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either in the Stationers' Register, the Herbert Officebook, or in internal evidence,1 for doubting the statement of the title-pages.

STRUCTURE OF THE COMEDIES OF MANNERS

There is a great deal of sameness about the comedies of Brome, but this is due, not to a lack of variety in types of plot, as Dr. Faust has suggested, but rather to a repetition of the stock characters and stock situations that seem to have pleased Caroline audiences. Brome's

plots, I think, may be divided into four distinct types. The Antipodes must be put into a class by itself, for but one-third of it has a regular plot, which is the framework for the satiric masque with which the rest of the piece is taken up. Randolph's Muses Looking-Glass is the only other play I know which approaches this type.

The City Wit is a very good play, modeled on the type

1 E. H. Oliphant in 'The Problem of Authorship in Eliz. Drama' (Mod. Phil., 8. 3), says there are but three plays of Brome on which we may base a knowledge of his style with anything like absolute safety,-Antipodes, Jovial Crew, and Covent Garden Weeded, and adds that there are eleven more which may be accepted unless internal evidence cause us to doubt the external. He gives no reason for the particular selection of Covent Garden Weeded. His suggestion that the Mad Couple is probably founded on a play by Rowley, because it appears on the Cockpit list of 1639 between plays by Rowley and those of Shirley, I consider ill grounded.

2 Op. cit., p. 31.

3 Dr. Allen (op. cit., pp. 44-46) has mentioned Brome's repetition of himself as his most provoking habit. This is shown in the repeated types of character (see below p. 64); in the similarity of the disgrace-situation at the basis of the main plots of Novella, Damoiselle, and New Academy; and in the wearisome frequency of disguise as a motive in fourteen plays. Secrets of birth, false marriages, a man marrying one person when he thinks he is marrying some one else, changed letters, confused identities, timely disappearances, drunken scenes, last scene conversions, all appear just as one expects them to.'

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of the Alchemist, that is, it consists of a series of tricks1 rather than of a regularly developed intrigue. Crasy, a fallen tradesman who discovers that his relations and friends turn against him when he is in trouble, plots a revenge upon every one of them in turn by means of a series of disguises, with the help of his servant Jeremy. This gives a chance for six or seven excellent situations, almost any one of which could, like those of the Alchemist, be separated from the others. Some of them, however, again like those of the Alchemist, grow out of one another. This same sort of duping Brome has used again in the underplots of two more plays, Covent Carden Weeded and the Sparagus Garden. Here we have the fleecing of one or more country fellows by a band of London scoundrels or roarers.' As I have not come across this 'conycatching' plot in drama before the Alchemist, I suppose we may consider that play the origin of all these scenes and underplots in Cartwright's Ordinary, Marmion's Fine Companion, Nabbes' Bride, and Glapthorne's Hollander, as well as those in the two plays of Brome just mentioned.2 If these scenes were as typical of the lost plays of the period as they are of those extant, cony-catching must have been a stock situation of the late drama.

None of the other plays of Brome can be considered as merely a series of tricks. The rest of the plots are extremely complicated intrigues. But these I divide again into two classes, those made up of three, four, or five interests separable from one another, but united in the end; and those in which the various threads of the intrigue are completely involved in one another from the first act. Of the first class the Sparagus Garden is typical. This has five distinct interests, two of them wholly epi

1 Woodbridge, Studies in Jonson's Comedy, p. 60.

2 Cf. also Middleton's Fair Quarrel 4. 1 and 4, where Chough is taught to be a

roarer.'

sodic, the other three brought together into one in Act 5 The main plot is a very complicated intrigue of two lovers separated by the enmity of the father of one and the grandfather of the other. The first underplot deals with the gulling of a country clown. The second underplot concerns the tricking of Sir Arnold Cautious by his nephew and other gallants. The episodic elements are the quarrels of Brittleware, the jealous husband, with his loose wife, and the very realistic tavern-scenes at the doubtful resort known as the Sparagus Garden. The main plot is further complicated by the addition of the unnecessary Moneylacks, father of the heroine, who does much plotting on his own account. The first underplot has one Tom Hoyden, who plots against his brother Tim, the country. gull. The second underplot is loosely made to help the main plot by adding motive. There are other minor interrelations all through the play. All those interests, however, are kept practically distinct from one another until the last act. Here they are brought together with some skill. The whole effect of witnessing the play must have been much like trying to watch a five-ring circus with side-shows added!

