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Acting “above” in Richard Brome’s (1590?-1652) comedies
Athina EFSTATHIOU-LAVABRE Univ. Paris Nanterre
Richard Brome was a genuine master of comedy who wrote for London’s most renowned theatres. From 1629 to 1642, he wrote sixteen plays under Charles I’s reign. They were mostly set in contemporary London and covered a vast range of themes: political, social and historical. He created a wide array of characters, whose names often reflected their humour, and his oeuvre revelled in the theatrical techniques of the past, not least the play- within-the-play, which gave his comedies a distinct baroque sensibility, like those of Corneille and Calderón, his European contemporaries. The “most prolific of the Caroline Sons of Ben”1 as described by Joe Lee Davis, an “early inheritor of Shakespeare”,2 as dubbed by Matthew Steggle, just to name two of his most important dramatic influences, he belonged to a generation of playwrights who borrowed openly from their predecessors.3 Like them, Brome also used the “onstage and offstage resources”4 of the indoor theatres such as the tiring-house for things invisible and/or when needing sound effects, and also moved action to an upper playing area, a space often identified, in printed text at least, laconically as “above”. For the purposes of this paper, I shall briefly begin by identifying some scenes where the stage directions suggest action that takes place above the main stage, their relevance being mainly topical. I shall then turn to a more detailed study of the use of the space “above” in Brome’s The Antipodes, first performed in 1638, and more specifically during the staging of the play-within-the play.5
1 Joe Lee Davis, The Sons of Ben: Jonsonian Comedy in Caroline England, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1967, p. 21. On the topic of Brome’s heritage and filiation see Athéna Efstathiou-Lavabre, “‘The Testimony of Several Poets of that Age’: filiation(s) et affiliation(s), ou le cas de Richard Brome (1590 ?-1652)”, Shakespeare en devenir, n° 6, 2012, Héritiers littéraires: légitimes et bâtards. 2 Matthew Steggle, Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004, p. 4. 3 Gisèle Venet, “Introduction”, in William Shakespeare, Tragédies, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Jean-Michel Déprats, Paris, Gallimard, 2002, p. clxxxi. 4 Title taken from “Part 1 Onstage and Offstage Resources in Early Modern Performance”, Tim Fitzpatrick, Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2011, p. 9-61. 5 Analysis of the stage direction “above” was first tested in 2007 when giving a paper at the Brome Symposium on the play-within-the-play and the interplay of multiple spaces. Later that year, I included part of that work in
Balcony Scenes/Scènes de balcon ARRÊT SUR SCÈNE/SCENE FOCUS 6 (2017)
* […] above by far the most common term (occurring roughly 300 times in over 150 plays) for the performance area over the main platform elsewhere designated walls or window, which also functioned as the music room […].6 This is the definition of “above”7 given by Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson in their 1999 publication, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 1580-1642. Brome resorts to this stage direction right from his first comedy, The Northern Lass, performed in 1629. In act II, scene ii of the play, Constance, who is the Northern lass, is told “But go you to your 8 chamber” (II.ii.speech236) . After her exit, she then reappears in the same act, although she is no longer on the main stage. A stage direction indicates “above” (II.ii.261). The reader is then told that Constance sings “above”. From this space “above”, the actor playing the part of Anvil waits on the main stage below. He hears the young maiden sing a song of melancholy, which is the play’s driving humour and of which she must be cured. Placing Constance “above” the stage allows Brome to give importance to the use of song and music not only in this play, but also in his other comedies where songs abound. Her solitary position also contributes to exploring the theme of melancholy, a recurring state of mind in Brome’s plays. However, just as importantly, as Julie Sanders has pointed out in her 2010 edition of the play, […] [Constance] appear[s] to emerge in a space above the stage, representative of a balcony on the property of Sir Paul Squelch. Brome was fond of incorporating the latest architectural and spatial innovations such as balconies into his plays;9 Indeed, when studying 1630s’ London, modern editors of Brome’s plays and literary critics have enlightened readers about these architectural changes. For instance, in The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy, Adam Zucker writes: […] the balcony was a signature element of the new Continental aesthetic that made Covent Garden a space worthy of a major European capital city ; […] as a new, Italianate element of my doctoral thesis in French. Reconsidered here, for the purposes of this paper, I solely focus on the space referred to as “above”. I express my gratitude to my friend, the poet Andrew Staniland, for his assistance at the time and here again, for agreeing to proofread my work. I would also like to thank the readers for their invaluable suggestions and corrections. 