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n6217   2.1 With the opening scene of the second act we return to Letoy’s mansion and find from his converse with the Doctor that they are in league together respecting Peregrine’s cure and the bringing of Joyless’s family to London. Letoy appears to be the mastermind behind the whole enterprise, which he is organising and controlling rather in the manner of Shakespeare’s Prospero. Of special note is the information that Hughball on Letoy’s orders has encouraged Diana in her flirtatiousness (which retrospectively explains his rather arch behaviour with her in the final scene of Act One). He leaves to attend to his patient whose drugged state will soon be wearing off, while Letoy gets his actors ready for the ensuing performance, instructing them about the proper acting style and modes of decorum they should adopt as befitting the particular play they are soon to enact. He wishes them to play for realism rather than exhibit themselves overtly as actors. His man, Byplay, is singled out for special advice: since his is an acknowledged talent for improvisation, it is he who must lead the troupe’s invention in responding to however Peregrine reacts and be attentive to any whispered instructions that the Doctor may choose to offer. The actors depart when Letoy’s guests arrive with Blaze, who proceeds to introduce them to their host. Letoy’s chance observation that Diana is wearing his ring provokes an angry enchange between her and Joyless, who threatens to take her home. Letoy openly courts Diana and asserts his authority as a lord over Joyless, insisting that either husband and wife both stay or that Joyless depart alone while Diana remains behind to enjoy the promised entertainment. A grudging Joyless agrees to join the party, and all depart to Letoy’s private theatre. To the themes of madness and jealousy Brome has begun meticulously to introduce the concept of drama and acting as therapy. Significantly, Letoy insists that his actors adopt a studied seriousness in what they do and that they be wholly attentive to the purpose of the drama they are to play and not self-consciously vaunt their personal expertise. [go to text]

n5577   [Letoy] This edition. Q does not assign a speech-prefix to the opening line of this act, though from the context it is clearly Letoy's. [go to text]

n4400   Tonight This opening word situates the following sequence precisely within the time-scheme of the play. All the action occurs within the span of twenty-four hours: Act One daytime; Acts Two to Five throughout the ensuing night, culminating in the morning of the following day. As the performance was held in an indoor theatre, it is possible that there was a significant change in the lighting provision for much of the rest of the play with the candles over the playing space being raised somewhat to give a dimmer effect. This would increase the impression that the action was moving into a dream world (the journey through the Antipodes) that in time will verge on nightmare. Full lights signifying morning would then return with the arrival of Joyless and Truelock mid-way into the final act, when Letoy's intentions in shaping the action of the play as he does are revealed. [go to text]

gg3247   takes two senses are relevant in this context: is received, appreciated, esteemed; also, achieves its objective [go to text]

gs124   fancy invention [go to text]

gg1017   cried up extolled, praised [go to text]

gs126   fancy imagination, creative insight [go to text]

gg1018   fancies fantasies, caprices, toys [go to text]

gg410   still always; continually; ever; on every occasion [go to text]

gg1019   After 'at (the rate of)' OED, which dates this usage from 1530 [go to text]

gg236   anon soon; immediately; in good time [go to text]

gg674   perfect with their lines completely learned, memorized [go to text]

n4399   But one The exception is Byplay, who is to feature prominently in the play-within-the-play. [go to text]

gg1020   shifts clever ploys or expedients, impromptu experiments or displays (in acting) [go to text]

n1523   extempore A particular felicity of the later stages of this play lies in the many dramaturgical strategies that Brome deploys to pretend with his audience that the actors have departed from their carefully rehearsed script and are improvising. This occurs most dramatically when Peregrine ceases to be an observer of the play-within-the-play and becomes himself an actor within it, as does Martha too. By introducing Byplay as a master of improvisatory tactics and skills here, spectators are made alert to the possibility that improvisation (acting extempore) is about to occur. [go to text]

gg1021   extempore improvised [go to text]

gg1022   purpose substance, objective [go to text]

gg1023   moves stirs up, excites [go to text]

n1524   poetic furies This is a scholarly joke for the benefit of the learned members of Brome’s audience: poetic inspiration was termed furor poeticus in Latin, but here the poet-dramatists are getting in a frenzy and raging against their actors because they are not observing the strict phrasing of the text they are speaking. [go to text]

gs753   fribble performs impromptu to his own invention [go to text]

gg1025   mimic comic actor [go to text]

gs128   entertained took into service [go to text]

gg1026   interchange exchange [go to text]

gg1027   Discourse talk, conversation [go to text]

gg1028   Put him to’t apply, set someone to do something, test [go to text]

gg1029   wrought (literally) moulded, shaped; (in context) persuaded [go to text]

gg1030   suffer allow, tolerate [go to text]

n1525   spur his jealousy off o’ the legs The image is from urging on a horse by applying spurs to its flanks so that it increases its speed. The doctor has invited Diana to goad Joyless’s jealousy by any means within her power to intensify it to an extreme. [go to text]

n4401   tonight Again the audience are gently reminded of the time-scheme governing the action. [go to text]

n1526   actors The quarto reads ‘Actor’ but the word has been emended to the plural to parallel ‘spectators’ and because more than one of the spectators of the play-within-the-play will get involved in the action. Haarker records that G.P.Baker was the first editor of the play to make this change when he included The Antipodes in the third volume of Representative English Comedies (New York: 1914). All subsequent editors have followed his example. [go to text]

gg1031   double twice as much [go to text]

n1527   Where be the foils and targets for the women? This is a first teasing intimation to spectators of how the inverted world of the Antipodes will be represented before them. The comment intimates too that the sequence of inversions will tackle issues of gender. [go to text]

gg1032   foils light fencing swords, épées [go to text]

gg1033   targets shields [go to text]

gg1034   coil fuss, noisy row [go to text]

n4448   Enter QUAILPIPE Q marks a scene division here with the entrance of Letoy's company of actors: "Act 2. Scene 2.". [go to text]

n4129   name that is, to the appellation "knave" [go to text]

gg1036   ready dressed [go to text]

gg1035   shape stage costume [go to text]

n1528   I want my beaver shoes and leather cap Prologues were often dressed in a fashion that revealed something of the play that was to follow. Jonson was an absolute master at devising amusing ways with costume to highlight his prologues in this way. Cynthia’s Revels starts with three boy actors from the company fighting over the cloak which will invest whoever succeeds in getting hold of it with a grandeur suitable to speaking the prologue. In The Poetaster Envy wreathed in serpents rises through the trap to pour scorn on the intended subject of the ensuing comedy (the play was one of Jonson’s contributions to the Poetomachia, the War of the Poets, and concerns envy amongst playwrights and writers) till she is silenced by the arrival of the true prologue, clad in magnificent armour, who forces her back under the stage treading on her descending head as ‘we tread /Thy malice into earth’. Quailpipe’s appearance follows this trend by revealing him in a costume that announces the absurd inversions that are to follow in the play-within-the-play, since he is to wear fur on his feet and shoe leather on his head. [go to text]

n1528   To speak the prologue in Prologues were often dressed in a fashion that revealed something of the play that was to follow. Jonson was an absolute master at devising amusing ways with costume to highlight his prologues in this way. Cynthia’s Revels starts with three boy actors from the company fighting over the cloak which will invest whoever succeeds in getting hold of it with a grandeur suitable to speaking the prologue. In The Poetaster Envy wreathed in serpents rises through the trap to pour scorn on the intended subject of the ensuing comedy (the play was one of Jonson’s contributions to the Poetomachia, the War of the Poets, and concerns envy amongst playwrights and writers) till she is silenced by the arrival of the true prologue, clad in magnificent armour, who forces her back under the stage treading on her descending head as ‘we tread /Thy malice into earth’. Quailpipe’s appearance follows this trend by revealing him in a costume that announces the absurd inversions that are to follow in the play-within-the-play, since he is to wear fur on his feet and shoe leather on his head. [go to text]

gg1037   appointed prescribed (by a stage direction) [go to text]

n4137   [He fetches them.] Parr and Kastan with Proudfoot insert an appropriate direction here, which is implied by the dialogue. This edition follows their example. [go to text]

gg1038   Certes certainly [go to text]

