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After exhibiting Brome's faults as a versifier, it is only fair to quote a few passages of his best work. The following is from the Sparagus Garden (3. 5, p. 163):

You dare not sir blaspheme the virtuous use
Of sacred Poetry, nor the fame traduce

Of Poets, who not alone immortal be,

But can give others immortality.

Poets that can men into stars translate,

And hurle men down under the feet of Fate:
Twas not Achilles sword, but Homers pen,
That made brave Hector dye the best of men :
And if that powerful Homer likewise wou'd,
Hellen had beene a hagge, and Troy had stood.

Poets they are the life and death of things,

Queens give them honour, for the greatest Kings
Have bin their subjects.

Brome's best verse is to be found in the Queen's Exchange. The Shakespearian influence shown in situations and characters may also be felt occasionally in the verse. I quote two of the most effective passages:

At the same place again?

If there be place, or I know any thing,
How is my willingness in search deluded?

It is the Wood that rings with my complaint,
And mocking Echo makes her merry with it.
Curs'd be thy babling and mayst thou become
A sport for wanton boys in thy fond answers,
Or stay, perhaps it was some gentle Spirit
Hovering i' th' air, that saw his flight to Heaven,
And would direct me thither after him.

Good reason, leave me not, but give me leave
A little to consider nearer home;

Say his diviner part be taken up

To those celestial joys, where blessed ones
Find their inheritance of immorality.

(2. 3, p. 496.)

Ha! Do I hear or dream? is this a sound,

Or is it but my fancy? 'Tis the music,

The music of the Spheres that do applaud

My purpose of proceeding to the King.

I'l on; but stay; how ? What a strange benummednesse
Assails and siezes my exterior parts ?

And what a Chaos of confused thoughts

Does my imagination labour with ?

Till all have wrought themselves into a lump
Of heaviness, that falls upon mine eyes

So ponderously that it bows down my head,
Begins to curb the motion of my tongue,
And lays such weight of dulness on my Senses,
That my weak knees are doubling under me.
There is some charm upon me. Come thou forth
Thou sacred Relique ! suddenly dissolve it.
I sleep with deathlesse1; for if thus I fall,
My vow falls on me, and smites me into Ruine.
But who can stand against the power of Fate?
Though we foreknow repentence comes too late.
(3. 1, p. 504.)

MORAL TONE

The ideas of decency in the seventeenth century were certainly very different from those of subsequent times. The numerous contributors to Jonsonus Virbius unite

1 A word seems to have dropped out here.

in asserting that Ben Jonson never wrote a word that might offend the chariest sense of modesty. Ben is always moral, but it would take a bold critic to call him modest. The same thing is true of most of the Jacobeans. With the Caroline dramatists there was somewhat of a weakening of the moral tone, and a slight increase in the vulgarity and indecency of the dialogue. But they surely did not have far to go in the last mentioned respect, after Bartholomew Fair. In both morality and indecency Brome reflects the tendency seen in the average plays of the reign of Charles I.1

Alexander Brome, in his preface to Five New Plays of 1653, is quite right in saying that the plays are as innocent of wrong, as full of worth,' but he is not right in the sense in which he intended the line to be understood. Extreme coarseness seems to have become a dramatic convention in the comedy of manners. Middleton and Nabbes are as great offenders against modern taste as Brome. Glapthorne and Davenant become equally foul in language, whenever their style is colloquial. Even the knight, Sir Aston Cokayne, and the clergyman, Jasper Mayne, are quite as degraded. The dramas of these men reached such a low point that Wycherley and Vanbrugh in the next reign could not descend much further. However, none of them put on the stage such unspeakable grossness as Jonson and Herrick employed in certain of their epigrams.

Though there is no difference in the indecency of language between the writers of the Caroline and those

1 Dekker and Webster's Northward Ho is not exactly a moral preachment, either. The whole atmosphere of it is foul. Every man tries to cuckold his friend. Poetic justice is meted out in the end by marrying the worst villain to a prostitute. In one scene a man is pandar to his wife.

2 Marmion's comedies are the least open to objection, on this point, of all those of the time.

of the Restoration period, there is some difference in the moral tone of their plots. Plays in which vice is made attractive and virtue ridiculous do occur in Elizabethan drama, but they are rare. The triumph of the rake, Mirabel, in Fletcher's Wild Goose Chase (1621), marks the beginning of the moral decline carried on in Shirley's Brothers (1626) and Lady of Pleasure (1636), and Brome's Mad Couple well Matched (c. 1635). In the Brothers, Luys is the counterpart of Mirabel, and in the Lady of Pleasure, the three gallants, Scentlove, Kickshaw, and Littleworth, are typical Restoration sparks, who talk openly of intrigues, and affect immorality more than they practise it. In the Mad Couple well Matched there are four intrigues, and two more suspected; the bad characters all end happily; no one suffers for his flagrant immorality; the hero is faithless, a rake, a scoundrel, and a liar.

This play, however, is unique among Brome's. In all the rest, the good wins in the end. In several of them there is a definite moral, or at least a conscience, in spite of the fact that the aim is chiefly to amuse. An instance is Fabritio's excusing himself to the audience for his conduct toward his father in the matter of the old man's amours. Again we have the highly moral speech of Diana to Letoy, who pretends to tempt her virtue, in the Antipodes (5. 2). And in the Damoiselle there is a strong moral influence, without any trace of the Restoration manner. In his satire we have perhaps the best proof that Brome worked most of the time with a correct moral standard, for he always, like his master, ridicules folly and vice, but never virtue.2

1 Novella 4. 2, p. 160.

2 See below, Influence of Jonson, p. 91.

SOURCES AND INFLUENCES

Langbaine, who did very creditable work for a pioneer in literary criticism, says of Brome: 'His plots were his own, and he forged all his various Characters from the mint of his own experience, and judgement. Tis not therefore to be expected, that I should be able to trace him, who was so excellent an imitator of his master, that he might truly pass for an original.' This easy way of dismissing the whole matter of literary influence will unfortunately not satisfy the demands of modern scholarship.

There are but two plays for which undoubted sources for the main idea of the plot have been discovered-the Jovial Crew and the Queen and the Concubine.1 The Jovial Crew has its source, as Dr. Faust has shown,2 in Middleton and Rowley's Spanish Gipsy. He proves that Brome did not go back to the original sources of his story-two novels of Cervantes, La Gitanilla and La Fuerza de la Sangre-but worked from the English play founded on them.3 The treatment of this plot shows much originality. The atmosphere, motives, characters, and conclusion are completely changed. The source of the Queen and Concubine is followed much more closely. Professor Koeppel discovers this to be Greene's Penelope's Web (1587). Brome has enlarged upon the simple 1 I do not include the Lancashire Witches, because the principal share is due to Heywood. See above, pp. 48 ff.

2 Op. cit., p. 85.

" He adds an important suggestion from the Gipsies Metamorphosed, and gives a list of six plays in which scenes of the forest and fields occur.

• Quellen und Forschungen (1897) 82. 209.

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