6 Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 1. In The Late Lancashire Witches, written with Thomas Heywood, “above” clearly indicates where the musicians are situated: “Musicians show themselves above.”, III.iii.538. See The Late Lancashire Witches, Modern Text, ed. H. Ostovich, Richard Brome Online (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome, 17 January 2010). All other quotations are taken from The Northern Lass, Modern Text, ed. J. Sanders, The Novella, Modern Text, ed. R. Cave, The Weeding of Covent Garden, Modern Text, ed. M. Leslie, The Antipodes, Modern Text, ed. R. Cave and A Jovial Crew or, The Merry Beggars, Richard Brome Online (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome, 17 January 2010). Regarding the music room, see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, 4th ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 181-183, 194-199. 7 For analysis of the stage direction “above”, see also more recently Mariko Ichikawa, The Shakespearean Stage Space, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 1-28, p. 52-71. 8 For all quotations, the number that follows the act and scene corresponds to the speech number as it appears in the modernised online text that is used here throughout. The word ‘speech’ will not appear in subsequent quotations. Moreover as Julie Sanders puts it, “Constance’s chamber in terms of stage space is represented by the balcony or the space above the stage, since she comes out from there to look down on Anvil with Trainwell in the next scene, and delivers her distracting song from that vantage point.” Click on the word chamber at II.ii.236, The Northern Lass. 9 Click on above in added stage direction: “[TRAINWELL and CONSTANCE enter above.]”, II.ii.252, The Northern Lass.
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residential architecture, balconies were the focus of some anxiety for a city obsessed with the motions of women through public space. […] Although few Londoners in 1632 had seen a proper balcony on a house, thousands had taken in the spectacle of a woman on a raised platform [...].10 In Brome’s The Weeding of Covent Garden, which “was written in the second half of 1632 or in 1633”11, specific mention of the “balcony” is made and is also preceded by “above”. The stage directions indicate:
DORCAS enters above upon a balcony. GABRIEL gazes at her. DORCAS is habited like a courtesan of Venice (I.i.69) In his edition of the play, Michael Leslie notes that “The Covent Garden development may have contained the first such balconies in England. Their novelty explains the servant Belt’s lack of knowledge of them […]”.12 Indeed, even though one of the characters identifies Dorcas as “some lady or gentlewoman” (I.i.75), and then “nominates the 13 place”, “standing upon her balcony” (I.i.75), the servant still misinterprets the nomination, allowing Brome a sexual pun on the balcony “as a foreign Italian import itself”14. As Adam Zucker points out, Belt “searches for a homophonic ‘belle coney’, which literally means ‘beautiful rabbit’, but in this context more likely refers to a part of the body […]”.15 Brome’s text reads: 16 BELT. Her belle coney? Where is it? I can spy from her foot to her face, yet I can see no belle coney she has. COCKBRAIN. What a knave’s this? That’s the balcony she stands on, that which jets out so on the forepart of the house. Every house here has one of ’em. (I.i.76-77) While the Covent Garden area is central to understanding some of the town’s transformations, the balcony thus becomes a platform upon which women are put on show “in the light of a well-known code of sexual and commercial display”,17 as Michael Leslie puts it, to be viewed by men. The balcony thus represents “a place for viewing” which the etymology of the word ‘θέᾱτρον’, meaning theatre in Greek, in fact signifies.18 Just as Constance in The Northern Lass sings a song from above, so does Dorcas, with a lute. Brome resorts to a very similar stage direction to the one used in The Weeding of Covent Garden when having Victoria in The Novella, a 1632 comedy set in Venice, appear on the stage for the first time – “VICTORIA above, looking in a glass; […].” (II.ii.218) and later in the same scene, the stage directions indicate:
10 Adam Zucker, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 121-122. 11 Steggle, Richard Brome: Place and Politics …, p. 43. 12 For the above quotation and for further explanation of the balcony and its significance in the play, click on balcony at I.i.75, The Weeding of Covent Garden. 13 See “Chapter 4 Nominating the Place”, Fitzpatrick, Playwright, Space and Place …, p. 87-102. 14 See Eleanor Lowe, “Onstage and Offstage Drama: New approaches to Richard Brome”, Early Theatre, 10:2, 2007, p. 114. See p. 109-116 for the entire review. 15 Zucker, The Places of Wit …, p. 119. 16 “Belt’s bawdy jokes become a bit more comprehensible if we consider how strange balconies actually were as a feature of residential architecture in London. In Italy, and especially in Venice, balconies were common enough, but with the limited exception of those wealthy enough to have traveled, few people in London had seen one until at least the end of James’s reign”. Zucker, The Places of Wit …, p. 121-122. 17 For above quotation, click on balcony at I.i.75, The Weeding of Covent Garden. 18 Etymology quoted from The Oxford English Dictionary. See entry under theatre.
