Acknowledgements

As General Editor I wish to express a profound gratitude to all members of the editorial panel (Michael Leslie, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro, Marion O’Connor, Helen Ostovich, Julie Sanders, Elizabeth Schafer and Matthew Steggle) for their integrity and whole-hearted commitment to the project, which made greater demands on their precious research time than any of us had at first envisaged. Particular thanks are owed to Eleanor Lowe, who joined the project as Post-Doctoral Fellow and quickly proved not only a first-rate scholar but also an organisational genius: her assistance at every level was impeccable. Numerous individuals have helped the project on its way: Mark Greengrass, as director of HRIOnline (Sheffield), greatly aided me in preparing the application to the AHRC; Peter Thomson kindly gave his support to the application on its submission; two unknown referees for the AHRC offered direct and indirect advice about its format and ambitions; AHRC panels in the Performing Arts and in English gave it their blessing and recommended funding, which the AHRC forthwith provided; staff at the AHRC have offered advice and agreed to reallocations of monies within the grant as the project evolved in ways not initially anticipated; David Shepherd took on Professor Greengrass’s mantle as director of HRIOnline (Sheffield), gave his unqualified support for the venture and aided the project at every stage of its coming to fruition before he left Sheffield for a new post at Keele University; Peter Hulton of Arts Archive admirably filmed the workshops with great sensitivity to what we were trying to achieve; Brian Woolland, who first invited me to write an essay on Jonson and Brome for a book he was editing (out of which the whole conception for the project grew), gave massively of his time to direct the workshops with considerable flair, invention and unflagging energy; Kim Durban, Eleanor Collins, Eleanor Rycroft and Farah Karim-Cooper responded enthusiastically (and promptly) to the invitation to contribute additional essays to the site.

Several institutions and members of staff within them have earned special thanks. At Royal Holloway, University of London, the Department of Drama and Theatre (headed at the time of the application by David Wiles) gave unqualified backing to the whole idea; colleagues have since been immensely supportive but I would especially like to express appreciation to Jenny Clark, then the departmental administrator, who helped frame the application and ensured the papers got to the right people at the right time; to Sean Brennan and his technical team for ably contributing to the workshops by regularly constructing in the Boilerhouse Theatre a suitable working environment for our endeavours; to David Thurlby and Simon Cassford for advice and support with computer issues; to two postgraduates, Laura Higgins and Kate Napier, who took time off from their own studies to assist Eleanor Lowe in organising the workshops; to David Ward of the college library, who ensured our research needs were continually met; Helen Swaine of the Finance Department, who ably managed our budget; the staff of the Research and Enterprise Department, who assisted with the completing of the application to the AHRC; and to David Sweeney, then Vice-Principal for Research and Enterprise, who gave advice and encouragement at every stage of its completion in his uniquely genial fashion till he left for pastures new.

At the University of Sheffield’s Humanities Research Institute the project has been assisted on a daily basis by Steven Newman, specially appointed as Data Developer assigned to the Brome edition and by Katherine Rogers, Technical Officer. Together they patiently brought all our scholarly efforts together and realised our ambitions for an online edition to an astonishing and gratifying degree. In the early stages they were ably supported by Jamie McLaughlin and Ed Mackenzie and in the last two years by Michael Pidd, the Digital Manager. Throughout Julie Banham, the Coordinator, has been a superb organiser of meetings and a valued source of information.

At the Arts and Humanities Research Board, Ian Broadbridge and his staff answered questions rapidly and with continuing generosity in their responses, showing always great sensitivity to our aims.

A large and magnificent contribution to the edition came from the actors who joined the workshops and brought such insight, acumen, vision and scruple to their work for us. They are named at the end of each of the edited clips, where names can more readily be aligned with faces; but they must properly be listed here too as a mark of my absolute respect and admiration for their particular kind of scholarship and expertise: Clare Calbraith, Olivia Darnley, Sarah Edwardson, Joanna Hole, Jennifer McEvoy, Kate Spiro, Beth Vyse, Hannah Watkins, Anita Wright; Sam Alexander, Keith Bartlett, David Broughton-Davies, Mike Burrell, Philip Cumbus, James Curran, Jack Fortescue, Adam Kay, Robert Lister, Lachlan McCall, Alan Morrissey, Jean-Marc Perret, and Joseph Thompson. Special thanks too to Lyn Darnley, Head of Text, Voice and the Artist Development at the Royal Shakespeare Company, who recommended actors from the company’s alumni list suitable for the project and to her manager, Jane Hazell, for tracking down contact details. Lyn Darnley generously gave up a weekend afternoon to conduct a workshop for the project on the particular demands of speaking verse in Brome’s plays. Other specialist workshops were conducted by Charmian Hoare on dialect speech in Brome and by Jenny Tiramani on period costume and references to clothing in the plays.

Midway through the preparation of the edition the editorial panel held an international conference on Brome and the Caroline Theatre, at which we launched a prototype of the site. We are grateful for the feedback we received from colleagues on that occasion and also from the numerous groups of undergraduates, postgraduates, actors, academics and scholars who have since shared with us their responses on accessibility and user-friendliness when viewing later versions of the prototype: their advice has done much to shape the layout of the current site.

To all, my sincere thanks.

Richard Allen Cave

My grateful thanks to all the editorial panel, the actors and to Brian Woolland for their considerable input into my thinking about Brome’s plays generally and about the two I was editing in particular; to the staff of the British Library, the library at Eton College, the London Library, Senate House Library (University of London) and the library at Royal Holloway; to Lucy Munro for her wonderfully informative (dated) listings of known performances on Caroline stages; to Simon Cassford for unfailing advice and help with video editing; to Eleanor Lowe for commenting creatively on both editions in draft; and to my partner, Chris Burgess, who selflessly allowed the rival attractions of Richard Brome to lure me repeatedly away from our relationship.