gg1039   presenter introducer, speaker of the prologue [go to text]

gg1040   capital pertaining to the head [go to text]

n4131   Trouble not you your head with my conceit What follows is a wondereful satire on the arts that constitute bad acting. While it is at first somewhat reminiscent of Hamlet's advice to the players, Brome quickly pursues his own line of denunciation. There is potential here either for this to be performed by the actor playing Letoy in the style of the lazzi of commedia dell' arte with a virtuoso display of preposterous poses and mannerisms, or for the troupe of actors to assume the postures that Letoy decries. Whether this passage was originally played as a conscious sending-up of known actors of the time, it is not now possible to determine. Clearly like Jonson and Shakespeare before him, Brome disliked egocentric performers whose self-display intruded on the matter of the play and the swift development of its action. [go to text]

n1529   mind your part This whole speech of Letoy’s echoes Hamlet’s advice to the players about how to perform their tragedy before Claudius’s court; but Brome is more specifically satirical than Shakespeare, offering a salient critique of fussy, dated or mannered forms of acting. His conclusion almost quotes Hamlet’s: ‘Suit the action to the word, the word to the action’ (3.2.17-18). [go to text]

gg1041   scholastic histrionic, affected (in the manner of amateur university actors); relying too much on mechanical gestures and inappropriate vocal emphases [go to text]

gg1042   seesaw monotonous up-and-down movements of the arms and hands or of the legs and feet (the nursery rhyme from which the phrase is drawn, 'Seesaw, sacradown, Which is the way to London town?' continues 'One foot up and one foot down') [go to text]

gg1043   sawyer workman who saws timber [go to text]

n1530   Hercules Furens This was a rhetorical tragedy by the Roman dramatist, Seneca, which had been translated by Jasper Heywood in 1561. The implication is that bad actors play every role as heavy because they lack versatility of technique and a true sense of decorum; or to put it bluntly: the man rants in the manner of Shakespeare’s Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he demonstrates how he ‘could play Ercles rarely or a part to tear a cat in’ and with no shred of humility follows his performance in this vein with ‘This was lofty’ (1.2.24-28). Though Shakespeare's play dates from 1595-1596, it had been revived within the decade by the King's Men, chiefly for a performance at court in the autumn of 1630. [go to text]

gg1044   audients’ hearers (audiences throughout the Renaissance period were generally thought of as listeners not spectators or viewers of a performance) [go to text]

gg1045   fibulating twiddling one’s buttons (derived from the latin, fibula: a clasp, fastening or broach) [go to text]

gg1046   band-strings ties, usually of white linen, fastening a ruff or collar snugly at the neck [go to text]

gs129   in’t engaged in such activity [go to text]

gs130   charge command [go to text]

gg1048   singles a movement in dancing that involved taking two steps forward or back that ended with bringing the feet together [go to text]

gg1049   doubles a term in dancing to describe moving four steps forward or back which concluded with bringing the feet together [go to text]

n1531   dancing masters o’the Bear-garden The forms of dance referred to in the lines immediately preceding this involve extremely simple steps, and Letoy’s critique ends tartly with this reference which implies that the footwork is simple enough to be taught to the dancing bears in Paris Garden or the Hope Theatre in Southwark, where bear-baiting was still as popular an entertainment as in Shakespeare’s day. [go to text]

gg1050   tumblers acrobats [go to text]

gg1052   feat stunt, tour de force, trick [go to text]

gg1051   gather wind get one’s breath back [go to text]

gg1053   firking pulling or hitching up [go to text]

n1532   Go, be ready The added stage direction is implied by the Letoy’s command. [go to text]

gg1054   Take licence to take the liberty of or dare to [go to text]

gs124   fancy invention [go to text]

gg1055   interlocutions conversations, chats [go to text]

n1120   audients The modern usage, audience, is not absolutely synonymous with Brome's term, where the stress is more on the idea of hearing a play. Hence the original term is deployed here. [go to text]

gg1056   elder older, one-time [go to text]

n1533   Tarlton Richard Tarlton, who died in 1588, was one-time court jester to Elizabeth I; he was celebrated in his time for his jigs and the singing of improvised rhymes. [go to text]

n1534   Kemp William Kemp took over Tarlton’s stage roles and to some degree his style of playing; he died around 1603-4, and it is thought that Shakespeare’s criticism in Hamlet of the players of fools was directed at him: ‘And let those that play your clowns, speak no more than is set down for them. For there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that’s villainous, and shows a pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it’ (3.2.38-45). [go to text]

gg2965   spent exhausted, worn out [go to text]

n4141   In answering my doctor and his patient This is both permission for Byplay to indulge his talent for improvisation and also an indication that in the ensuing scenario the acting troupe are to work in the manner of commedia dell' arte. They must take their inspiration from the doctor's comments and instructions, but are all the while to focus their invention on Peregrine and his reactions to what he sees played out before him. [go to text]

gg1057   gave me light enlightened, informed [go to text]

n4402   us, Q follows the word "us" with a period: "us." This makes nonsense of the ensuing dependent clause, which is left isolated from the information which it embellishes. This edition follows Haaker and Parr in replacing the period marking with a comma. [go to text]

n1535   sunk past rising That is: they were totally ruined. This may be a glancing reference to the recent plague that had kept theatres in London closed for over sixteen months, picking up the phrase ‘that time’s calamity’ from the very opening speech of the play, where memory of the plague informs most of the imagery. [go to text]

gg3192   mute a silent performer, one who mimes or makes up a scene as a non-speaking attendant [go to text]

n4144   Blaze, when he comes, shall serve This neatly sets up the rudiments of an extended joke, playing on the various meanings of the word 'mute', which will feature in the dialogue in 5.1 [AN 5.1.speeches974-976]. [go to text]

n4449   Enter BLAZE Q starts a new scene with the arrival of Letoy's guests: "Act 2. Scene 3.". As the action is in fact continuous, there is no such division marked here. [go to text]

n9838   My lord, I am become your honour’s usher Video This scene from the entrance of Blaze with Diana and Joyless to their exit was the subject of a short workshop. (That is, from [AN 2.1.speeches264-291].) The characters Martha and Barbara were omitted along with such dialogue as was addressed to them to allow for three actors only to focus on the work; Michael Leslie joined them in the role of Blaze.) Though on the surface it might seem just a filling-in sequence showing the arrival of Joyless with his family at Letoy’s London mansion, intent on observing his son Peregrine’s cure, in practice we discovered it is layered with tensions and subtle directives to the audience to view Letoy especially in a questioning light. By the end of the play the audience learns that Letoy has been play-acting with Diana and for a specific purpose. In the workshop we were interested to explore how soon an audience might or should become aware of this fact. He appears from his first encounter with Diana to be flirting with her outrageously and, as Joyless sarcastically remarks in observing this, his actions look like those of a lord who pursues women by right of conquest (le droit de seigneur) with no scruple or qualm of conscience: “Indeed, ‘tis a high point of honour in /A lord to keep a private gentleman’s wife /From him”. Everything that Letoy says and does aggravates tensions within the marital relationship between Joyless and Diana. And yet their coming to Letoy’s house is in quest of a cure and from the opening scene the doctor has intimated that more in the family seem to need his attentions than just Peregrine. He has offered to cure Diana, Martha and Joyless himself too. To what degree might Letoy be seen as working a cure of Diana and Joyless’s dysfunctional marriage, parallel to the Doctor’s curing of Peregrine’s madness? None of this is stated and it is only established as fact within the final scenes of the play. How purposefully should the cast “prepare” an audience for this final revelation so that when it comes it seems quite plausible and not outright absurd? There is ample evidence that Caroline audiences were accustomed to going more than once to a play. Playgoers at a second viewing of The Antipodes would be privileged to know the outcome and for them the “preparation” for the revealing of Letoy’s intentions with Diana and Joyless would occupy at least part of their interest.

