The University of Sheffield
Humanities Research Institute

The Richard Brome Project

The intention is to create an online edition of the Collected Works of the Caroline dramatist, Richard Brome. This AHRC-funded project aims to combine dramatic textual scholarship with theatre practice. Intended users are scholars of drama and theatre studies, English Literature, History and cultural studies, as well as theatre practitioners.

The dramatist Richard Brome

Richard Brome:

The exact date of Brome´s birth is not known but it is surmised that the likely date was circa 1590. Equally uncertain is the date at which he became Ben Jonson´s "man" (a term which has been variously interpreted as Jonson´s servant, amanuensis and theatre assistant). Brome is famously referred to in this way within the Induction to Jonson´s Bartholomew Fair and it is often assumed that Brome must have been publicly acknowledged as Jonson´s "man" by 1614, the date of the play´s initial performances. But Jonson revised Bartholomew Fair prior to its publication in 1631, and the reference may possibly be a late addition. All other references to their relationship accrue around this later period. Brome appears to have established his reputation as a dramatist with four plays staged by the King´s Men over the years 1629-1632: The Love-Sick Maid (now lost), The Northern Lass (printed 1632), The City Wit and The Novella. Sometime after this period Brome seems to have begun working for the Prince´s Men at the Red Bull and they may have staged either or both The Weeding of Covent Garden and The Queen´s Exchange, although it was the King´s Men who performed his collaboration with Heywood, The Late Lancashire Witches, in 1634. The following year Brome entered into a formal contract with a rival company, the King´s Revels, based at the Salisbury Court Theatre, who claimed in consequence an exclusive right to the staging of his subsequent work. They were responsible for mounting by far the largest group of his plays: The Sparagus Garden (1635, published 1640), Queen and Concubine (1635-6), The New Academy (1636), The Antipodes (1636-7, published 1640); then later after the company had reformed as Queen Henrietta´s Men, The English Moor (1637), The Damoiselle (1638), The Love-Sick Court (1638) and The Florentine Friend (1638, now lost). A Mad Couple Well Match´d, though written in 1638 for the Salisbury Court Theatre, was rejected by them and offered to Beeston and his company at the Cockpit, who staged the play in 1639. This was not the first time that Brome had turned to Beeston when in need of income: the Salisbury Court contract did not offer him quite the water-tight security Brome might have hoped when signing it. During a prolonged period of plague when the theatres generally were closed but Beeston´s company somehow successfully continued to play, an impoverished Brome had offered to them The Antipodes and was taken to court by the King´s Revels Company for breach of contract. The documents surviving from the ensuing case offer considerable insight into the working conditions of dramatists in the Caroline period, their problematic relationships with the various acting companies, and likely fees for their work. Beeston´s company were to mount the last plays that Brome wrote before the closing of the theatres in 1642: The Court Beggar (1640) and The Jovial Crew (1642) together with a revival of The Weeding of Covent Garden in 1641. Of Brome´s last years little is known: the last few months of his life were spent as a Brother in Charterhouse. His death is recorded as 24th September 1652, and the papers record his burial at a cost of 13s.

Project objectives

Richard Brome´s plays have not appeared as a complete edition since John Pearson´s three-volume facsimile-reprint in 1873. Pearson did not include collaborations or Brome´s non-dramatic works. Certain plays have appeared as single editions in recent years, but only a select few; some of these are in old-spelling. This edition aims to include all Brome´s dramatic works, including his sole-authored plays, collaboration(s), and manuscript materials. Each text will be fully edited and accompanied by bibliographical, linguistic and dramaturgical commentaries (including comprehensive stage histories for each play and information about possible patterns of doubling). Brome´s few known non-dramatic writings will also be included. The edition is to be presented as an online resource, enabling additional pictorial and written material to be keyed into the edited text, further illuminating the social, political, cultural and theatrical contexts in which Brome´s plays are immersed.

An innovative feature

The edition will also deploy professionally acted sequences, which will allow the editors to test their ideas through the medium of performance and present these to the users of the text. The edition will not only make the texts accessible to scholars and theatre practitioners, but also begin to explore their theatricality visually, serving as inspiration to encourage more frequent staging of Brome´s works. The enacted sequences will be recorded in workshop conditions with a changing body of actors (all drawn from the alumni lists of the Royal Shakespeare Company) to avoid apparent prescription of any one style of performing as definitive. Rather the intention is that the workshop format shall promote discussion of performance options, description of which in traditional editions is limited to the written word.

Commentaries

In addition to direct textual commentary, the following subjects are also to be examined:

Also included will be a full Glossary and a Bibliography, covering wider issues as well as Brome´s work and specific plays.

Why edit Brome online?

The distinctive feature of Brome´s dramaturgy is the highly inventive forms of theatricality through which he promotes his stringent satire of Caroline society, the politics of trade, the commercialism of court life, the surreal nature of a world governed by an absolutist monarch, and the moral vacuity of forms of drama achieving fashionable success within such a society. Most of Brome´s plays need contextualising within the theatrical, political and social history of their time. The virtues of online publication will enable transcriptions of early printings (and manuscripts where such exist, as with The English Moor) to be viewed comparatively alongside modernised rendering of the texts, while commentary, annotations, pictorial matter (prints, maps), glossary, bibliography, enacted sequences and the texts will be interlinked and indexed and therefore readily searchable in a more immediately accessible and user-friendly fashion than is possible within the confines of the book-format.

Personnel:

The project unites the research specialisms and technical expertise of an international panel of experienced scholars. All have previously engaged in editing period texts and texts for performance and bring to the project a wealth of varied experience, which is regularly pooled in twice-yearly editorial conferences.

General Editor and Project Manager:

Richard Cave (Royal Holloway, University of London)

The Editorial Panel:

Michael Leslie (Rhodes College, Memphis)

Eleanor Lowe (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Lucy Munro (Keele University)

Marion O´Connor (University of Kent at Canterbury)

Helen Ostovich (McMaster, Ontario, Canada)

Julie Sanders (University of Nottingham)

Elizabeth Schafer (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Matthew Steggle (Sheffield Hallam University)

Brian Woolland (independent scholar and director of the workshops)

hriOnline (Sheffield) will be responsible for creating and implementing the electronic format.

Arts Archives (Exeter):

Peter Hulton will record all the workshop performances for inclusion in the edition.