The Antipodes: the undergraduate cast of my production of the play and the audiences who attended the performances (their responses as performers and spectators to a comedy of Brome’s were revealing and informative); Anthony Parr, who gave a witty paper on the cultural background to the play at the conference on Brome and the Caroline Theatre; and Richard Proudfoot, whose chance comments during a conversation together proffered insights into the relation between his edition of the play with David Scott Kastan and the production staged at the Globe and his attitude to the cutting of Caroline playtexts for performance.

The Novella: Barbara Ravelhofer for an illuminating exchange of emails about choreography and choreographers in the early seventeenth century; Jenny Clark for help with translations from the German; Jenny Tiramani for answering numerous questions about clothing and makeup referred to in the text or implied by it; Fiorenzo Fantaccini, Dario Calimani, and Federica Ambrosini for considerable help with matters pertaining to the history and cultural standing of Venetian courtesans.

For both Covent Garden Weeded and The New Academy: my editorial colleagues on the Brome Project (especially Richard Cave, Eleanor Lowe, and Brian Woolland) and our actors; my colleagues in the English Department at Rhodes College, especially Jennifer Brady, Brian Shaffer, and Scott Newstok; Andrew Wade and Nick Hutchison for many conversations about the craft of acting; Rhodes College, for research support through the Connie Abston Chair in Literature; and to Connie and Dunbar Abston; the staff of the Barret Library, Rhodes College, especially Kenan Padgett for exemplary assistance with Inter-Library Loans; the following research libraries and their staffs: British Library, Bodleian Library, National Art Library (Victoria & Albert Museum), Folger Shakespeare Library, Library of Congress, Huntington Library, Newberry Library; and, most importantly, my family, for tolerating my mental absence even when at home and especially Frances and Georgina for helping me understand what's at stake in father/daughter plots.

Covent Garden Weeded: the research staff of The Royal Armouries for advice concerning seventeenth-century weapons.

The New Academy: Dr Barbara Ravelhofer for advice on aspects of dancing in the period; Susan North (Victoria & Albert Museum) and Jenny Tiramani for advice concerning seventeenth-century clothing

General thanks to: The Renaissance Drama Research Group of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, for enthusiastically testing prototypes of my edited texts at the annual play-reading meeting; in particular, Will Sharpe, Héloïse Sénéchal and Catherine Clifford for their comments, and Lizz Ketterer and Andy Kesson for stimulating conversations about all things dramatic. Especial thanks go to Dr Martin Wiggins (an excellent Careless in the play-reading, in contrast with his scholarship) and Professor John Jowett for suggestions and inspiration.

I would wish particularly to thank staff at the following research libraries who provided valuable assistance: the Folger Shakespeare Library (Karen Kettnich); British Library; Shakespeare Institute Library (Kate Welch and Karin Brown); Bodleian Library; also the students of the Department of Drama and Theatre, Royal Holloway (University of London), who studied A Mad Couple Well Matched and A Jovial Crew as part of a course on Renaissance Production, gamely performing short extracts in and around the college’s Japanese Noh theatre; and the participants who contributed to the Shakespeare Association of America seminar on ‘Richard Brome and Caroline Drama’ (April, 2007), and to Lucy Munro for her talents as co-organiser.

A Mad Couple Well Matched: Rachel Revett for gamely translating French, and Sally Steel for her helpful translation of Parra’s Italian edition.

The Love-Sick Court: Roderick Saxey II and Clare Smout for expert and witty assistance with Latin translation; Eleanor Rycroft for intimate knowledge of beards in Early Modern drama.

General: I would like to thank all of the Brome editors, the actors and other practitioners who participated in the workshops, Steven Newman, Kathy Rogers and other staff at HRI, and members of the 2007 Shakespeare Association of America seminar on ‘Richard Brome and Caroline Theatre’. I am also grateful to librarians at the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, the Library of Congress, and the Newberry Library, Chicago for their help.

The Queen and Concubine: I would like to thank Robert Reid and Linda Grant for their help with the Latin translations, and Nicola Leach and Jessica Dyson for allowing me to read and cite unpublished material. I am also extremely grateful to James Chalmers and Presence Theatre Company for providing me with the opportunity to hear a reading of the complete text and for discussing the play with me; I would especially like to thank Jack Fortescue and Martin Hodgson for their useful questions about the Curate’s Latin and Brome’s attitude towards the country people respectively. Thanks are also due to Philip Bird for conversations about the handling of mass speeches in early modern drama. I would also like to thank Clare McManus and Tiffany Stern for comments and suggestions.

The Demoiselle: I would like to thank Karen Britland, Ceri Morgan and Yvan Tardy for suggestions and comments on the French dialogue; and the Malone Society, who generously funded a research trip to read extant copies of The Demoiselle.

General thanks: to Bernard Sharratt.

The Court Beggar: Kenneth Fincham; David Ormerod.

The Queen’s Exchange: Darryll Grantley.

Grateful thanks to The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose funding supported some of my Brome research; and McMaster University Arts Research Board, for supporting some of my Brome research and dissemination of results at conferences.

Grateful thanks to Lauren Drew; Ami Instone; Heather Drewett; Jessica Tillett; and Lotty Englishby. Elizabeth Warren rescued me in a Latin crisis. Richard Proudfoot pointed me in the right direction to get to Crooked Lane. Especial thanks to Cristina Paravano, especially in the area of rhetoric. Most of all, thanks to Vincent and Maddy Jones.