The workshop began with some discussion of stage space and how it might be used to define Letoy’s superior social status as aristocrat. It then moved on to debating how to handle the numerous asides within the scene: whether as general direct address to the whole audience, which might involve an actor moving to a position where he or she could get full view of them and command their attention, or by a turn of the head to engage with specific individual spectators. The pace of the scene seemed to require the latter approach but would be explored in the playing. Richard Cave initiated discussion of the lines: “Let me beseech /Your lordship’s reacceptance of the un- /Merited favour [that is the ring Diana retrieved in an earlier scene] that she wears here.” Is the fact that the line-division falls across and so bisects the word “unmerited” an instance of a poor ear for metrics on Brome’s part or might it be a cue to the actor to use in some way? How flirtatiously pressing should Letoy’s approach to Diana be, since within six lines of Joyless’s entrance with his wife the latter has the aside, “He courts her”? The actors noted how Letoy immediately resorts to what one of the performers called “lovespeak” rather than a formal greeting; and the actor playing Letoy (Hannah Watkins) became concerned about how “big” to make the courtship, vocally and physically. How deliberately, she asked, is Letoy trying to make Joyless jealous? With this discussion in mind, the actors made the following first attempt at staging the scene.

Taking her cue from the text, Letoy [Hannah Watkins] avoids contact with Joyless [Adam Kay] and moves straight to Diana [Beth Vyse], immediately establishing what the lord’s priorities are. Reference to the ring allows Letoy then to kiss Diana’s hand; and his continuing to talk with Diana (thus ignoring Joyless’s questions about the origins of the ring) effectively marginalises the husband in a manner which clearly motivates Joyless’s ensuing aside. Left apart, he can direct that aside to the whole audience. Though a matter of a few lines, this rendering clearly established Diana’s awakening interest in Letoy for his not standing on conventional ceremony. Beth Vyse wondered whether she should be so responsive (since later dialogue shows Diana to be suspicious of Letoy and astonished when she learns he is a lord). The sequence was played again with Diana being deeply unsure how to respond: she offers her hand out of politeness but physically draws back in some perplexity when Letoy seems to take advantage of having contact with her. Brian Woolland, the director, wondered whether this was too innocent a reading. Some preliminary work based on the premise that Letoy was deliberately setting out to provoke Joyless’s jealousy showed Hannah Watkins’s acting beginning to move towards conscious performance and Woolland asked her to emphasize this quality; and Adam Kay as Joyless asked if he might explore moving through asides to the audience towards seeking some kind of support in his confusion from Blaze (Michael Leslie). This is what next was attempted. Gradually layers of meaning, psychological and social, have been added to the playing and a feature recurrent throughout Brome’s dramaturgy of the divided focus within the playing space has been almost unconsciously set up by the players. It was decided to move on to later in the scene to explore the outcome of the seemingly private exchanges between Joyless and Diana that Brome shows taking place while Letoy is greeting his other guests and arranging for Blaze to join the players, as “there is an actor wanting”. This commentary on the workshop continues at [AN 2.1.speech278] “I say restore the ring, and back with me”.

[go to text]

gs131   grace honour [go to text]

gg1058   pledge (n) token, emblem [go to text]

gg1059   languish grow faint, pine (with love) [go to text]

n5727   Next, lady―you― This edition. Q here reads: "Next Lady? you?". Either reading is defendable. Is Letoy simply turning to the next woman in the line waiting to be presented to him (the implication of Q's punctuation, replicated by Haaker)? Or, having turned to Martha, does Letoy find he has to draw her attention to him because she is lost in her own fancies (the inference to be drawn from the punctuation of this edition, following the precedent set by Parr, Kastan and Proudfoot)? Director and cast have a choice here over delivery of the line, depending on whichever possibility is most in tune with how in rehearsal the scene is developing. [go to text]

gg1060   toy trinket, plaything or entertainment (in context all meanings are possible: there has just been talk of the ring on Diana’s finger; Martha with her fixation on becoming a mother interprets the word simply as a means to amuse a child; but Letoy could be referring to his play-within-the-play, which is designed both to delight and effect a cure of folly) [go to text]

gg1061   Time was once, formerly [go to text]

gs132   strangely oddly, surprisingly; but Partridge reads an innuendo into the word and interprets it as meaning 'sexually intimate', especially when coupled as here with 'used' [go to text]

gg262   Prithee (I) pray thee: (I) ask you; please [go to text]

gs133   study't learn (it) by heart [go to text]

n9839   I say restore the ring, and back with me. Video The welcome that Letoy offers to Martha and Barbara and his private instruction to Blaze to join the players has taken audience awareness away from Joyless and Diana and, when next the focus returns to them, we find them already advanced into a quarrel. What follows was the first attempt at staging the final sequences of the scene which, though still often exploratory and hesitant, shows both Beth Vyse as Diana finding a newly decisive voice in the proceedings and, most interestingly, Adam Kay’s spontaneously inventive handling of the textual crux that is the scansion of the word, “un- /merited” (speech 286). Brilliantly Adam decides to use the line-break to mime removing the ring from Diana’s finger: the near-violence of the one gesture contrasting markedly with the elegant holding of the ring out to Letoy for his acceptance. Diana’s body language now is different from her initial retreating away from Letoy and more expressive of her growing interest in him. Having provoked Joyless’s jealousy, Hannah Watkins’s Letoy now objectively stands to observe the consequences on the married pair. The director, Brian Woolland, decided next to build on this and urged Hannah to keep her distance at least initially from Joyless and Diana, as this would allow Adam Kay as Joyless more room to move about the figure of his wife, rendering it easier for him to move between dialogue and direct address for his aside beginning at “The air of London /Hath tainted her obedience already” (speech 286). Michael Leslie noted how Joyless’s “Let me beseech” in effect completes the “public” pentameter begun by Diana’s “To lose my longing now” (speeches 285-286), which renders his intervening lines (about the decadence befalling his wife since she has come to London) more obviously “private”. Adam was asked to try and reproduce this effect in his delivery, since the dramaturgy meticulously indicates the required changes in vocal register. After thinking through the implications of this, he and the director decided that the sheer pacing of the changes of register necessitated that the lines that are designated an “aside” should be directed at individual audience members while physically he stayed within the group of three actors involved in the sequence. This information fed into the next attempt. Numerous interruptions occurred to disrupt the flow of the scene, which grew out of the actors’ uncertainty with the implication of their respective lines. Much of the ensuing discussion that attempted to resolve these issues is kept in the recording, as it demonstrates what kinds of questions need to be answered in the rehearsal situation and the degree to which proxemics, vocal tone and the movement of actors in relation to each other, the audience and the playing space can be deployed to add layers of implication to the growing meaning generated by the performance. What continually impressed in workshopping the scene was the return by the actors on several occasions to what at a first encounter they had instinctively done in negotiating seeming difficulties in the text.

Director and cast had become increasingly interested in Letoy’s status and how close they might approach a lord (though it was clear to them that he could bridge the gap between himself and persons of lower rank whenever he so chose). Elizabeth Schafer noted that although Joyless and Diana have asides, Letoy never does. The impact of this is that Letoy’s inner motivation remains unknown, which adds to the confusion of Joyless especially but also builds up in spectators a sense of the lord as a decided enigma. There is a way in which Letoy has no need of asides, since he is absolutely confident of who he is and what he is doing. There was further discussion about tone and physical positioning in relation to Joyless’s lines about a lord keeping “a private gentleman’s wife /From him” (speech 288), since many sensed that this was a different order of comment from the rest of the character’s lines in this sequence. It is not marked textually as an aside, but the actors wished to play it as such. They felt too that it was more a general social comment than an expression of private anguish. The previous playing had brought Adam as Joyless downstage of Letoy and Diana and he was encouraged to use this new position within the stage space to address the broad sweep of the audience and so distinguish this speech from other asides, which as the recording shows he had begun to direct to individuals directly in his line of vision. To do this seemed to mark him out for some degree of audience sympathy rather than leave him objectively and abjectly as the butt of jokes about cuckolds as a type, particularly given Diana’s following line indicating that she is becoming attracted to Letoy. Marginalised, Joyless still determines to stay whatever the outcome.

