The Antipodes
Encyclopedia
The Antipodes is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy
written by Richard Brome
c. 1640. Many critics have ranked The Antipodes as "his best play...Brome's masterpiece," and one of the best Caroline comedies — "gay, imaginative, and spirited...;" "the most sophisticated and ingenious of Brome's satires." Brome's play is "a funhouse mirror" in which the audience members could "view the nature of their society."
on 19 March 1640
, and printed later that year in a quarto
printed by John Okes for the bookseller Francis Constable
— "to be sold at his shops in King Street at the sign of the Goat, and in Westminster Hall." The title page of this first edition states that the play was acted in 1638 by Queen Henrietta's Men
at the Salisbury Court Theatre
, the regular troupe and venue for Brome's dramas from 1637 on. In a note addressed to the Courteous Reader at the end of the play's text, Brome writes that the play was originally intended for William Beeston
's company at the Cockpit Theatre
, which suggests that the play was written sometime around 1636. (Brome was involved in a contentious dispute over his change of companies in these years, as the theatres suffered a prolonged closure from May 1636 to October 1637, due to the bubonic plague
epidemic of those years.)
In that first edition, Brome dedicated the play to his patron, William Seymour, 2nd Duke of Somerset
. At around the same time, Brome sent a manuscript of his recent play The English Moor
to the Duke, likewise dedicated to Somerset.
The play was revived during the Restoration
era; Samuel Pepys
saw it performed on 26 August 1661.
; Mandeville himself is mentioned more than once in the play. Brome may have pulled hints and suggestions from other travel accounts, since the play refers to the famous English explorers of the day, Sir Francis Drake
, Martin Frobisher
, Sir Richard Hawkins
, and Sir Thomas Cavendish
. Many earlier writers stressed the sheer strangeness of far lands; Brome's self-styled "master," Ben Jonson
, did so in a notable instance in his 1620 masque
News from the New World Discovered in the Moon
, with children who are part bird and coaches that are blown by the wind — and some of Jonson's wonders date back as far as the Vera Historia of Lucian
. Strikingly, though, the idea of the Antipodes as a "topsy-turvy" place, where familiar relationships are directly reversed, seems to have been original with Brome; no clear precedents for it have been identified.
painter Anthony Blaze welcoming Master Joyless to London from the country. Joyless is oppressed by a set of personal problems. He is an older man, a former widower who has married a second wife, a seventeen-year-old woman named Diana — toward whom he is deeply possessive and jealous, fearing her potential infidelity. His son Peregrine has from his youth been obsessed with the literature of travel and voyaging, an obsession that is now so strong that it dominates his life, even to the point of preventing him from consummating his three-year-old marriage to his wife Martha — a circumstance that has left her profoundly unhappy, and almost as psychologically disturbed as her husband.
Blaze has a potential solution for all of the Joyless family's problems, in the treatments of a physician called Doctor Hughball, and the sponsorship of a mysterious nobleman named Letoy. Hughball had treated many disturbed Londoners successfully — even curing Blaze himself of his own suspicions of his wife's fidelity. His wife, Barbara Blaze, becomes an active participant in the eventual cure of the Joylesses, helping to manage Martha Joyless in particular.
Letoy is a wealthy aristocrat who pursues an odd lifestyle: he dresses plainly, yet furnishes his servants in rich clothes — the opposite of what is standard for noblemen of Brome's era. He also keeps a troupe of players, who he and the Doctor employ in their treatment of psychologically distressed individuals. The Doctor administers a powerful sleeping potion to Peregrine Joyless, and together with Master Joyless and his wife Diana they go to Letoy's country estate. There, Peregrine is told upon waking that he has travelled to the Antipodes
, the country directly opposite England on the other side of the globe. Letoy's players involve Peregrine in a pageant of life in "Anti-London," as a means of curing his obsession. In the process, Joyless and his wife are treated as well, unwittingly to them.