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Whilst she plays and sings above, BORGIO waits below. Many gallants pass over the stage, gazing at her. PISO is received in by BORGIO; after him a French cavalier; then a brave Spaniard ; and after him a glorious German. BORGIO takes fees of all as they enter the house. (II.ii.249) Regarding this particular moment in the play, in the modern edition of The Novella, Richard Cave writes:
[…] the whole scene was played out in the intimate space of the upper playing level or gallery. […] The image of an enticingly dressed female seated at a window while playing a lute or guitar was a pervasive icon signifying that the woman was a courtesan or prostitute (the image of her fingers strumming across an instrument placed in her lap was considered suggestively erotic). […] Here we move from a highly intimate scene situated “above” to a more open public sequence where the room or gallery above now becomes a window towards which a host of men gaze as they pass over the main playing space below. […] As often in Brome’s dramaturgy, there is a divided focus for the audience’s attention: on the performance of the song, and on the mimed action as each of the men on entering her house proffers a fee to Borgio.19
Unlike the abovementioned examples where the stage direction “above” allows female characters to be heard performing a song, as in the case of Constance, or elevated for view like a piece of merchandise for sale, like Victoria in The Novella or Dorcas in The Weeding of Covent Garden, in The Court Beggar (1640) the stage direction “above” serves another purpose altogether. Moving the spectators’ focus to action taking place “above”, the stage direction allows the playwright to conceal from the spectators what he does not actually show, the attempted rape of Strangelove. The stage direction “above”, which no doubt designates the “madman’s chamber” (III.ii.616), is used several times in act III scene ii: “Strangelove. [Screaming,] unseen, above. Help, help! Here help! Aaaaah !!!” (III.ii.602) and 20 “Strangelove. [Still unseen above] Help, help, a rape, a rape, murder, help!” (III.ii.607). However, it is the use of “above” in The Antipodes which I would now like to consider. More specifically, once the play-within-the-play is in motion (which is designed to cure Peregrine of his travel melancholy or “Mandeville madness”, (IV.i.896), how it enables Brome to experiment, in a highly original way, with the use of an upper playing level or gallery.
*
Courteous Reader: You shall find in this book more then was presented upon the stage, and left out of the presentation for superfluous length (as some of the players pretended). I thought good all should be inserted according to the allowed original and as it was at first intended for the Cockpit stage in the right of my most deserving friend, Mr. William Beeston, unto whom it properly appertained. And so I leave it to thy perusal, as it was generally applauded and well acted at Salisbury Court. Farewell, Ri[chard] Brome.21
19 For the above quotation and for further explanation of this moment in the play, click on above at II.ii.218, sign at II.ii.249, and on stage direction below at II.ii.249, The Novella. 20 For a close reading of this specific scene in Brome’s The Court Beggar, including the other references to the use of “above”, see “Unseen Above”, Ichikawa, The Shakespearean Stage Space, p. 61-62. 21 Richard Cave, “The Antipodes. Textual Essay” in Brome, The Antipodes, ed. Cave, 2010, §27.
