The Antipodes
The Antipodes is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy written by Richard Brome c. 1640. Many critics have ranked The Antipodes as "his best play...Brome's masterpiece," and one of the best Caroline comedies — "gay, imaginative, and spirited...;" "the most sophisticated and ingenious of Brome's satires." Brome's play is "a funhouse mirror" in which the audience members could "view the nature of their society."
Date, performance, publication
The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 19 March 1640, and printed later that year in a quarto printed by John Okes for the bookseller Francis Constable — "to be sold at his shops in King Street at the sign of the Goat, and in Westminster Hall." The title page of this first edition states that the play was acted in 1638 by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Salisbury Court Theatre, the regular troupe and venue for Brome's dramas from 1637 on. In a note addressed to the Courteous Reader at the end of the play's text, Brome writes that the play was originally intended for William Beeston's company at the Cockpit Theatre, which suggests that the play was written sometime around 1636.In that first edition, Brome dedicated the play to his patron, William Seymour, 2nd Duke of Somerset. At around the same time, Brome sent a manuscript of his recent play The English Moor to the Duke, likewise dedicated to Somerset.
The play was revived during the Restoration era; Samuel Pepys saw it performed on 26 August 1661.
Cast list
In 2012, Dr. Joshua McEvilla discovered a cast list of a 1638 staging of The Antipodes as performed by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Salisbury Court theatre. The list appears as handwritten marginalia in a copy of the 1640 edition previously owned by Dr. Hugh Selbourne. The copy was put up for auction by David Selbourne at Bonhams, where it was sold to an anonymous buyer for £25,000. It is currently held by Sokol Books, Mayfair, London, with a list price of £75,000.
Blaze, an Herauld Painter. Sumner
Joylesse, an old Country Gentleman. Perkins
Hughball, a Doctor of Physicke. Wintersall
Barbara, Wife to Blaze. Ambrose
Martha, Wife to Perigrine. Chamberlain
Letoy, a Phantasticke Lord. Shirlocke
Quaylpipe, his Curate. Turner
Perigrine, sonne to Joylesse. May
Diana, wife to Joylesse. Watt
By-play, a conceited servant to Letoy. Turner
Trulocke, a close friend to Letoy. Yong
Followers of the Lord Letoyes, who are Actors in the By-play.
Read
Grevill
Cartwright h
Style
No critic has ever claimed that Brome was a great dramatic poet or a truly distinctive literary stylist; his verse and prose are generally nothing more than functional, and certainly lack the vivid eloquence of Shakespeare and the intellectual knottiness of his idol Jonson. In The Antipodes, however, the richness of Brome's material appears to inspire him to an imaginative quality that he rarely achieves elsewhere — as in this passage from Act I scene vi, on Sir John Mandeville and the talking trees of the Antipodes:Synopsis
The play's plot is complex and intricate, even by the standards of Brome. The opening scene shows the herald painter Anthony Blaze welcoming Master Joyless to London from the country. Joyless is oppressed by a set of personal problems. He is an older man, a former widower who has married a second wife, a seventeen-year-old woman named Diana — toward whom he is deeply possessive and jealous, fearing her potential infidelity. His son Peregrine has from his youth been obsessed with the literature of travel and voyaging, an obsession that is now so strong that it dominates his life, even to the point of preventing him from consummating his three-year-old marriage to his wife Martha — a circumstance that has left her profoundly unhappy, and almost as psychologically disturbed as her husband.Blaze has a potential solution for all of the Joyless family's problems, in the treatments of a physician called Doctor Hughball, and the sponsorship of a mysterious nobleman named Letoy. Hughball had treated many disturbed Londoners successfully — even curing Blaze himself of his own suspicions of his wife's fidelity. His wife, Barbara Blaze, becomes an active participant in the eventual cure of the Joylesses, helping to manage Martha Joyless in particular.
Letoy is a wealthy aristocrat who pursues an odd lifestyle: he dresses plainly, yet furnishes his servants in rich clothes — the opposite of what is standard for noblemen of Brome's era. He also keeps a troupe of players, who he and the Doctor employ in their treatment of psychologically distressed individuals. The Doctor administers a powerful sleeping potion to Peregrine Joyless, and together with Master Joyless and his wife Diana they go to Letoy's country estate. There, Peregrine is told upon waking that he has travelled to the Antipodes, the country directly opposite England on the other side of the globe. Letoy's players involve Peregrine in a pageant of life in "Anti-London," as a means of curing his obsession. In the process, Joyless and his wife are treated as well, unwittingly to them.
Most of the play's middle and later portions are taken up by a play within a play, in which the Doctor, Blaze, and the actors, all under Letoy's direction, fool Peregrine into believing that he is actually in the Antipodes. The play goes anything but smoothly, as Martha attempts to interrupt, as Joyless and Diana comment caustically from the vantage point of their own unhappy marriage, and as Peregrine turns to whole enterprise his own way; the actors have to improvise and extemporize, and sometimes lose their way. But Letoy manages to direct the whole show toward the outcome he envisions.
