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A Jovial Crew, or the Merry Beggars, is a comedy about four noble lovers who join the beggar community for a pastoral life of dance and song. Or is it? Whilst maintaining its unremitting good humour, A Jovial Crew shows that the literary depiction of beggar life, and real beggar life, are profoundly different. Daily aspects of life in the beggar world – poverty, dirt, licentiousness – come as a surprise to the well-born, who are ultimately led to question their own values. The last production mounted before theatres were closed for the English Civil War, A Jovial Crew's exploration of class, commonwealth, kinship and kingship shows an intense engagement with contemporary politics. This edition, with dedicated sections on music and language in the play, argues that A Jovial Crew also offers a nostalgic farewell to English theatre. It explores Brome's attitude to performance and print, and follows A Jovial Crew from its first, Caroline staging, to its later manifestations as a Restoration comedy, an eighteenth-century opera, and a twentieth-century proto-Marxist tragicomedy.
A Jovial Crew is a seventeenth-century comedy which depicts the imbalance between the literary portrayal of beggar life and its reality. Including detailed notes and commentary, this playtext explores the stage history and considers the music and language in the play.
Investigating representations of poverty in Tudor-Stuart England, Fat King, Lean Beggar reveals the gaps and outright contradictions in what poets, pamphleteers, government functionaries, and dramatists of the period said about beggars and vagabonds. William C. Carroll analyzes these conflicting "truths" and reveals the various aesthetic, political, and socio-economic purposes Renaissance constructions of beggary were made to serve.Carroll begins with a broad survey of both the official images and explanations of poverty and also their unsettling unofficial counterparts. This discourse defines and contains the beggar by continually linking him with his hierarchical inversion, the king. Carroll then turns his attention to the exemplary case of Nicholas Genings, perhaps the single most famous beggar of the period, whose machinations as fraudulent parasite and histrionic genius were chronicled by Thomas Harman. Carroll next assesses institutional responses to poverty by considering two hospitals for the destitute, Bridewell and Bedlam, and their role as real and symbolic places in Elizabethan drama.Fat King, Lean Beggar then focuses on dramatic inscriptions of poverty, primarily in Shakespeare's plays. Carroll's analysis of The Taming of the Shrew and The Winter's Tale links the tradition of the merry beggar to the socioeconomic forces of the day; and his reading of King Lear makes a case for the uniqueness of Edgar, the Bedlam beggar, in the history of drama. Carroll also considers later plays such as Fletcher and Massinger's Beggars' Bush and Richard Brome's Jovial Crew to show how idealizations of the beggar ironically equate him with a monarch in his supposed freedom.
Avi's treasured Newbery Honor Book now in expanded After Words edition!Thirteen-year-old Charlotte Doyle is excited to return home from her school in England to her family in Rhode Island in the summer of 1832. But when the two families she was supposed to travel with mysteriously cancel their trips, Charlotte finds herself the lone passenger on a long sea voyage with a cruel captain and a mutinous crew. Worse yet, soon after stepping aboard the ship, she becomes enmeshed in a conflict between them! What begins as an eagerly anticipated ocean crossing turns into a harrowing journey, where Charlotte gains a villainous enemy . . . and is put on trial for murder!After Words material includes author Q & A, journal writing tips, and other activities that bring Charlotte's world to life!
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline comedy, covering both public and private theatres, emphasizing the eclectic, experimental nature of this comedy--its departures from the mainstream New Comedy tradition and its searching, witty analysis of social and personal relations in court, city and country. In his close analysis of some of the richest comedies of the period, Alexander Leggatt makes some unexpected connections between them. The reader is given a comprehensive picture of English comedy in one of its most creative periods.
This study of Caroline Drama concentrates on the public theatre playwriting of Philip Massinger, John Ford, James Shirley and Richard Brome between 1625 and 1642. Setting their plays within a social and political context, Julie Sanders reveals their concern with issues of community and hierarchy in the decades leading up to the English Civil Wars.
Richard Brome was the leading comic playwright of 1630s London. Starting his career as a manservant to Ben Jonson, he wrote a string of highly successful comedies which were influential in British theatre long after Brome's own playwriting career was cut short by the closure of the theatres in 1642.This book offers the first full-length chronological account of Brome's life and works, drawing on a wide range of recently rediscovered manuscript sources. Each of the surviving plays is discussed in relation to its social and political context, and its sense of place. A final chapter reviews Brome's enduring stageworthiness into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the most recent Brome revivals.
In this, the last book published during his lifetime, renowned historian of the English Revolution Christopher Hill uses the literary culture of the seventeenth century to explore the immense social changes of the period as well as the expressions of liberty, the law and the hero-worship of the outlaw defiance. As well as chapters on gypsies and vagabonds, Hill analyzes class, religion and the shift away from the importance of the church after the Reformation. Liberty against the Law is a late classic of Hill's work and essential reading for anyone interested in the history and politics of the seventeenth-century.
