TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE THE ROAD NOT TAKEN 1 CHAPTER 1 IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE SPACE 3 1.1 Fashion, refashion and Brome 3 1.2 Poor he came into the world and poor went out 8 1.3 The corpus 15 1.4 The lost plays 18 1.5 Critical reception 19 1.6 My space 26 CHAPTER 2 STAGING A PRESENCE WITHOUT A PRESENCE 33 2.1 The plot 34 2.2 Critical approaches 34 2.3 Social dynamics and spatial interaction 38 2.4 The citizen world 41 2.5 Life at court 46 2.6 The Presence scene: an example of spatial interaction 50 2.7 The geography of the play 55 2.8 Disguising identity 65 CHAPTER 3 EATING AND DRINKING IN EARLY MODERN LONDON 71 3.1 The different faces of Covent Garden 73 3.1.1 The plot 76 3.1.2 Critical approaches 77 3.1.3 The place within the play 78 3.1.4 Once upon a time there were the taverns 82 3.1.5 Inside the Goat Tavern 87 3.1.6 Inside the Paris Tavern 95 3.2 The devil looks ten times worse with a white face 100 3.2.1 Critical approaches 100 3.2.2 The plot 103 3.2.3 The history of the Devil Tavern 104 3.2.4 The place within the play 108 3.2.5 Introduction to the Devil Tavern 111 3.2.6 Inside the Devil Tavern (III, 2) 113 3.2.7 Inside the inn (V, 1) 116 3.3 The Sparagus Garden 118 3.3.1 The plot 119 3.3.2 The title and its contradictions 120 3.3.3. The history of the garden 123 3.3.4 Strategies: the place and its produce 125 3.3.5 A brief history of the asparagus 127 3.3.6 Act III: the garden on stage 131 CHAPTER IV THE TRIUMPH OF THE LAW 140 4.1 History of the Temple Walks 142 4.2 The Demoiselle: the world is turned quite upside down 145 4.3 The plot 146 4.4 The characters 147 4.5 Critical approaches 149 4. 6 The space within the play 150 4.6.1 Act I, 1: The law of the usurer 151 4.6.2 Act I, 2: The law of the Justice of the Peace 155 4.6.3 The Temple Walks onstage 156 4.6.4 Act II in the Temple Walks 157 4.6.5 Act IV in the Temple Walks 163 4.6.6 The ordinary onstage (III, 1; V, 1) 166 4.7 The lawless world of A Mad Couple Well Matched 169 4. 8 The plot 169 4. 9 Critical approaches 171 4.10 The history of Ram Alley 172 4.11 The space in the play 174 4.12 Ram Alley in the play 175 CONCLUSIONS Some conclusions 181 APPENDIX A personal experience 189 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………. 192 Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………….……… 206 PREFACE THE ROAD NOT TAKEN Writing about Richard Brome has been a challenge from many points of view since he represented for centuries what Robert Frost called “the road not taken.”1 Numerous scholars decided to privilege different paths so that this ‘critical road’ was ‘less travelled by.’ Actually, according to a cursory search of the MLA International Bibliography, the entries concerning Brome in its index of books, chapters, articles, and dissertations between 1884 and 2010 are only ninety-two. On the other hand, a similar research about Shakespeare returns 36,464 entries, “2,573 entries on Jonson, 1,785 entries on Christopher Marlowe, and 773 entries on Thomas Middleton.”2 Even the scholars who chose to go on this journey took Brome into consideration only for his historic interest more than for an intrinsic one: the playwright was undeservedly and simplistically labeled as a minor writer in Ben Jonson’s shadow, and suffered from the general prejudice against the Caroline period, conceived as a forgettable age of transition prior to the Restoration. This work lies in the field of a general revaluation of Brome and of his historical period which began in the 1980s after Martin Butler’s seminal book Theatre and Crisis (1984).3 Its global resonance led the way to a new wave of interest which started from the Anglo-American scholarship and spread all over the world through new studies on Brome (like the works of Julie Sanders and Matthew Steggle in England or Athena Efstathiou- Lavabre in France, to name just a few) and the staging of some of his plays such as The City Wit and The Antipodes which took the dramatist from London to Australia passing through Santa Cruz.4 In 2010, Brome’s plays had a worldwide diffusion owing to the project at Royal Holloway (University of London),5 the first online critical edition of his works since the last of 1873. Professor Richard Allen Cave guided a panel of international scholars in 1 Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose & Plays, (eds) Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson, New York: Literary Classics of the United States, c1995. 2 Brett D. Hirsch, “Bringing Richard Brome Online,” Early Theatre, Vol. 13.1, 2010, pp. 137-153, p. 138. 