There was some discussion as to whether a further possibility of staging Joyless’s intended departure would be for him to take an unwilling Diana with him, having given the ring to Letoy, only to have Diana intercepted by the lord who escorted her back into the main playing space. This might give further poignancy to Joyless's comment on the power of lords and a ironic contrasting delight in Diana at getting her wish to see the play granted. Pressures of time did not, however, allow an enactment of this detail, but it can be readily imagined from the complex dynamics that already obtain with the scene as performed. [go to text]

n4403   back That is: back home with me. The word implies movement here: that Joyless attempts to take Diana out of the playing space, but she stands firmly opposed to his intent. [go to text]

gs134   ease relief, freedom from anxiety in the mind [go to text]

gs135   slight insult [go to text]

gg1062   bounty kindness, generosity, munificence (but with possible sexual overtones) [go to text]

n1536   lose This is a very condensed expression, but clear as to its meaning, if ‘lose’ is interpreted in the sense of ‘to be deprived of’, ‘to forfeit’ or ‘to fail to attain’ (what Diana most longs for). [go to text]

gg1063   tainted infected, corrupted [go to text]

gg1064   touch touch on, represent [go to text]

gs136   favour token given as a mark of favour [go to text]

gs137   from against, contrary to [go to text]

gg1065   post rush, race [go to text]

n4145   Indeed ’tis a high point of honour The tone of this utterance is difficult to place and so director and actor must explore whether it is fitter in the context of the given production for this to be delivered as a private aside or be openly directed at Letoy in a markedly caustic manner. Either way the pointed satire of the remark must register with an audience. For a practical exploration of these lines, see the workshop and its commentary at the start of this sequence. [go to text]

gg3194   private retiring, reticent, not in the public eye [go to text]

gg1066   plain simply dressed; but also open, frank [go to text]

gs138   brave showily dressed (but also with overtones of braggart) [go to text]

gs139   gallant fashionable, polished, chivalrous (the focus is more on social than moral attributes) [go to text]

n4446   2.2 Q creates a new scene at this point in the text with the entry of a new set of characters: "Act. 2. Sene [sic] 4.". Following the format of this edition where a new scene is marked only where an entrance of characters follows a general emptying of the stage, the entrance of Peregrine and the doctor starts Scene 2. [go to text]

n6218   2.2 The initial episode of this scene establishes the degree to which fantasy is a trick of the imagination: all but Peregrine are aware of the divide between truth and fiction. The Doctor and his assistants know that Peregrine has merely slept long and deeply but Peregrine is easily made to believe that he has been travelling for months on end around the circumference of the globe. While Peregrine concentrates on changing his clothes to ones appropriate to the new climate of the Antipodes, Letoy and his guests take their seats as onstage audience without Peregrine’s perceiving them. Ostentatiously Letoy continues to flirt with Diana to Joyless’s chagrin, till a musical flourish announces the start of the play and a Prologue craves his spectators’ indulgence, stressing that nothing the actors present is to be viewed as reflecting on anyone present in the auditorium (again instructing spectators to be wary of confusing a constructed fiction with the reality of their private lives). The theatre audience is confronted by two groups of spectators onstage and will in time be presented with a variety of responses to what they too watch performed. As the play-within-the-play begins, the Doctor’s promise of a world that is the exact reversal of life in London is fulfilled: legal catchpoles are seen running away from the man they should be arresting; a young gentleman is married to an elderly lady of some means but both are in thrall to their waiting woman, who is carrying her young master’s child; old men are sent to school while young men assume positions of responsibility; and there is frank talk of young gallants being commissioned by ageing citizens to get their wives pregnant to satisfy the women’s sexual longings. None of this is seen by the characters of the play-within-the-play as shocking, immoral or salacious, but is accepted by them as in full accord with Antipodean law, social rules and precedent (Byplay in role expounds this with rigour). Peregrine with his traveller’s mindset is enchanted by all he sees; Joyless is disturbed by the play; but Diana again confidently opens herself intellectually and imaginatively to the possibilities of a world where none of the restrictive conventions that structure her own life obtain: she is perceptive and curious, searching for information and understanding as she senses (particularly for women) new personal freedoms. Joyless raises objections to what he has witnessed on ethical grounds, voicing in justification the traditional patriarchal norms of his own society that the Antipodean world consistently challenges. All withdraw, as indeed the Caroline theatre audience would have done at this point, for an interval of refreshment: Peregrine, besotted with what he deems a new world that he has discovered, joins the actors backstage but in the firm belief that he is being entertained by Antipodean citizens. A similar loss of a hold on reality was experienced earlier by Peregrine’s wife, Martha: when the gentleman vows he prefers sex at home in preference to sex on commissioned demand, Martha, quite missing the point of the young man’s punctiliousness, leaps to her feet and offers to go home with him herself if he will get her with child. The continual interjections, comments, interpretations, criticisms proffered by the onstage spectators invite the theatre audience to examine their own attitudes and values and the nature of their relation to the theatre and its world of enacted fictions. [go to text]

n1537   Enter in sea-gowns and caps, DOCTOR and PEREGRINE [who is] brought in a chair by two sailors; cloaks and hats brought in. This stage direction demonstrates the power of a simple set of signifiers like costumes to evoke a precise situation on an otherwise unlocalised stage, where in a similar situation nowadays would in all likelihood be achieved through sound effects (think of the sudden arrival on shipboard of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). The direction also prepares for a necessary change of clothing by Hughball and Peregrine, while the carrying in of a sleeping Peregrine allows us to watch the whole process of his awakening into what he thinks is a reality and the audience know is a dream world. [go to text]

gg1069   sea-gowns sailors’ clothing or, given the speed with which Peregrine and the Doctor have to change their clothing later in the scene, recognisably water-resistant cloaks (Eleanor Lowe informed the editor that these would be of linen canvas waterproofed with linseed oil in the 1630s) [go to text]

gg1070   Determines is drawing to an end, is concluding [go to text]

gg1071   phantasms illusions, visions [go to text]

gg1072   somniferous sleep-inducing, soporific [go to text]

gg1073   calenture a disease incident to sailors within the tropics, characterized by delirium in which the patient, it is said, fancies the sea to be green fields, and desires to leap into it: used figuratively (OED 2) [go to text]

gg1074   country sleep supposedly deep sleep, untroubled by the anxieties that disturb the slumbers of city-dwellers [go to text]

n1538   Eight months―――― Though the doctor’s ensuing speech completes the verse line, the extended dash here in the text indicates that the actor playing Peregrine is required to express total amazement. There is much comic potential in this short exchange. [go to text]

n1539   seven Christian champions These were the patron saints of England (St. George), Wales (St. David), Scotland (St. Andrew), Ireland (St. Patrick), Italy (St. Anthony), Spain (St. James) and France (St. Denis). They were the subject of a various ballads, songs and a romance but the most likely influence on Brome and his audiences was the play, The Seven Champions of Christendom by John Kirke, which had recently been played at both the Cockpit and the Red Bull theatres. Lucy Munro gives 1635 as the likely date of performances, since there is a reference in the text to the Brome-Heywood collaboration, The Late Lancashire Witches staged by the King's Men in their 1634-35 season, although Kirke's play was not published until 1638. [go to text]

n1540   David by name, slept seven years in a leek-bed This is Brome’s satirical take on the section devoted to St. David in the romance version of the seven champions’ lives written by Richard Johnson and published in 1596, where by the magic of the enchantress, Ormondine, the saint (wrapped in finest silk) is kept sleeping for seven years in a beautiful garden while damsels sing him endless lullabies. Brome wittily substitutes a ‘leek bed’ for the magic garden, leeks being with daffodils the emblem of Wales (St. David is the patron-saint of that country). [go to text]

n4146   their famous history This was The Most Famous Historie of the Seaven Champions of Christendome by Richard Johnson, published in 1596. A dramatisation of this work, The Seven Champions of Christendom by John Kirke (published 1638) had been acted at the Red Bull c. 1635. [go to text]

gg103   presently immediately (OED adv, 3); without delay [go to text]

gg1075   verge edge, rim, circumference (the verge of the world is, therefore, the equator) [go to text]

gg1076   upper northern (hemisphere) [go to text]

gg1077   clime climate, region [go to text]

n1541   Of equal composition of elements With that of London The climate exactly matches that in London. [go to text]

n1542   I never was at London To demonstrate Peregrine’s being completely possessed by the dream world, Brome has Peregrine forget his coming to London to Blaze’s house and shows too that he has no conception of being in London at this moment. [go to text]