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As he explains in the 1640 edition of the play, Richard Brome originally wrote this comedy for his friend William Beeston and the Cockpit Theatre, but it was actually first performed in 1638 at Salisbury Court, the theatre to which Brome had been contracted since 1635.22 Built in 1629 at Whitefriars, in what had originally been a barn, this indoor theatre was one of the last to be built before the playhouses were closed in 1642. From this extract, it seems clear that Brome, like his contemporaries, wrote above all in order to see his plays performed. The dramatic text, which for him was not an end in itself, was tested and found its raison d’être on the stage. Nevertheless, once published, it was no longer intended only for the spectator, but also for a wider audience of readers. But the main thing the author tells us in this extract is that the published text is different to the one performed at Salisbury Court. Apparently frustrated at the cuts imposed by the players, he expresses his satisfaction at having been able to restore his original text through publication. It is, however, impossible to know the extent of the changes to which Brome refers and that is why in “The Staging of Plays at the Salisbury Court Theatre 1630-1642”, David Stevens relegates The Antipodes to the category of those plays that offer “the least conclusive evidence of the staging practices of this theatre because of revision before printing”.23 I want now to analyse a reference to the “window”, but it is important to be careful. As theatre historians warn us, it is a matter of formulating hypotheses, without ever claiming certainties. However, if the analysis I wish to propose cannot, for lack of proof, rest on what exactly happened during the performance of the comedy at Salisbury Court, it can still rest on what we may assume the author would have liked, since he clearly favoured the published version over the staged one – “I thought good all should be inserted according to the allowed original”. Although Brome’s œuvre teems with examples of plays-within-plays, The Antipodes is the only comedy in which the stage is explicitly referred to as such:
BYPLAY. […] It will be possible For him to think he is in the Antipodes Indeed, when he is on the stage among us, (II.i.260)
At this point in the play, Brome’s dramaturgy is self-referential and the very statement of theatricality also exposes its artificiality. The character reminds us that the journey to the Antipodes which is going to follow is merely an artifice, accomplished by means of a play. The characters won’t leave Letoy’s house, which is, as Blaze suggests, “an amphitheatre / Of exercise and pleasure” (I.ii.115). If, as Anthony Parr proposes in his edition of the play, this house is not an amphitheatre stricto sensu, “The word was associated with classical arenas and places of contest, but its technical use of ‘double theatre’ is used here figuratively 24 to suggest the variety of entertainment on offer”, it is undeniably a theatre, a place where
22 See for example Eleanor Clare Collins, “Richard Brome and the Salisbury Court Contract”, Richard Brome Online (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome, 17 January 2010), §1-27. 23 Stevens classifies the plays of the period in three categories (A, B, C), according to whether or not they help to reveal the staging practices used in their first production. “The plays of Group C, the least conclusive among our evidence, were either presented at another theatre or show evidence of revision before printing.” See David Stevens, “The Staging of Plays at the Salisbury Court Theatre, 1630-1642”, Theatre Journal, 31, 1979, p. 511- 525. 24 Richard Brome, The Antipodes, Three Renaissance Travel Plays [1995], ed. Anthony Parr, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999, n. 52, p. 235.