Most of the play's middle and later portions are taken up by a play within a play
, in which the Doctor, Blaze, and the actors, all under Letoy's direction, fool Peregrine into believing that he is actually in the Antipodes. The play goes anything but smoothly, as Martha attempts to interrupt, as Joyless and Diana comment caustically from the vantage point of their own unhappy marriage, and as Peregrine turns to whole enterprise his own way; the actors have to improvise and extemporize, and sometimes lose their way. But Letoy manages to direct the whole show toward the outcome he envisions.
In the metatheatre
of the play within the play, Brome presents the society of "Anti-London" as a distorted mirror-image of English society of his day. (Brome carefully specifies that the Antipodean kingdom is like England in political structure and religion, thereby avoiding the two fatal subjects for a Caroline dramatist; his Antipodeans only reverse English "manners.") In Brome's Anti-London, lawyers are poor and shabbily dressed, while poets are rich and gaudy; a lawyer refuses all fees, until a female client beats him into accepting her money. A gallant begs from a beggar, so that he can buy his grandmother ballads and "Love-pamphlets," and "Hobby-horses and rattles for my grandfather." A maiden tries to pick up a gallant in the street, and when he refuses her she kicks him. Old men are sent to school by their adult children, and play hooky when they can. Servants rule their masters. Gentlemen talk and behave as crudely as the lowest of common laborers, while watermen and carmen comport themselves with grace and gentility.
The play goes somewhat awry when Peregrine wanders into the players' "tiring house" and finds their properties. Thinking he's in "some enchanted castle," he slaughters their stage "Monsters, giants, furies, beasts, and bugbears,"
By right of conquest, Peregrine crowns himself king of the Antipodes, with the players' pasteboard crown and sword of lath. Letoy, however, turns this unforeseen event to his advantage: he has Byplay, the leader of the actors, set the new king the task of reforming his kingdom.
Then, the topsy-turvy aspects of the Antipodes become less humorous and more threatening. A statesman entertains several "projectors," who present him with wild speculative projects — like increasing wool production by flaying horses alive and affixing sheepskins to them. The Statesman accepts all their follies. Antipodean justice punishes the victims of disasters like fires and shipwrecks, with "Imprisonment, banishment, and sometimes death," to teach them to be more careful next time; and it rewards thieves, bawds, and even "The captain of the cut-purses" when they are old and can no longer practice their crimes. The shocked and chastened king Peregrine determines to reform and rectify his kingdom.
Peregrine is presented with his wife Martha, dressed as his queen; he is told that she is the daughter of the last king of the Antipodes, and he must mate with her to secure his crown. Under the guidance of Doctor Hughball and Barbara Blaze, the couple retire to bed and consummate their marriage. Afterwards, Peregrine is like a man come out of a dream; his sanity and mental balance are returning.
Letoy almost drives Joyless to desperation, by making the old man believe that he, Letoy, is trying to seduce Joyless's wife Diana. Instead, Joyless witnesses Diana reject the nobleman's advances. Letoy informs both of them that he is Diana's true father. Years before, he had put aside his infant daughter to be raised by his client Truelock. In his younger years, Letoy himself had suffered from the curse of irrational jealousy, and had suspected that his daughter was another man's child. Only a death-bed assurance from his wife convinced Letoy that he had been wrong. Having recovered from his own irrationality, he turned to helping others do the same.
The play concludes in a masque: Discord ushers in the personifications of Folly, Jealousy, Melancholy, and Madness, to "most untunable" music. They, however, are driven out by Harmony, who leads in Mercury
, Cupid
, Bacchus
, and Apollo
, who bring wit, love, wine, and health.
Martha Joyless is a child bride, a "poor piece of innocence" who has been kept ignorant of sexuality; she longs desperately for a baby, but doesn't quite know how to get one. She weeps as she complains of her husband Peregrine that
Barbara Blaze calls Martha's enforced married chastity "monstrous." Martha asks Barbara "How came you by your babies?" and wants to be shown the mechanics of sex. Martha says that "A wanton maid" once kissed and fondled her — a franker indication of lesbian activity than plays of English Renaissance theatre
usually provide. [See The Queen's Exchange
and A Mad Couple Well-Match'd
for other Brome allusions to lesbianism.]