gg1078   grand chief, capital [go to text]

gg161   relation narration, account [go to text]

gg1079   weeds clothes [go to text]

gg1080   don put on (wear) [go to text]

n4450   Shift Q marks a new scene with the arrival of Letoy and his guests: "Act 2. Scene 5.". Interestingly the scene heading is situated in the line between the doctor's last few words ("Hark, sir, their music.") and the stage direction "Shift", while the list of characters entering at this point is given on the following line. This may have been dictated by the exigencies of spacing on the page, but it perhaps suggests a neat timing in performance where Peregrine's changing his cloak was the cue for the play-within-the-play to begin. [go to text]

n1543   Shift This is the conventional phrasing of a direction to indicate a change of clothes, as the dialogue indicates should happen here; and the earlier stage direction at the start of this scene made provision for ‘cloaks and hats’ to replace the sea-gowns and caps in which Peregrine and the Doctor make their entrance. Dessen and Thomson in their Dictionary of Stage Directions (pp.194-195) give numerous examples of this use of the term, shift. [go to text]

n1544   they sit at the other end of the stage How plays-within-plays were staged has been the subject of considerable argument. Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy appears from details in the dialogue to situate the onstage audience in the gallery so that they confronted the larger part of the theatre audience and looked down on the action being played out on the main stage area. This positioning is required by Brome for the later sequences of the play-within-the-play when Letoy, Diana and Joyless view the action from what we are to suppose is a window in his gallery. Here, however, the onstage audience is situated on the same level as the actors in the Antipodean world, though separated from them as the reference to the ‘other end of the stage’ indicates. But much depends on how one interprets the word ‘end’. Brome wrote The Antipodes for performance by Beeston’s company of boy players at the Cockpit (although it was actually first played by the Salisbury Court company). About the latter theatre little is known, but some evidence survives about the Cockpit, including drawings by Inigo Jones for the conversion of the fighting arena into a theatre. From these Martin White in Renaissance Drama in Action (London: Routledge, 1998) has calculated that the playing space at the Cockpit was fifteen feet deep and at its widest nearly twenty-four feet across; this would make for a rectangular stage, amost half as wide again as deep (pp.156-157). By the end of this first scene in the Antipodean world some fourteen actors (or maybe even sixteen actors, if there were no doubling amongst the two sergeants and two of the old men) need to be variously grouped about the playing space, including two separate groupings of onstage spectators of the play-within-the-play. Letoy, Diana, Joyless, Barbara and Martha comprise one such audience, while Peregrine and the Doctor comprise a second, independently situated audience; the remaining seven (or nine) performers would be performing the play-within-the-play. Only the first group of five spectators are designated a precise situation onstage at ‘the other end’. Peregrine and the Doctor are as much the object of that first group’s observation as the actors in Letoy’s play and so there needs must be space between those groupings to allow for such divided fields of scrutiny. The possibilities are many: Letoy’s group might be placed to the rear of the stage seated on stools along with the more affluent members of the audience who sat there, while Peregrine and the Doctor sat either alongside but apart from that first group or were positioned to the front of the stage, leaving Letoy’s actors to perform in the space between those two groupings. Both groups of onstage spectators might be placed at the rear of the stage looking forwards to view the play-within-the-play (when they would face the actual theatre audience) or they might all be placed with their backs to the theatre audience (but that might create problems with sight-lines for the theatre audience seated at ground level). If John H. Astington's account of the possible prow-like formation of the stage at Salisbury Court is accurate (see 'The Messalina Stage and Salisbury Court Plays', Theatre Journal, 43 [May 1991], pp. 141-156), then it would seem viable to place the two onstage groups of spectators at the sides to stage left and stage right, leaving the central space for Letoy’s actors. Modern directors will need to experiment within the available space for a suitable configuration of performers; but, whatever arrangement is decided on, attention must be given to allowing upwards of fourteen performers to command an audience’s attention at various points in the action. For a practical exploration of this issue, see the workshop and commentary at [NOTE n9840]. [go to text]

n1545   QUAILPIPE [as] PROLOGUE. The actor should presumably be wearing the beaver shoes and leather cap that were discussed in the previous scene (see speech 252). This prologue to the play-within-the-play interestingly follows a thematic line already voiced in the prologue to the main play: care is taken to establish that the satire is not directed at particular individuals. This is a line of argument pursued in the prologues and inductions to any number of city comedies; the ingenuousness is a pose, since clearly the satire has its precise aims. But several writers of comedy had fallen foul of the law over the years, including Jonson for his involvement in the collaborative Eastward Ho!, when specific individuals considered themselves slanderously lambasted by details in the writing (most famously the Spanish Ambassador, who, finding his predecessor, Gondomar, the target of sustained and virulent criticism in Middleton’s The Game at Chess, performed in 1624, succeeded in having the play banned). The phrasing of the prologues became a form of self-protection for the playwrights. Throughout this prologue, Brome continually emphasises how distant the Antipodes are from the world of his audience (‘so far below /Things in our orb’) and so how ‘far-fetched’. Of course the elaborate denial of any ideological agenda would merely serve to alert spectators to its likely presence. [go to text]

gg1081   far-fetched absurd, fantastic [go to text]

gs141   stuff material and, given the sustained metaphor in the context, performed matter [go to text]

gg1082   prejudice personal bias [go to text]

gg1083   gall bile, venom [go to text]

gg1084   timist 'a time-server'; 'one who follows or complies with the humour of the time' (OED 1, which dates such a usage as occurring till 1658); one who tries to be a man of the moment (the word seems to have been coined by Thomas Overbury in his A wife...Whereunto are added many witty characters [1613]) [go to text]

gg1085   tax censure, accuse [go to text]

gs142   touch at injure, hurt [go to text]

gg1086   orb world, sphere (of activity) [go to text]

gg1087   flow circulate; but also abound (as in the biblical phrase, 'flows with milk and honey' OED v, 14) [go to text]

gg1088   degree class, social rank [go to text]

gg1089   kaiser king (deriving from the latin, Caesar) [go to text]

gg1090   clown rustic, yokel, country bumpkin [go to text]

gg1091   dreamt (literally) hovered over drowsily; (in context) spun out, drawled out words affectedly [go to text]

gg1092   reader 'curate' is how the character is described in the dramatis personae; but possibly the usage implies too a lay person employed to read lessons in chapel where no trained clergy officiated [go to text]

gg1093   Out of his function at his leisure [go to text]

gg1094   Children a company of child actors [go to text]

gg1095   black a punning allusion in the context to the company playing at the Blackfriars Theatre, but the word also carries the meaning, evil or vicious [go to text]

gg1349   Revels entertainments in royal or aristocratic households (as these were most often performed by professional acting troupes, the word was often added to the name of a company, such as the Children of the King's Revels) [go to text]

gg715   fain gladly, willingly, eagerly [go to text]

gg236   anon soon; immediately; in good time [go to text]

gg1096   Flourish. a burst of horns or trumpets, a fanfare [go to text]

n4451   Enter With the arrival of the first characters of the play-within-the-play, Q marks a new scene ("Act 2. Scene 6."), though no such division was marked when Quailpipe made his entrance as Prologue (after line 976). [go to text]

gg1097   SERGEANTS officers of the law court who made arrests, served summons to attend trial, and enforced judgements (in use till 1680 according to the OED n, 4a) [go to text]

gs143   office job, function (that is, make an arrest) [go to text]

n1546   shoulder-ache arrests were often initiated by laying a hand on the suspect’s shoulder [go to text]

gg1098   charter established laws and practices [go to text]

gg1099   forfeited lost or confiscated [go to text]

gg1100   varlets rogue, menial [go to text]

n1127   catchpoles Thed term is a pejorative reference to sergeants (akin to bum-bailiff), thought to derive from a weapon with hinged prongs used to effect arrests by grasping the suspect round the head (poll) or shoulder (hence the Gentleman's reference earlier to 'shoulder ache'. [go to text]