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one watches a performance. The dramatic location merges with the stage space.25 For his plot, Brome has found the ideal location, which needs no special scenery, since it is already completely there and he loses no time in letting the action and the characters stray beyond it to establish the full extent of the theatrical space, beginning with Peregrine himself, who discovers, without actually recognising it as such, the actors’ tiring-house. Byplay, one of Letoy’s actors announces to Letoy and the patient’s family, who are “not alone / Spectators, but […] actors” (II.i.237), that the young madman has broken into the tiring-house:
BYPLAY. He has got into our tiring house amongst us, And ta’en a strict survey of all our properties, (III.i.552)
This transgression of locations provokes a transformation that is essential for Peregrine. As though the prop were in search of a new actor, Peregrine purloins a diadem and puts it on his head, proclaiming himself at once King of the Antipodes. For obvious technical reasons, this intrusion cannot be shown to the audience since the tiring-house is situated out of sight, behind the façade of the frons scenae.26 It is there that the actors, ordinary people, transform themselves into characters; it is there as well that Peregrine, this ordinary character, transforms himself in turn, and despite himself, into an actor. In the rest of the comedy, Brome continues to make full use of the architectural resources of the theatre. When Peregrine, having become King of the Antipodes, prepares to leave the stage with his courtiers in order to celebrate his new status, Letoy suggests to Joyless and Diana, who have been watching, and commenting on the embedded play since it began, that they leave the stage:
LETOY. He must not see You yet; I have provided otherwise For both you in my chamber; and from thence We’ll at a window27 see the rest o’th’play Or if you needs, sir, will stay here, you may. (III.i.667)
In his 2010 online edition of the play, Richard Cave notes:
No records concerning the interior theatre architecture of the Salisbury Court Playhouse are extant but surviving drawings by Inigo Jones (c.1616)28 for the conversion of an indoor
25 The following works have helped me reflect upon notions to do with space and the stage in relation to the e play-within-the play. Georges Forestier, Le Théâtre dans le théâtre sur la scène française du XVII siècle (1981), Genève, Droz, 1996, and Patrice Pavis, Dictionnaire du théâtre, Paris, Armand Colin, 2002, p. 118-123. 26 For instance see Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, p. 151-158, p. 197-203. 27 Click on asterisk placed after window at III.i.667, The Antipodes, which also includes a detailed analysis of what the word implies and the way in which the required theatrical space was probably used. 28 According to drawings (7B et 7C) of an indoor playhouse, “probably” that of the Cockpit Theatre, found at Worcester College Oxford, which were initially attributed to Inigo Jones in 1616, but recently attributed to his student, John Webb (See Jon Greenfield and Peter Mc Curdy “Practical evidence for a reimagined indoor Jacobean theatre”, Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse, ed. Andrew Gurr et Farah Karim-Cooper, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 32-64, p. 35). The dimensions of the stage are as follows: “The stage area is 23 feet 6 inches (7.2 metres) by 15 feet (4.6 metres), which cannot have been very different from the Blackfriars dimensions. It is 4 feet (1.2 metres) high, and the tiring-house behind it 10 feet (3 metres) in depth running the whole breadth of the playhouse at the squared end”. See Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, p. 190-215.
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playhouse, which are thought generally to be for The Phoenix or Cockpit in Drury Lane, show an elaborate and sizeable window-like opening above the central stage entrance. A similar upper, small, centrally placed playing area is also to be seen in John Webb’s designs (c.1629) for the Cockpit-at-Court theatre in Whitehall. Since Brome wrote in expectation that his play would be performed at the Cockpit in Drury Lane by Beeston’s company, one could suppose that he had the architectural provisions of that theatre in mind when devising the next act of the play, where the onstage audience look down on the play-within-the-play. It is also possible that the interior of the Salisbury Court playhouse shared a number of features with the Cockpit in terms of its layout, including perhaps a centrally situated, upper 29 acting level.
The fictional spectators, who have occupied an area of the stage up until the end of act III, will as of act IV claim another part of the theatre, from which they will continue to watch the embedded play. However, it is not until after act IV scene i that a stage direction clarifies this: “LETOY, DIANA [and] JOYLESS, appear above” (IV.i.856). For a significant amount of time, then, the secondary play has been performed without any fictional spectators – which would imply that it wasn’t one. However, a statement by Diana contradicts this new hypothesis, since she comments upon Byplay’s performance – “Diana. Never was such an actor as Extempore!” (IV.i.859) – and he had made his entrance at IV.i.819 – “Ent[er] […] BYPLAY like a statesman”. In fact, the stage direction indicates that the fictional spectators are going to speak, and thus be noticed by the real audience, their presence up until then having been, in all probability, implicit. When he evoked “the tiring house” in act III, Brome deliberately confused the real location and the fictional space. From now on, though, it is a different story. The gallery, a space located above the main stage of the real theatre, becomes Letoy’s “chamber”. As Cave suggests, “This entrance is on the upper stage or gallery, as at the “window” described by Letoy at the close of the previous act: “We’ll at a window see the rest o’ th’ play”.30 It is no longer a deliberate confusion, but rather a substitution, the author appropriating the architectural resources of the theatrical space. In A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642, the window is defined as follows:
Window cited in the directions of roughly thirty-five plays, almost always to designate a location above/aloft; with no reliable external evidence of actual windows on the upper level this is best considered a fictional term for a dialogue-created location or perhaps an implicit as (if) situation […].31
In act IV of The Antipodes, the three characters who have changed space are no longer at the level of the main stage, thus liberating playing space that the inner play can occupy. If, as already seen, Brome often situated the action of other plays above the main stage, this is the only time that he did so as part of an embedded play – which raises once again the question of how to define its process. In fact, placed above, upstage and behind a window, the fictional spectators still change their status. A change of relationship is in effect: as
29 See footnote 27, i.e., click on asterisk placed after window at III.i.667, The Antipodes. 30 Click on asterisk placed after above at IV.i.856, The Antipodes. 31 Dessen and Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642, p. 251.