Before he consummates his marriage, Peregrine talks about the Gadlibriens, a people mentioned in Mandeville who have an odd sexual practice: a bridegroom always hires "Another man to couple with his bride, / To clear the dangerous passage of a maidenhead." This suggests an inhibition and fear of sexuality that goes deeper than anything derived from Peregrine's obsession with travel.
At the end of the play, Brome includes Cupid and love as an essential part of his recipe for social sanity.
and Kempe
, / Before the stage was purg'd from barbarism....," though this censure must be qualified, as it has far too often not been, by the Prologue's criticism of the contemporary stage.
Brome also gives a vivid miniature picture of the "crude coil" of the actors squabbling over their costumes, wigs, and false beards.
to which it relates.
. It was staged at the modern replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London in August 2000. http://arts.independent.co.uk/theatre/features/article258113.ece http://www.globelink.org/docs/The_Antipodes_2000.pdf
Comedy
Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...
written by Richard Brome
Richard Brome
Richard Brome was an English dramatist of the Caroline era.-Life: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...
c. 1640. Many critics have ranked The Antipodes as "his best play...Brome's masterpiece," and one of the best Caroline comedies — "gay, imaginative, and spirited...;" "the most sophisticated and ingenious of Brome's satires." Brome's play is "a funhouse mirror" in which the audience members could "view the nature of their society."
Date, performance, publication
The play was entered into the Stationers' RegisterStationers' Register
The Stationers' Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. The company is a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers in England...
on 19 March 1640
1640 in literature
The year 1640 in literature involved some significant events.-Events:*January 21 - Salmacida Spolia, a masque written by Sir William Davenant and designed by Inigo Jones, is performed at Whitehall Palace — the final royal masque of the Caroline era.*March 17 - Henry Burnell's play Landgartha...
, and printed later that year in a quarto
Book size
The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms is commonly used by libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books, ranging from "folio" , to "quarto" and "octavo"...
printed by John Okes for the bookseller Francis Constable
Francis Constable
Francis Constable was a London bookseller and publisher of the Jacobean and Caroline eras, noted for publishing a number of stage plays of English Renaissance drama....
— "to be sold at his shops in King Street at the sign of the Goat, and in Westminster Hall." The title page of this first edition states that the play was acted in 1638 by Queen Henrietta's Men
Queen Henrietta's Men
Queen Henrietta's Men was an important playing company or troupe of actors in Caroline era London. At their peak of popularity, Queen Henrietta's Men were the second leading troupe of the day, after only the King's Men.-Beginnings:...
at the Salisbury Court Theatre
Salisbury Court Theatre
The Salisbury Court Theatre was a theatre in 17th-century London. It was located in the neighbourhood of Salisbury Court, which was formerly the London residence of the Bishops of Salisbury. Salibury Court was acquired by Richard Sackville in 1564; when Thomas Sackville was created Earl of Dorset...
, the regular troupe and venue for Brome's dramas from 1637 on. In a note addressed to the Courteous Reader at the end of the play's text, Brome writes that the play was originally intended for William Beeston
William Beeston
William Beeston was a 17th century actor and theatre manager, the son and successor to the more famous Christopher Beeston.-Early phase:...
's company at the Cockpit Theatre
Cockpit Theatre
The Cockpit was a theatre in London, operating from 1616 to around 1665. It was the first theatre to be located near Drury Lane. After damage in 1617, it was christened The Phoenix....
, which suggests that the play was written sometime around 1636. (Brome was involved in a contentious dispute over his change of companies in these years, as the theatres suffered a prolonged closure from May 1636 to October 1637, due to the bubonic plague
Bubonic plague
Plague is a deadly infectious disease that is caused by the enterobacteria Yersinia pestis, named after the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin. Primarily carried by rodents and spread to humans via fleas, the disease is notorious throughout history, due to the unrivaled scale of death...
epidemic of those years.)