3 Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 4 Actually The Antipodes had some modern performances at the Globe Theatre (2000), Santa Cruz (2005) and Ballarat, Australia (2008). 5 Richard Brome Online (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome, 10 January 2010), ISBN 978-0-9557876-1-4. I will be describing the features of the edition later in the chapter (pp. 23-24). 1 the editing of the whole corpus of Brome’s plays paving the way to a real rebirth of Richard Brome as a man of theatre. My work is an Italian attempt to answer T. S. Eliot’s claim that “Brome deserves to be more read than he is, and first to be more accessible than he is.”6 Actually, despite the vivacity of recent studies and the freshness of the new approaches, as well as the charm of ‘new’ plays on stage, the critical revolution started in the 1980s in Britain and America seems to have involved Italian criticism only very marginally since no relevant monographic studies have been devoted to Brome. Moreover, the dominant approach in Italian criticism is still based mainly on traditional interpretations so that the playwright was given a restricted space in hand-books and in the histories of British Theatre in Italian.7 Anna Anzi8 and Daniela Guardamagna seem to mark the importance of Brome as a Caroline playwright, yet their critical attention was devoted to his major plays such as A Jovial Crew and The Antipodes which belong to the end of his dramatic production. The exception is the Italian scholar Anton Ranieri-Parra who made an Italian translation of A Mad Couple Well Matched in 2003 and wrote a monographic introductory study on Brome which explores the main aspects of his literary production without giving a new critical contribution.9 Therefore, working on Brome here in Italy has been like penetrating into an unknown region and taking the road ‘less travelled’ but what I found was both rewarding and fascinating and, as Frost would say, ‘that has made all the difference.’ 6 Thomas S. Eliot, (1920) The Sacred Wood, Essays on Poetry and Criticism, London: Methuen, 1983, p. 21. 7 In Franco Marenco’s Storia della civiltà letteraria inglese, only a three-page section is devoted to John Ford and Richard Brome. See Franco Marenco (ed), Storia della civiltà letteraria inglese, vol. Il teatro del primo Seicento, Torino: Utet, 1996, pp. 804-806. 8 Anna Anzi, Storia del teatro inglese dalle origini al 1660, Torino: Einaudi, 1997; Anna Anzi, Daniela Guardamagna, Il teatro Giacomiano e Carolino, Roma: Carocci, 2002. 9 I will be discussing his contribution later in the chapter (pp. 23-24). 9 See the stage history (pp. 16-18). 2 CHAPTER 1 IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE SPACE 1.1 Fashion, refashion and Brome The title of the dissertation “Refashioning the Self in Richard Brome’s Theatre” immediately suggests the critical perspective through the reference to Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), a milestone in the history of criticism and a programmatic book of “New Historicism.”10 It revolves around the concept of ‘fashion,’ a verb provided with a variety of meanings: firstly, shaping ex novo, “to give fashion or shape to; to form, mould (either a material or immaterial object)” (OED 1; 1611 - Bible Job xxxi.15 “Did not one fashion vs in the wombe?”); secondly, “transforming or modifying something already existent” (OED 4; 1601 - Shakespeare Julius Caesar II.i.220 “Send him but hither, and Ile fashion him;” finally, “counterfeiting” (4b; 1599 - Shakespeare Hen. V, I.ii.14 “God forbid. That you should fashion, wrest, or bow your reading.”) As Greenblatt noticed, in the 16th century the verb ‘fashion’ came “into wide currency as a way of designating the forming of the self”11 according to a set of social standards: “a manipulable, artful process”12 which involves a code of behaviour, a way of dressing, speaking and relating to other people. Greenblatt selected six writers who manifested, each in a different way, peculiar aspects of self-fashioning, a particular sensitivity to the construction of identity owing to the experience of a profound personal mobility: Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, William Tyndale, Edmund Spenser and Thomas Wyatt. Surprisingly, he does not include Jonson in his list. The gap represented by the significant and strange absence of Ben Jonson has been filled in by the collection of essays edited by Julie Sanders 10 New Historicism is a critical movement which developed in the 1980s through the work of the scholar Stephen Greenblatt and gained global influence in the 1990s.