n1547   Enter OLD LADY and BYPLAY, like a servingman Once again in Q this information is cramped into a marginal note in italics that lies adjacent to, and to the right of some four lines of dialogue. It is almost as if these directions were an added afterthought. This might lead one to suppose that the author’s foul papers or copies of them have been annotated either to create a prompt copy for use at the Salisbury Court Theatre, or (as seems more likely, given Brome's coda to Q, which indicates that the printed text far exceeds in length the version actually performed) to form the copy text for printing and publication. Q also marks a new scene with the entry of two new characters, breaking up the information to spread it over four lines: "Act 2. Scene 7. /Enter old Lady and /Byplay, like a /Servingman.". [go to text]

n9840   Yonder’s your master. Video Over the course of working on the edition the panel of editors became impressed with Brome’s ability to draft scenes which involve a large cast of characters and to develop them such that no one role is disadvantaged within the group and no role is overly privileged at the expense of the rest of the cast. No scene of this type is more intricate in its demands or more sustained than the play-within-the-play sequences that occupy most of the action of acts two to four of The Antipodes. These scenes mark the highpoint of Brome’s experiments with metatheatricality: they far exceed the experimentation attempted by Shakespeare, Webster or Jonson in this vein. A play is largely improvised around a character (Peregrine) who, beginning as a spectator, becomes increasingly involved in the world of the play that he is supposedly watching; the play and this man’s response to it are watched by an onstage audience who repeatedly give their judgements on what they are seeing; two of the women spectators (Martha and Diana) at various times bridge the boundary normally established between onstage and offstage worlds; a male spectator (Letoy) has a specialist’s eye to the performance, being employer of the acting troupe and deviser of the play they present, into which he too intrudes to supervise what is happening when the performance threatens to get out of hand; a range of other male and female spectators (ostensibly Letoy’s guests at the entertainment) express their reactions to what they are observing and one of them (Joyless) begins to watch some members of this audience (Diana and Letoy), as if they too were improvising the script of a private drama of their own making; and, of course, there is the theatre audience watching the inter-relation of all this activity and making their own judgements about its modes of presentation, the quality of its performance, the accuracy of its satire, the success of its strategies for meaning-making and what it reveals and critiques about the act of going to the theatre. It is the permeability of the various boundaries between stage and auditorium that creates an underlying sense of threat and danger behind the comedy.

The challenge to a director is to make this complex fabric of interchanges between different levels of reality absolutely clear to the theatre audience through pacing, the shifting into and slippage between different styles of acting, and the keeping of a tight hold on the multiple layers of plotting involved. The play-within-the-play in the antipodean world is rather like a satirical review where a rapid flow of situations is designed to illustrate a common theme that unites them all, since within this part of the action there is no linking plot-line. It is how the various onstage spectators respond to the performance (enchanted by it, critical of it, provoked to intervene in it) that on another level develops the various plot-strands that were set going in the opening act. Ostensibly the onstage audience are observing the process of drama as therapy at work on Peregrine, but as the play-within-the-play proceeds, others (Joyless, Diana, Martha, even Letoy) seem equally in need of some kind of cure: moral, emotional or psychological. All four present themselves as disturbed or damaged, the more so as they individually assert a need to control events. Staging these sequences, which can involve upwards of thirteen or fourteen characters onstage together, is challenging in what it requires in terms of ensemble acting: the need to listen so as to contribute spot on cue and not disrupt the rhythmic flow of dialogue and action which make up a kind of mosaic of details. The offstage audience experiences this as a continuum, but also needs to be able to discriminate its constituent parts. To work best within the time-constraints we were forced to observe, Brian Woolland, the director, decided to spend a short session working simply on a few of the opening episodes of the play-within-the-play with a group of three actors swelled out with one or two editors to establish what amounted to a ground-bass, above, into and against which the reactions of the two onstage audiences (Peregrine and the doctor; Letoy and his guests) might be introduced the following morning, when the number of professional actors would be augmented from three to ten. The scenes chosen were those involving the Gentleman, the Old Lady and the Waiting Woman.

Clearly the primary need is to find a means to distinguish the world of the play-within-the-play from the world of the play proper. That required some discussion of an appropriate style of acting especially for the former. Too extreme or histrionic a style (such as commedia dell’arte) would perhaps make the connections between the two worlds difficult for the theatre audience to determine: the preference was for a heightened version of the acting style prevailing when performing in the world of the play proper (a heightening towards the cartoon-like to some degree). To aid that process of stylisation (and to allow space to accommodate later the two onstage audiences) director and cast opted to work on a highly confined space within the main stage area: gestures became larger, more precise in their definition; movement was limited but tellingly significant when effected. Entrances were found to be a usefully instant means of establishing a particular and somewhat larger-than -life characterisation. A read-through and group discussion led to the idea of using accents for inverse status: the poshest, for example, was deployed by the Old Lady, who is revealed as the scene develops to be the lowest in her household’s pecking-order, while the all-powerful pregnant Waiting-Woman has the coarsest. This would begin to establish for the theatre audience the pattern of comic inversions that Brome extends into ever more bizarre situations. The cast also came to perceive that much of the comedy in the sequence comes from the fact that a family group is rationally discussing whether the Gentleman should get another man’s wife with child: this is the stuff of adulterous farce where usually everyone involved tries to keep their motives and actions secret, whereas here it is all out in the open and on the agenda of a family-council. The actors felt they needed a structure of movements, a physical scenario within which to work out detail. The scene was divided into what actors delight in calling “beats” and an appropriate tableau-effect was devised for each. Here is a short recorded sequence showing Brian Woolland working on these stage pictures within what can be seen to be a highly confined space with, in order of appearance, Adam Kay (Gentleman); Eleanor Lowe (Byplay); Hannah Watkins (Old Lady) and Beth Vyse (Waiting-Woman).

There was some debate as to whether the Gentleman, knowing he is in disgrace with wife and household, might appeal to the theatre audience at least by gesture if not by word; but it was agreed that the characters in the play-within-the-play are in their own enclosed world at least until Peregrine is invited into it at the end of the act and indeed no asides are indicated in Brome’s text for these scenes. Feeling confident that there was now a defining shape to the sequence which they had elaborated on with a series of equally defining movements, the actors next attempted a run-through including the dialogue. While the actors were now confident with the overall structure they had devised, they wished to work on specific aspects of the sequence with a view to augmenting the comedy, which they felt was overly reliant on accents and the one gag of the Gentleman being treated like a dog, till the Waiting-Woman comes to his rescue. Time was devoted to working on the Waiting-Woman’s entrance to augment its comic potential. The cast are seen here developing this. The sequence neatly exemplifies the interaction between editors and practitioners in jointly shaping the comedy. Prompted by Adam Kay, the cast next explored keeping the movement structure and the accents while playing for outright realism. They were motivated in this by the awareness that the characters seemed to believe wholly in the events that are being described, however bizarre they might seem to a watching audience: within a comedic structure each wished to play absolutely true to self. They were encouraged in this by the editors, since such a style seemed wholly in line with the advice Letoy gives earlier in this act to his players, where he asks them not to indulge in affectation or other absurdities but to achieve a style where “words and action married so together / [Shall] strike harmony in the ears and eyes /Of the severest, if judicious critics” (2.1. speech 255).

The actors were pleased with this attempt because it allowed an audience to find the silliness and absurdity within the situation, the actors did not set out deliberately to play the comedy. It was agreed that the slowing down of the delivery of the dialogue in line with the actors’ characterising of an old woman and a breathless pregnant woman actually enabled the details of the situation to be grasped more easily by spectators so that their finding the absurdity became more of a possibility. Too fast-paced a delivery meant that the levels of comedy were lost. What was now emerging strongly was the primacy and power of women over men, who are required in this upside-down world to exhibit all the qualities expected of a wife in seventeenth-century society. Hannah Watkins questioned how good these actors of Letoy should be and the general view was that their style of playacting was “definitely not Pyramus and Thisbe”. To add a layer of comedy relegating Letoy’s actors to the third-rate or worse would detract from Brome’s satire, which as a group these actors were beginning to own through their performing style, allowing it to come to the fore.