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Richard Cave notes, they “look down”,32 but from behind, seeing the fictional actors from the rear and thus facing the real spectators. Placed behind Peregrine, they are less visible. They see without being seen – which is the aim, even if this warning is belated: “He must not see you yet”.33 Moreover, Richard Cave adds that
By removing the onstage spectators to that upper, “framed” space, Brome is indicating that they should now be viewed as altogether more private than previously, though they are actually placed in a manner that renders them more conspicuous to the theatre audience’s view.34
Moreover, the topographical separation between above and below paradoxically underlines the existence and the process of a play-within-a-play. Above, there is a fictional audience ; below, there are the fictional actors who perform. With the exception of the two “discovery scenes” in A Jovial Crew,35 in all of Brome’s other plays in which the process of a play-within-a-play intervenes, one part of the stage is transformed into an auditorium, simply because the onlooking characters are seated there, and another into a fictional stage, simply because the “actors” perform there. The boundary, which is usually not physically apparent, remains purely symbolic. Nevertheless, if the fictional spectators have been placed so that their presence does not disturb the performance of the embedded play, they retain all the same, through the window, which is still very much a part of the outer play, an undeniable capacity to be a nuisance, as this exchange between the youthful Diana and her excessively jealous husband Joyless demonstrates:
DIANA. Never was such an actor as Extempore! JOYLESS. You were best to fly out of the window to him. DIANA. Methinks I am even light enough to do it. JOYLESS. I could find in my heart to quoit thee at him. DIANA. So he would catch me in his arms, I cared not. LETOY. Peace both of you, or you'll spoil all. (IV.i.859-864)
It is, however, soon Letoy himself who, after having condemned the verbiage of Diana and Joyless, expresses the greatest danger to the performance of “the Antipodes”. Impatiently, from the gallery, the master of ceremonies addresses his actor, who is playing a man of state. From the aforementioned window, he reproaches him for having forgotten his instructions:
32 Click on asterisk placed after window at III.i.667, The Antipodes, which also includes a detailed explanation of what the interior of the Salisbury Court may have looked like, including the spatial possibilities the theatre offered. 33 Writing about the Cockpit Theatre back in 1965, T. J. King explains: “[…] the area above and the discovery space should be considered as a unit auxiliary to the main acting area […]” See T. J. King, “Staging of Plays at the Phoenix in Drury Lane, 1617-1642”, Theatre Notebook, n° 19, 1965, p. 153. David Stevens also uses the terms “auxiliary space”. See David Stevens, “The Staging of Plays at the Salisbury Court Theatre, 1630-1642”, p. 519. As the Oxford English Dictionary indicates, the term auxiliary – from the Latin auxiliārius, auxilium meaning help – seems particularly appropriate here. In fact, it is used to hide offstage those characters whose presence on it would threaten the happy dénouement of the play. 34 Click on asterisk placed after window at III.i.667, The Antipodes. 35 See “He opens the scene; the beggars are discovered in their postures; then they issue forth; and last the PATRICO” (I.i.80-81) and “RANDALL opens the scene: the beggars discovered at their feast. After they have scrambled a while at their victuals, this song” (II.ii.309), A Jovial Crew.