In the metatheatre of the play within the play, Brome presents the society of "Anti-London" as a distorted mirror-image of English society of his day. In Brome's Anti-London, lawyers are poor and shabbily dressed, while poets are rich and gaudy; a lawyer refuses all fees, until a female client beats him into accepting her money. A gallant begs from a beggar, so that he can buy his grandmother ballads and "Love-pamphlets," and "Hobby-horses and rattles for my grandfather." A maiden tries to pick up a gallant in the street, and when he refuses her she kicks him. Old men are sent to school by their adult children, and play hooky when they can. Servants rule their masters. Gentlemen talk and behave as crudely as the lowest of common laborers, while watermen and carmen comport themselves with grace and gentility.
The play goes somewhat awry when Peregrine wanders into the players' "tiring house" and finds their properties. Thinking he's in "some enchanted castle," he slaughters their stage "Monsters, giants, furies, beasts, and bugbears,"
By right of conquest, Peregrine crowns himself king of the Antipodes, with the players' pasteboard crown and sword of lath. Letoy, however, turns this unforeseen event to his advantage: he has Byplay, the leader of the actors, set the new king the task of reforming his kingdom.
Then, the topsy-turvy aspects of the Antipodes become less humorous and more threatening. A statesman entertains several "projectors," who present him with wild speculative projects — like increasing wool production by flaying horses alive and affixing sheepskins to them. The Statesman accepts all their follies. Antipodean justice punishes the victims of disasters like fires and shipwrecks, with "Imprisonment, banishment, and sometimes death," to teach them to be more careful next time; and it rewards thieves, bawds, and even "The captain of the cut-purses" when they are old and can no longer practice their crimes. The shocked and chastened king Peregrine determines to reform and rectify his kingdom.
Peregrine is presented with his wife Martha, dressed as his queen; he is told that she is the daughter of the last king of the Antipodes, and he must mate with her to secure his crown. Under the guidance of Doctor Hughball and Barbara Blaze, the couple retire to bed and consummate their marriage. Afterwards, Peregrine is like a man come out of a dream; his sanity and mental balance are returning.
Letoy almost drives Joyless to desperation, by making the old man believe that he, Letoy, is trying to seduce Joyless's wife Diana. Instead, Joyless witnesses Diana reject the nobleman's advances. Letoy informs both of them that he is Diana's true father. Years before, he had put aside his infant daughter to be raised by his client Truelock. In his younger years, Letoy himself had suffered from the curse of irrational jealousy, and had suspected that his daughter was another man's child. Only a death-bed assurance from his wife convinced Letoy that he had been wrong. Having recovered from his own irrationality, he turned to helping others do the same.
The play concludes in a masque: Discord ushers in the personifications of Folly, Jealousy, Melancholy, and Madness, to "most untunable" music. They, however, are driven out by Harmony, who leads in Mercury, Cupid, Bacchus, and Apollo, who bring wit, love, wine, and health.
Sexuality
The subject of sex is central to the play's concerns. At least part of Joyless's problem with his wife is that he is no longer capable of satisfying her sexually; he fears that his wife will seek out another man for "some sport," since he "can make her none." Doctor Hughball asserts that in the Antipodes "the maids do woo / The bachelors," and that "The wives lie uppermost" — which Diana Joyless calls "a trim / Upside-down Antipodean trick indeed."Martha Joyless is a child bride, a "poor piece of innocence" who has been kept ignorant of sexuality; she longs desperately for a baby, but doesn't quite know how to get one. She weeps as she complains of her husband Peregrine that
Barbara Blaze calls Martha's enforced married chastity "monstrous." Martha asks Barbara "How came you by your babies?" and wants to be shown the mechanics of sex. Martha says that "A wanton maid" once kissed and fondled her — a franker indication of lesbian activity than plays of English Renaissance theatre usually provide.
Before he consummates his marriage, Peregrine talks about the Gadlibriens, a people mentioned in Mandeville who have an odd sexual practice: a bridegroom always hires "Another man to couple with his bride, / To clear the dangerous passage of a maidenhead." This suggests an inhibition and fear of sexuality that goes deeper than anything derived from Peregrine's obsession with travel.
At the end of the play, Brome includes Cupid and love as an essential part of his recipe for social sanity.
Theatrics
In staging his play within a play, Letoy acts like a theatre director; he criticizes the mannerisms of the players and guides them toward a naturalistic style of acting. Brome doesn't have Letoy insist upon slavish adherence to the author's text; quite the opposite, he stresses the players' talent for improvisation when the play and its purpose demand it. Yet he censures the habits of comic actors who play to the audience for easy laughs, as "...in the days of Tarleton and Kempe, / Before the stage was purg'd from barbarism....," though this censure must be qualified, as it has far too often not been, by the Prologue's criticism of the contemporary stage.Brome also gives a vivid miniature picture of the "crude coil" of the actors squabbling over their costumes, wigs, and false beards.