The following day with the addition of seven actors, a second workshop addressed the issue of staging the whole scene as written with its complex structure involving two separate onstage audiences. The first question was where to place these groups within the playing space. Initially it was decided to situate them behind and to the sides of the special space marked out for the play-within-the-play with Joyless, Diana, Letoy, Barbara and Martha seated to the audience’s left while Peregrine and the Doctor sat on the audience’s right, that is to either side of the entrance through the curtaining and in each case with the chairs defining a curve, which joined to either side with the end of the row of chairs used by the theatre audience. The following extract from an early run-through in this formation shows how the grouping was realised in relation to the actors in the play-within-the-play: here the Antipodes was framed by London. The framing device allowed the theatre audience to perceive the parallels and contrasts on which Brome’s satire will develop. However the static presentation of the onstage audience meant that it was sometimes difficult to spot who exactly from within their group was speaking and these actors all spontaneously began to speak their lines sotto voce like asides, which tended to make them lose prominence and thus significance too. Other disruptions may be noted, as when Eleanor Lowe as Byplay chooses to glance at Diana and Joyless when they have a particularly long exchange and the general unease of the players when their work stops while their spectators take over the dialogue. There ensued lengthy discussions about what should happen amongst the actors in the play-within-the-play while this commentary occurs. It was suggested that they “freeze”; but, as Sam Alexander (Peregrine) observed: if Peregrine’s focus is directed wholly to the play-within-the-play which he, as a traveller, takes for the reality that is the Antipodes, this sudden halting of the action is going to disturb his concentration and with that his eventual cure. Something, it was generally agreed, needs to occur to carry the actors of the play-within-the-play over in a plausible silence till they take up the dialogue again. Asked why the onstage audience alongside Letoy had resorted to sotto voce delivery, they all agreed they had intuitively sought not to upstage the players they were watching. Richard Cave pointed out along with Brian Woolland that, admirable though their intentions were, Diana’s responses in particular needed to be heard, since they have a direct bearing on her progress morally and emotionally through the play. While The Antipodes initially appears to be about Peregrine, a second plot-line involving the theatre audience’s exploration of the complexities of Diana’s character is subtly being brought to their attention. And so her voice and the voices of those she converses with must be heard in a sustained way.

In trying to resolve these difficulties that a first attempt at a staging had provoked, there was discussion next whether the seating of the onstage audiences in their current formation was helpful in drawing the theatre audience’s attention to them. A wholly static Peregrine seemed wrong too: he may actually be in a theatre, but in his own perception he is not in a world of make-believe but in a geographical locality which is the realisation of a lifetime’s hopes and ambitions. By the end of this sequence he has begun to fraternise with the “inhabitants” and goes off to see their homes and share their food; and Sam Alexander thought he should be free to engage with the play-within-the-play as if he is increasingly wanting to be a part of its world. A rearrangement of the onstage audience was organised: Letoy and his party were seated directly in front of the theatre audience on the very front of the stage-area and they were separated such that Martha and Barbara sat to the audience’s left and the rest (Letoy, Joyless and Diana) to their right. Peregrine and the Doctor remained where they originally had been placed, but they abandoned their chairs and were encouraged to interact with each other (Peregrine expressing growing excitement, Hughball being worldly-wise, as one who has seen it all before). A further read-through while the play-within-the-play was performed was continually disrupted by actors questioning the use of the space and their individual relation to it. While at times sheer mayhem seemed to obtain, the continual enquiry showed how intricate the dramaturgy is and how demanding on the actors if a steady flow is to be maintained despite the constant shift of focus. The longer the discussions were allowed to run and the more actors looked to the text to explain their dilemmas, the more they began in time to proffer solutions to their own questions. Why “freezing” of the action in the play-within-the-play is not necessary became clear when Hannah Watkins (the Old Lady) pointed out that, immediately before the first intrusion of Diana, Joyless and Letoy, she has commanded the Gentleman be silent while she decides for herself why he has been pursued by the law: she is thinking and her young husband waits anxiously for the outcome of her deliberations and Peregrine waits with mounting curiosity. The text itself offered an answer. The following short extract involving this particular moment shows all this thinking in operation and the effect of seating Letoy, Diana and Joyless with their backs to the theatre audience, which while not upstaging the play-within-the-play nonetheless gives greater prominence to how the onstage audience choose to act and to the specific ideas from the action they are watching which they choose to pick up for comment. The next short extract shows the effect of Peregrine being free to move within the whole playing space when sheer fascination compels him to get a closer view of what is going on (that he will soon join this world that captivates him becomes much more plausible in consequence). Again the pause in the action of the play-within-the-play was motivated by the Old Lady’s bringing an end to her criticism of her husband by turning her back on him which leaves him uncertain how to break the impasse between them. A third short extract shows Martha trying to enter the play-world once the subject of child-getting is seen to be the source of the quarrel between the Old Lady and the Gentleman, a subject with which she readily identifies. Her action comes close to jeopardising Letoy and Hughball’s scheme for Peregrine when his concentration is disturbed by her intrusion; some quick thinking by the doctor is required to allay his suspicions. The layering, juxtaposing and interweaving of different levels of reality which is the daring feature here of Brome’s dramaturgy has begun to find an appropriate expression; the comic dynamic which results actually gains from the actors’ new proximity in this second arrangement of them within the playing space.

The next extract is included because, though it comprises discussion only and no performance, it demonstrates how invaluable the actors were repeatedly in aiding editors to resolve textual cruxes or to show where passages required paraphrase and comment. The debate centred on the meaning of the words that frame Peregrine’s question: “Have you no young men scholars, sir, I pray, /When we have beardless doctors?” which prompt the doctor’s reply: “He has wiped /My lips. You question wisely, sir” (2.2. speeches 385-386). Interestingly this was a debate that continued between the editor of the play and Eleanor Ryecroft, when she was drafting the essay on beards that is to be found elsewhere in this edition. It is not a textual crux as such; the problem stems from Brome’s compressed use of syntax that requires some elucidation: much depends on how one interprets the word “When”. Here is the discussion on the rehearsal floor when Sam Alexander (Peregrine) requested help from editors, Richard Cave and Michael Leslie (equipped to appear in the extract as two of the Old Men), his fellow actor, David Broughton-Davies (Hughball) and the director on how he should understand these lines in order to convey their import fully to an audience. The discussion offered one of the best annotations on the passage one could hope for and a succinct contextualising of the question in the context of the developing action. The lines were now delivered as the fruit of Peregrine’s intense concentration on the antipodean world: he had begun to find possible inconsistencies in its inversions, which is a challenge to Letoy’s vision as dramatist and startling proof that Peregrine is not mad in any conventional sense, if he is in command of such logic.

The last extract from this workshop concerns the final moments of this act, where Peregrine intervenes to protect the Old Men from being punished for playing truant from school. Their arrival provides one of the first truly hilarious inversions in The Antipodes: one-time figures of authority, sent back to school in old age, behave like boys of ten. It is disturbing, therefore, when they are promptly threatened with being whipped (the conventional punishment for errant schoolboys in the seventeenth century) and humiliated by being forced to the ground and made to raise their backsides in the air in preparation for the lash. Peregrine acts humanely and requests their pardon. Here the difficult lines about “beardless doctors” are carried off lucidly; so too is Hughball’s response. Peregrine’s involvement in the plight of the Old Men leads naturally to his being introduced by Byplay inventively to the Old Lady and her family. This is seen in mime, while Diana begins to confide in Letoy, who is clearly by now proving a more sympathetic listener and companion at the theatre than her husband. The actors had almost spontaneously through the mime found the means to continue the one plot-line in an audience’s awareness without distracting their attention at this crucial moment from a provocative new stage in Diana’s attitude to Letoy. It is by such means that the flow of action can be sustained but it requires considerable sensitivity from each group of actors to their companions onstage, if a necessary balance is to be created and sustained. As Brian Woolland observed in thanking the actors for this workshop, they had found the means (as this last video extract exemplifies) to give each of the multiple levels of action in the sequence its due weight while making it absolutely clear to spectators where the focus of attention was shifting at any given moment and why. [go to text]

gg1101   take him you in hand discipline, correct [go to text]

gg1102   fetch breath get one’s breath back [go to text]

gg1103   sweetly kindly, amiably (the OED records ironic usages of the word in the mid-seventeenth century) [go to text]