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LETOY. Ha’ you forgotten (puppy) my instructions Touching his subjects and his marriage? BYPLAY. I have all now, my lord. PEREGRINE. What voice was that? (IV.i.874-876) Through Byplay’s improvised36 reply, Brome once more experiments with space by installing Diana, Joyless and Letoy in the gallery. Metaphorically, the spatial distance brought into play since the start of act IV is an echo of the topos of the theatrum mundi, which is omnipresent in Brome’s dramaturgy. Letoy, watching from above what is happening below at his instigation, occupies the privileged position of a god or demiurge. This configuration, which reinforces the theme of the world as a theatre, is all the more striking in that its leading actor, Peregrine, is unaware that he is being observed and does not even realise that he is acting. Finding himself in the delicate position of having to make up for Letoy’s blunder, which threatens to shatter the illusion of the imaginary location, the fictional actor exploits the spatial relationship by passing off his master’s voice as that of a god – not without irony:
BYPLAY. A voice out of the clouds that doth applaud Your highness’ welcome to your subjects’ loves. […] A voice that doth inform me of the tidings, Spread through your kingdom, of your great arrival; And of the general joy your people bring To celebrate the welcome of their king. Shouts within. (IV.i.877, 879) The text never specifies exactly where the embedded action takes place. The imaginary location, Anti-London, could be as vast as the one that inspires it, London. “Out of the clouds” offers a sudden indication, implying that the action unfolding in the Antipodes takes place outside, in the open air. The worst thus having been narrowly avoided, Letoy, fearing that Byplay’s explanation will complicate matters further, decides to take things in hand himself. The master of ceremonies reintegrates himself physically on stage. Leaving Joyless and Diana alone in the gallery, Letoy henceforth takes on another role of master of the revels, not hesitating to involve himself in the action of the embedded play, in order to lead it to its conclusion – thereby curing Peregrine:
LETOY. So, now he’s in. Sit still, I must go down And set out things in order. Ex[its]. (IV.i.878) Then
[…] LETOY enters and mingles with the rest, and seems to instruct them all. (IV.i.879) Finally, once the performance of “the Antipodes” has concluded, Letoy asks Joyless and Diana to come down and join him again onstage:
[…] as LETOY directs. LETOY stays.
36 For the importance of the theme of improvisation in this play see Karen Kettnich, “‘Now mark that fellow; he speaks Extempore’: Scripted Improvisation in The Antipodes”, Early Theatre, vol. 10, n°2, 2007, p. 129-139, and Richard Cave, “Improvisation” in “The Antipodes. Critical Introduction”, Brome, The Antipodes, 2010, §23-25.
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Balcony Scenes/Scènes de balcon ARRÊT SUR SCÈNE/SCENE FOCUS 6 (2017)
LETOY. So, so, so, so. This yet may prove a cure. DIANA. See my lord now is acting by himself. LETOY. And Letoy’s wit cried up triumphant. Ho! Come, Master Joyless and your wife, come down Quickly, your parts are next. […] (IV.i.899-902)
Then: […] JOYLESS [and] DIANA enter. (IV.i.908). These two extracts show that the actors had little time to return to the stage once the characters they were playing had left the gallery. As Jean MacIntyre observes about shows performed at Whitefriars Playhouse, another indoor theatre built in about 1605, “It seems to have taken at least a minute for actors to go between the above and the main stage. In Ram Alley twenty lines of dialogue occur between Boucher's exit below and his re-entry above.”37 In The Antipodes, the time is even less. Barely a dozen lines separate Letoy’s request that Diana and Joyless “come down” from the “window”.