In that first edition, Brome dedicated the play to his patron, William Seymour, 2nd Duke of Somerset
William Seymour, 2nd Duke of Somerset
Sir William Seymour, 2nd Duke of Somerset, KG was an English nobleman and Royalist commander in the English Civil War....
. At around the same time, Brome sent a manuscript of his recent play The English Moor
The English Moor
The English Moor, or the Mock Marriage is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy written by Richard Brome, noteworthy in its use of the stage device of blackface make-up...
to the Duke, likewise dedicated to Somerset.
The play was revived during the Restoration
English Restoration
The Restoration of the English monarchy began in 1660 when the English, Scottish and Irish monarchies were all restored under Charles II after the Interregnum that followed the Wars of the Three Kingdoms...
era; Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys FRS, MP, JP, was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament who is now most famous for the diary he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man...
saw it performed on 26 August 1661.
Sources
For the play's exotica, Brome relied first of all on the classic book The Travels of Sir John MandevilleJohn Mandeville
"Jehan de Mandeville", translated as "Sir John Mandeville", is the name claimed by the compiler of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a book account of his supposed travels, written in Anglo-Norman French, and first circulated between 1357 and 1371.By aid of translations into many other languages...
; Mandeville himself is mentioned more than once in the play. Brome may have pulled hints and suggestions from other travel accounts, since the play refers to the famous English explorers of the day, Sir Francis Drake
Francis Drake
Sir Francis Drake, Vice Admiral was an English sea captain, privateer, navigator, slaver, and politician of the Elizabethan era. Elizabeth I of England awarded Drake a knighthood in 1581. He was second-in-command of the English fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588. He also carried out the...
, Martin Frobisher
Martin Frobisher
Sir Martin Frobisher was an English seaman who made three voyages to the New World to look for the Northwest Passage...
, Sir Richard Hawkins
Richard Hawkins
thumb|250px|right|Sir Richard HawkinsAdmiral Sir Richard Hawkins was a 17th century English seaman, explorer and Elizabethan "Sea Dog", and was the son of Admiral Sir John Hawkins....
, and Sir Thomas Cavendish
Thomas Cavendish
Sir Thomas Cavendish was an English explorer and a privateer known as "The Navigator" because he was the first who deliberately tried to emulate Sir Francis Drake and raid the Spanish towns and ships in the Pacific and return by circumnavigating the globe...
. Many earlier writers stressed the sheer strangeness of far lands; Brome's self-styled "master," Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...
, did so in a notable instance in his 1620 masque
Masque
The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in 16th and early 17th century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio...
News from the New World Discovered in the Moon
News from the New World Discovered in the Moon
News from the New World Discovered in the Moon was a Jacobean era masque, written by Ben Jonson; it was first performed before King James I on January 7, 1620, with a second performance on February 29 of the same year...
, with children who are part bird and coaches that are blown by the wind — and some of Jonson's wonders date back as far as the Vera Historia of Lucian
Lucian
Lucian of Samosata was a rhetorician and satirist who wrote in the Greek language. He is noted for his witty and scoffing nature.His ethnicity is disputed and is attributed as Assyrian according to Frye and Parpola, and Syrian according to Joseph....
. Strikingly, though, the idea of the Antipodes as a "topsy-turvy" place, where familiar relationships are directly reversed, seems to have been original with Brome; no clear precedents for it have been identified.
Style
No critic has ever claimed that Brome was a great dramatic poet or a truly distinctive literary stylist; his verse and prose are generally nothing more than functional, and certainly lack the vivid eloquence of Shakespeare and the intellectual knottiness of his idol Jonson. In The Antipodes, however, the richness of Brome's material appears to inspire him to an imaginative quality that he rarely achieves elsewhere — as in this passage from Act I scene vi, on Sir John Mandeville and the talking trees of the Antipodes:-
-
-
-
-
-
- But he had reach'd
-
-
-
-
- To this place here — yes here — this wilderness,
- And seen the trees of the Sun and Moon, that speak,
- And told King Alexander of his death; he then
- Had left a passage ope for travellers,
- That now is kept and guarded by wild beasts,
- Dragons, and serpents, elephants white and blue
- Unicorns, and lions of many colours,
- And monsters more as numberless as nameless.