The other plays that I put in this class are the Damoiselle, with three separate interests; the New Academy, with four; the English Moor, with four; Court Begger, with four; and Covent Garden Weeded, with three. Many of these separate interests are extremely involved in themselves—for instance, the main plots of the last two-and have much that is purely episodic besides. The lastmentioned play might be put in a class by itself, because the main plot is wholly dependent upon the exaggerated humor of one of the characters. This makes it exactly of the type of the Silent Woman. Just as Morose's exaggerated hatred of noise is the motive at the basis of that play, so Crosswill's desire to act contrary to the wishes

of everybody with whom he comes into contact causes all the plotting and counterplotting of his children and friends in Covent Garden Weeded. However, as this play has underplots of a long-lost girl turning up and marrying a reclaimed rake, a band of 'roarers' who gull two victims, and a justice who weeds Covent Garden after much experience with its noxious plants, I class it with the comedies of separate interests, like the Sparagus Garden.

The other type of intrigue which Brome has used, that in which the threads of which the plot is composed are inextricably involved in one another from the beginning to the end of the play, has two examples, the Northern Lass and the Mad Couple well Matched. For an instance of this type I will summarize the situation at the beginning of Act 4 of the Northern Lass. Sir Philip Luckless has married the Widow Fitchow, but the pair have quarreled before the consummation of the marriage. Tridewell is in love with Mistress Fitchow, and she with him. Sir Philip is in love with Constance, the Northern Lass, who has gone mad for the love of him. Mistress Fitchow wishes her marriage annulled, but will not allow Sir Philip to marry Constance if she can help it. Constance has two other suitors, Nonsense and Widgine, both strongly backed by different persons who are interested, the Widow Fitchow being the backer of her brother Widgine. Sir Paul Squelch, a justice, the guardian of Constance, wishes her to marry Nonsense. Squelch incidentally has an intrigue with Holdup, a harlot, whom, in order to conceal her, he has disguised as Constance. This is but a bare statement of the situation, without mentioning the episodic scenes and the nine additional characters to help confuse the progress of the plot. The difference between this sort of plot and that of the comedy of the type of the Sparagus Garden is at once evident. In the Mad Couple well Matched there is the same intricacy of plotting.

Here we have six or seven intrigues, in which everybody attempts somebody else's virtue, though there is not very much virtue in the entire dramatis persona. But every thread is so involved in the others that to take one would necessitate a considerable change in the rest. This variety of plot is exactly that which became most popular in the comedy of the Restoration. Even when we see it at its highest development in Congreve, it is difficult to follow, and impossible to remember long. It is interesting to note that both of Brome's comedies of this class were produced during the Restoration period with great success.1

The striking characteristic of all Brome's comedies of manners, of whatever type, is the extreme complication of their plots. They are mazes which have to be traversed a second time in order that the reader may be sure of finding his way at any point. To see them on the stage would require such close attention on the part of the audience that witnessing a play would become a serious mental effort, rather than a relaxation. And this complexity is characteristic not only of Brome, but of most of his contemporaries in the field of comedy. Brome has merely outdone them slightly in this respect, and has handled his difficult problem a little better. In Brome, English drama reached an extreme of intricacy which has never been equaled, and never can be surpassed without a hopeless entanglement of the wits of the audience. Even one of the characters in the Sparagus Garden exclaims:

Well here's such a knot now to untie

As would turn Edipus his braine awry.

Middleton summed up his own type of comedy in his introduction To the Comic Play-Readers, Venery and

1 See above, p. 30.

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