* Though I disagree with Michael Leslie’s assessment of Brome as being “no great poet”,38 I fully agree with him when he writes that the dramatist’s “consciousness of rhythm and its importance in framing an audience’s understanding and responsiveness are impressive”.39 Of course, this is not only true of Brome. Like his predecessors and contemporaries, Brome mastered all the available tools of his trade, in other words, the theatres he wrote for, and whose architectural constraints he made full use of, not only in his plays, but also in the-plays-within-his-plays. “Acting above” is anything but a simplistic and hackneyed use of space. From the singing maidens standing (disguised or not), with a song to sing and lute in hand, on the balconies of 1630s’ London or Venice, to more specifically, the space “above” in the inner play “the Antipodes”, I believe Brome accomplishes a highly sophisticated interaction of theatrical, dramatic and stage space and in doing so clearly reveals a remarkable facet of his dramaturgy. “Acting above” also allows the playwright to show his stagecraft at its best, as well as his taste for theatricality and metadrama (there are frequent references to the language of theatre throughout the canon, for disguise and role-play (one thinks of Dorcas in The Weeding of Covent Garden and Victoria in The Novella disguised as courtesans), for props (the glass and lute) and for music (the songs), in sum all the things that the theatre is made of and that a professional dramatist like Brome knew how to make skilful use of in his plays.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BROME, R, The Antipodes, Three Renaissance Travel Plays [1995], ed. Anthony Parr, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999. ——, Richard, Richard Brome Online, Modern Texts, ed. Richard Cave, 2010, https://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome/home.jsp: The Northern Lass, ed. J. Sanders, The Novella, ed. R. Cave, The Weeding of Covent Garden, ed. M. Leslie, The Late Lancashire Witches, ed. H. Ostovich, The Antipodes, ed. R. Cave and A Jovial Crew, or The Merry Beggars, ed. H. Ostovich, 2010 (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome, 17 January 2010).
37 Jean MacIntyre, “Production Resources at the Whitefriars Playhouse, 1609-1612”, Early Modern Literary Studies, 2:3, 1996, 2. 1-35, §8 and 9. 38 Leslie, “The Weeding of Covent Garden. Critical Introduction”, Brome, 2010, §8. 39 Leslie, “The Weeding of Covent Garden. Critical Introduction”, Brome, 2010, §8.
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A. EFSTATHIOU-LAVABRE, Acting “above” in Richard Brome’s comedies
CAVE, Richard, “The Antipodes. Textual essay”, The Antipodes in Richard Brome Online, Modern Texts, ed. Richard Cave, 2010, https://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome/home.jsp. DAVIS, Joe Lee, The Sons of Ben: Jonsonian Comedy in Caroline England, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1967. DESSEN, Alan C. and THOMSON, Leslie, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999. FITZPATRICK, Tim, Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2011. e FORESTIER, Georges, Le Théâtre dans le théâtre sur la scène française du XVII siècle (1981) Genève, Droz, 1996. GREENFIELD, Jon, and MC CURDY, Peter, “Practical Evidence for a Reimagined Indoor Jacobean Theatre”, Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse, ed. Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 32-64. th GURR, Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, 4 ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009 (2013). ICHIKAWA, Mariko, The Shakespearean Stage Space, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015. KETTNICH, Karen, “‘Now mark that fellow; he speaks Extempore’: Scripted Improvisation in The Antipodes”, Early Theatre, vol. 10, n°. 2, 2007, p. 129-139. KING, T. J., “Staging of Plays at the Phoenix in Drury Lane, 1617-1642”, Theatre Notebook, 19, 1965, p. 146-166. LESLIE, Michael, “The Weeding of Covent Garden. Critical Introduction”, The Weeding of Covent Garden in Richard Brome Online, Modern Texts, ed. Richard Cave, 2010, https://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome/home.jsp. LOWE, Eleanor, “Onstage and Offstage Drama: New approaches to Richard Brome”, Early Theatre 10.2, 2007, p. 109-116. MACINTYRE, Jean, “Production Resources at the Whitefriars Playhouse, 1609-1612”, Early Modern Literary Studies, 2:3, 1996, 2.1-35. PAVIS, Patrice, Dictionnaire du théâtre, Paris, Armand Colin, 2002. STEGGLE, Matthew, Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004. STEVENS, David, “The Staging of Plays at the Salisbury Court Theatre, 1630-1642”, Theatre Journal 31, 1979, p. 511-525. VENET, Gisèle, « Introduction », in William Shakespeare, Tragédies, Œuvres complètes, t. 1, ed. Jean-Michel Déprats, Paris, Gallimard, 2002, p. clxxxi. ZUCKER, Adam, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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