-
Synopsis
The play's plot is complex and intricate, even by the standards of Brome. The opening scene shows the heraldHeraldry
Heraldry is the profession, study, or art of creating, granting, and blazoning arms and ruling on questions of rank or protocol, as exercised by an officer of arms. Heraldry comes from Anglo-Norman herald, from the Germanic compound harja-waldaz, "army commander"...
painter Anthony Blaze welcoming Master Joyless to London from the country. Joyless is oppressed by a set of personal problems. He is an older man, a former widower who has married a second wife, a seventeen-year-old woman named Diana — toward whom he is deeply possessive and jealous, fearing her potential infidelity. His son Peregrine has from his youth been obsessed with the literature of travel and voyaging, an obsession that is now so strong that it dominates his life, even to the point of preventing him from consummating his three-year-old marriage to his wife Martha — a circumstance that has left her profoundly unhappy, and almost as psychologically disturbed as her husband.
Blaze has a potential solution for all of the Joyless family's problems, in the treatments of a physician called Doctor Hughball, and the sponsorship of a mysterious nobleman named Letoy. Hughball had treated many disturbed Londoners successfully — even curing Blaze himself of his own suspicions of his wife's fidelity. His wife, Barbara Blaze, becomes an active participant in the eventual cure of the Joylesses, helping to manage Martha Joyless in particular.
Letoy is a wealthy aristocrat who pursues an odd lifestyle: he dresses plainly, yet furnishes his servants in rich clothes — the opposite of what is standard for noblemen of Brome's era. He also keeps a troupe of players, who he and the Doctor employ in their treatment of psychologically distressed individuals. The Doctor administers a powerful sleeping potion to Peregrine Joyless, and together with Master Joyless and his wife Diana they go to Letoy's country estate. There, Peregrine is told upon waking that he has travelled to the Antipodes
Antipodes
In geography, the antipodes of any place on Earth is the point on the Earth's surface which is diametrically opposite to it. Two points that are antipodal to one another are connected by a straight line running through the centre of the Earth....
, the country directly opposite England on the other side of the globe. Letoy's players involve Peregrine in a pageant of life in "Anti-London," as a means of curing his obsession. In the process, Joyless and his wife are treated as well, unwittingly to them.
Most of the play's middle and later portions are taken up by a play within a play
Story within a story
A story within a story, also rendered story-within-a-story, is a literary device in which one narrative is presented during the action of another narrative. Mise en abyme is the French term for a similar literary device...
, in which the Doctor, Blaze, and the actors, all under Letoy's direction, fool Peregrine into believing that he is actually in the Antipodes. The play goes anything but smoothly, as Martha attempts to interrupt, as Joyless and Diana comment caustically from the vantage point of their own unhappy marriage, and as Peregrine turns to whole enterprise his own way; the actors have to improvise and extemporize, and sometimes lose their way. But Letoy manages to direct the whole show toward the outcome he envisions.
In the metatheatre
Metatheatre
The term "metatheatre", coined by Lionel Abel, has entered into common critical usage; however, there is still much uncertainty over its proper definition and what dramatic techniques might be included in its scope...
of the play within the play, Brome presents the society of "Anti-London" as a distorted mirror-image of English society of his day. (Brome carefully specifies that the Antipodean kingdom is like England in political structure and religion, thereby avoiding the two fatal subjects for a Caroline dramatist; his Antipodeans only reverse English "manners.") In Brome's Anti-London, lawyers are poor and shabbily dressed, while poets are rich and gaudy; a lawyer refuses all fees, until a female client beats him into accepting her money. A gallant begs from a beggar, so that he can buy his grandmother ballads and "Love-pamphlets," and "Hobby-horses and rattles for my grandfather." A maiden tries to pick up a gallant in the street, and when he refuses her she kicks him. Old men are sent to school by their adult children, and play hooky when they can. Servants rule their masters. Gentlemen talk and behave as crudely as the lowest of common laborers, while watermen and carmen comport themselves with grace and gentility.
