed 1659).
A Jovial Crew, or the Merry Beggars (performed 1641, printed 1652; revised in 1731 as an opera).

Brome collaborated with Thomas Heywood in The Late Lancashire Witches, which was acted by the King's Men and printed in 1634. The play is based on events of 1633-4, and therefore must have been written shortly before.

Brome plays that have not survived include: Wit in a Madness (1637); 'The Jewish Gentleman (registered 1640); The Life and Death of Sir Martin Skink (ca. 1634) and The Apprentice's Prize (ca. 1633-41), two more collaborations with Heywood); and Christianetta (registered 1640), possibly a collaboration with George Chapman.

When the theaters reopened during the Restoration, a handful of Brome's plays were performed and republished; the most successful was A Jovial Crew, which was acted widely and printed in 1661, 1684, and 1708. Also, Brome plays reappeared in rewritten, adapted, or plagiarized forms. One example: The Debauchee by Aphra Behn (printed 1677) is a rewrite of Brome's A Mad Couple Well Match'd", down to the characters' names.

See A. W. Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature, vol. iii, pp. 125-31 (1899). The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome were published in 1873.

[edit] Note

^ The Court Beggar satirizes Sir William Davenant, either because a) Davenant got William Beeston's place at the Cockpit and Red Bull Theatres in 1640; or b) Davenant planned a lavish new theatre that would provide unwelcome competition for Brome. Logan and Smith, p. 193.

[edit] References

Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith, eds., The Later Jacobean and Caoline Dramatists: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama, Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 1975.
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
This article incorporates public domain text from: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London, J.M. Dent & sons; New York, E.P. Dutton.