The play goes somewhat awry when Peregrine wanders into the players' "tiring house" and finds their properties. Thinking he's in "some enchanted castle," he slaughters their stage "Monsters, giants, furies, beasts, and bugbears,"
-
- Kills monster after monster; takes the puppets
- Prisoners, knocks down the cyclops, tumbles all
- Our jigambobs and trinkets to the wall.
By right of conquest, Peregrine crowns himself king of the Antipodes, with the players' pasteboard crown and sword of lath. Letoy, however, turns this unforeseen event to his advantage: he has Byplay, the leader of the actors, set the new king the task of reforming his kingdom.
Then, the topsy-turvy aspects of the Antipodes become less humorous and more threatening. A statesman entertains several "projectors," who present him with wild speculative projects — like increasing wool production by flaying horses alive and affixing sheepskins to them. The Statesman accepts all their follies. Antipodean justice punishes the victims of disasters like fires and shipwrecks, with "Imprisonment, banishment, and sometimes death," to teach them to be more careful next time; and it rewards thieves, bawds, and even "The captain of the cut-purses" when they are old and can no longer practice their crimes. The shocked and chastened king Peregrine determines to reform and rectify his kingdom.
Peregrine is presented with his wife Martha, dressed as his queen; he is told that she is the daughter of the last king of the Antipodes, and he must mate with her to secure his crown. Under the guidance of Doctor Hughball and Barbara Blaze, the couple retire to bed and consummate their marriage. Afterwards, Peregrine is like a man come out of a dream; his sanity and mental balance are returning.
Letoy almost drives Joyless to desperation, by making the old man believe that he, Letoy, is trying to seduce Joyless's wife Diana. Instead, Joyless witnesses Diana reject the nobleman's advances. Letoy informs both of them that he is Diana's true father. Years before, he had put aside his infant daughter to be raised by his client Truelock. In his younger years, Letoy himself had suffered from the curse of irrational jealousy, and had suspected that his daughter was another man's child. Only a death-bed assurance from his wife convinced Letoy that he had been wrong. Having recovered from his own irrationality, he turned to helping others do the same.
The play concludes in a masque: Discord ushers in the personifications of Folly, Jealousy, Melancholy, and Madness, to "most untunable" music. They, however, are driven out by Harmony, who leads in Mercury
Mercury (mythology)
Mercury was a messenger who wore winged sandals, and a god of trade, the son of Maia Maiestas and Jupiter in Roman mythology. His name is related to the Latin word merx , mercari , and merces...
, Cupid
Cupid
In Roman mythology, Cupid is the god of desire, affection and erotic love. He is the son of the goddess Venus and the god Mars. His Greek counterpart is Eros...
, Bacchus
Dionysus
Dionysus was the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology. His name in Linear B tablets shows he was worshipped from c. 1500—1100 BC by Mycenean Greeks: other traces of Dionysian-type cult have been found in ancient Minoan Crete...
, and Apollo
Apollo
Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in Greek and Roman mythology...
, who bring wit, love, wine, and health.
Sexuality
The subject of sex is central to the play's concerns. At least part of Joyless's problem with his wife is that he is no longer capable of satisfying her sexually; he fears that his wife will seek out another man for "some sport," since he "can make her none." Doctor Hughball asserts that in the Antipodes "the maids do woo / The bachelors," and that "The wives lie uppermost" — which Diana Joyless calls "a trim / Upside-down Antipodean trick indeed."Martha Joyless is a child bride, a "poor piece of innocence" who has been kept ignorant of sexuality; she longs desperately for a baby, but doesn't quite know how to get one. She weeps as she complains of her husband Peregrine that
-
- He ne'er put child not any thing towards it yet
- To me to making; for I am past a child
- To think they may be found in parsley beds,
- Strawberry banks or rosemary bushes, though
- I must confess I have sought and search'd such places
- Because I would fain have had one.
Barbara Blaze calls Martha's enforced married chastity "monstrous." Martha asks Barbara "How came you by your babies?" and wants to be shown the mechanics of sex. Martha says that "A wanton maid" once kissed and fondled her — a franker indication of lesbian activity than plays of English Renaissance theatre
English Renaissance theatre
English Renaissance theatre, also known as early modern English theatre, refers to the theatre of England, largely based in London, which occurred between the Reformation and the closure of the theatres in 1642...
usually provide. [See The Queen's Exchange
The Queen's Exchange
The Queen's Exchange is a Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by Richard Brome.-Publication and performance:The Queen's Exchange was first published in 1657, in a quarto issued by the bookseller Henry Brome...
and A Mad Couple Well-Match'd
A Mad Couple Well-Match'd
A Mad Couple Well-Match'd is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy written by Richard Brome. It was first published in the 1653 Brome collection Five New Plays, issued by the booksellers Humphrey Moseley, Richard Marriot, and Thomas Dring....
for other Brome allusions to lesbianism.]
Before he consummates his marriage, Peregrine talks about the Gadlibriens, a people mentioned in Mandeville who have an odd sexual practice: a bridegroom always hires "Another man to couple with his bride, / To clear the dangerous passage of a maidenhead." This suggests an inhibition and fear of sexuality that goes deeper than anything derived from Peregrine's obsession with travel.
At the end of the play, Brome includes Cupid and love as an essential part of his recipe for social sanity.
Theatrics
In staging his play within a play, Letoy acts like a theatre director; he criticizes the mannerisms of the players and guides them toward a naturalistic style of acting. Interestingly for a playwright, Brome doesn't have Letoy insist upon slavish adherence to the author's text; quite the opposite, he stresses the players' talent for improvisation when the play and its purpose demand it. Yet he censures the habits of comic actors who play to the audience for easy laughs, as "...in the days of TarletonRichard Tarlton
Richard Tarlton , an English actor, was the most famous clown of his era.His birthplace is unknown, but reports of over a century later give it as Condover in Shropshire, with a later move to Ilford in Essex...
and Kempe
William Kempe
William Kempe , also spelt Kemp, was an English actor and dancer specializing in comic roles and best known for having been one of the original players in early dramas by William Shakespeare...
, / Before the stage was purg'd from barbarism....," though this censure must be qualified, as it has far too often not been, by the Prologue's criticism of the contemporary stage.
Brome also gives a vivid miniature picture of the "crude coil" of the actors squabbling over their costumes, wigs, and false beards.
Critical responses
Brome's play touches upon so many themes and subjects — theatre itself; psychology and psychotherapy; sexuality and gender roles; lesbianism; colonialism and the alienness and "otherness" of foreign cultures; social satire and social justice; etc. — that many authors on these disparate subjects have discussed it or referred to it. The play stands as one "model for later antipodes-literature" and the utopian and dystopian literatureUtopian and dystopian fiction
The utopia and its offshoot, the dystopia, are genres of literature that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction is the creation of an ideal world, or utopia, as the setting for a novel. Dystopian fiction is the opposite: creation of a nightmare world, or dystopia...
to which it relates.
A modern production
The Antipodes is unusual among Brome's plays in having received a prominent modern production, directed by Gerald FreedmanGerald Freedman
Gerald Freedman is an American theatre director, librettist, and lyricist, and a college dean.Born in Lorain, Ohio, Freedman was educated at Northwestern University, where he received both BA and MA degrees. He began his career as assistant director of such projects as Bells Are Ringing, West Side...
. It was staged at the modern replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London in August 2000. http://arts.independent.co.uk/theatre/features/article258113.ece http://www.globelink.org/docs/The_Antipodes_2000.pdf
External links
- Richard Brome Online http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome/ contains a scholarly edition of this play, including textual and critical introductions.