n5578   You and your lady Correct English usage should read, as Byplay phrases it in the previous line, "My lady and myself". But this is the Antipodean world where everything including grammar is to be inverted. Servants, as we see later in the scene, have authority and precedence here over their masters and mistresses, so appropriately the Gentleman corrects Byplay's grammar to reflect this fact. Brome's attention to detail like this is remarkable and indicates how thoroughly he has entered into his imagined world. [go to text]

n1128   puppy Sometimes Byplay’s improvisations clearly do not please Letoy, but his intervention here establishes the pattern whereby the onstage spectators continually comment on the action of the play-within-the-play. 'Puppy' is a term of contempt implying that Byplay is the Lady’s lapdog. [go to text]

gg1104   composition agreement [go to text]

gg1105   disbursed paid out (that is in bribes) [go to text]

gg1106   open war outright hostility, active contention [go to text]

gg1107   ha’ you up as if before a magistrate [go to text]

gg1108   mend improve, supplement [go to text]

n1548   t’other forty shillings Like Jonson in comedies such as The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614), Brome consistently offers realistic details such as this reference to a servant’s wages to substantiate the fanciful world of his play. Twice forty shillings would amount to £4 sterling, which in the Caroline period would be a substantial sum, particularly since servants would additionally be given their clothing, lodging and subsistence, which a labourer (earning at that time some five shillings a week as his wage) would not. This then would be spending money. The National Currency Converter posits that £4 sterling in the 1630s would be the equivalent of £357 in 2009. By the 1640s there had been a slight drop in value and £4 would be the equivalent of £343. [go to text]

n1129   squire personal attendant (implying that, though she may be a Lady, he is no knight but a hanger-on) [go to text]

gg1110   covert-barne a corruption of covert-baron: the condition of being subject to a superior, usually applied to a married woman as under the command of her husband, her lord (OED covert a, 4, which gives several instances beside this of a humorous application of the word to a married man) [go to text]

gg1111   trespass―― an infringement of the law or one’s duty [go to text]

gg1112   handles manage, control [go to text]

gs59   handsomely cleverly, skilfully [go to text]

gg222   humour mood, temper, attitude, frame of mind [go to text]

gg453   mercer a person who deals in textiles, especially silks, velvets, etc. [go to text]

gg1141   slighted treated contemptuously, with indifference [go to text]

gg1142   lays plots to indict; (literally) sets a trap, waylays [go to text]

gg1143   portion dowry (monies, goods or lands brought by the wife to augment her husband’s estate on their marriage) [go to text]

gg1144   jointure marriage settlement (usually the part of a husband’s wealth or property that he elected to assign to his wife in the event of his death) [go to text]

gg1146   licence liberty [go to text]

n1549   Good still. Please contain yourself; please (continue to) be good. [go to text]

n1550   loves This is one of only four significant press variants to be detected in existing copies of the 1640 quarto; in some copies the word ‘likes’ appears instead and would seem to Kastan and Proudfoot to be the uncorrected press variant. Haaker and Parr similarly subscribe to the view that ‘likes’ was the original reading, which was subsequently corrected to read ‘loves’. Given the difficult situation in which the Gentleman finds himself, in which tactically and tactfully it behoves him to stress his commitment to his wife and his handmaid, then the stronger ‘loves’ would seem the preferred reading. [go to text]

gs145   Precious common oath derived from 'By God’s precious blood!' [go to text]

gg22   put the players out to forget one's lines (or words) (for further examples of this usage, see also Moth, 'They do not mark me, and that brings me out' (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.172); and Coriolanus, 5.3.40-2, 'Like a dull actor now/ I have forgot my part, and I am out/ Even to a full disgrace.' [go to text]

gs146   charge duty, responsibility [go to text]

n4452   Enter WAITING WOMAN Q marks a new scene division here: "Act.2. Scene.8.". [go to text]

gg3246   great-bellied pregnant [go to text]

gg191   wild rude, uncivilised; ungoverned, imprudent, rash [go to text]

gg1148   stay (n) support (but with implication of being a steadying influence) [go to text]

gg1149   curb restrain, rein in [go to text]

gg1015   In sooth truly [go to text]

n1551   think In the quarto, this final word to the long first line of the Waiting Woman's speech is presented as an overlap situated above 'would' but almost in the margin of the previous line. It is separated from the Gentleman's 'Pray let's home then' by a single bracket. It is here placed in its correct grammatical position. [go to text]

n1552   today, and knowing how apt He is to play the truant! The quarto makes this one continuous sentence divided simply by a comma after ‘today’. Haaker, and after her Kastan and Proudfoot, divide this into two sentences by inserting an exclamation mark after ‘today’ and then beginning a new sentence with ‘And’. Dramatically the speech records a mounting sarcasm on the part of the Waiting Woman, so the punctuation deployed here (a comma after ‘today’ and an exclamation mark to conclude the speech) is designed to reflect that tone. [go to text]

n4453   Enter three OLD MEN Q creates a new scene with this entrance: "Act. 2. Scene. 9." [go to text]

n4404   etc. This indicates that the Old Men were originally dressed in a manner that indicated they were to be seen as schoolboys, though precisely what these further indications would be is not clear. In the workshop sequence, the senior editors playing these roles chose to don caps as well as carry satchels. A more likely period detail would be the wearing of some form of academic-style gown to protect the students' day-wear from chalk and ink. Parr draws attention to a similar passage in News in the Antipodes (an anonymously authored prose pamphlet of 1642, which draws heavily on Brome's play for its inspiration) where the elderly school-fellows are described as holding bread and butter in their hands or bottles, presumably containing small beer for their refreshment. [go to text]

gg1151   Domine polite form of address to a schoolteacher or master, deriving from the latin, dominus (meaning "Master") [go to text]

gg1152   duster. despite this being used in a nonsense rhyme, it would appear to refer in context to the duster used to wipe clean writing slates or boards at school [go to text]

n1553   Domine, domine duster. Three knaves in a cluster, etc. This doggerel nursery-style song immediately establishes the comic inversion at work here with three very old men behaving like small children. Brome’s ability effortlessly to shift the tone and style of comedy within these episodes is impressive, so too is his use of knockabout farce to introduce a serious discussion between Peregrine and Byplay about conflicting needs concerning status and authority on the one hand to respect the dignity of age, and on the other for the elderly to give place to capable younger men. I have not located any precise origin for the song but rather suppose that the "etc" is an invitation for the actors to extemporise a suitably inane ditty. [go to text]

gg1150   wagships mischievous lads (in opposition to 'worships', the more fitting address to old men) [go to text]

n1554   cluster The Gentleman ironically picks up the old men’s term for themselves, as voiced in their rhyme. [go to text]

gg1153   shan’t dialect form of 'shall not', which Haarker assigns to the Midlands [go to text]

gg1154   bain’t dialect form of 'be not', 'are not', which Haarker again assigns to the Midlands [go to text]

gg1155   pay beat, flog [go to text]

gg1156   soundly severely [go to text]

gg1157   gallows-clappers rogues (that is, wretches destined for the gallows, where a hanged body will swing in the wind like the clapper in a bell) [go to text]

gs147   extempore impromptu, improvises [go to text]

gg820   dogged malicious, spiteful [go to text]

gg1158   fair reputable (but referring possibly to the men as white-haired) [go to text]

n6331   fair Though OED offers no such appropriate entry, it would seem to have been used as a term of praise or courtesy for someone no longer young in years. There is a comparable usage in The English Moor, where Testy is trying to recommend to his niece, Millicent, the elderly usurer, Quicksands, whom he has just forced her to marry: "I that have bred you from the cradle up /To a fit growth to match with his fair years /And far more fair estate" [EM 1.3.speech128]. [go to text]

n9788   Have you no young men scholars, sir, I pray, When we have beardless doctors? Video It was only when working with actors that the problems with these quibbling lines became fully evident. The actor playing Peregrine in our workshop requested a paraphrase of his lines, which provoked a wealth of conflicting responses. Amongst earlier editors, Haaker and Scott Kastan and Proudfoot offer no comment on the lines whatever. Parr has the following note: "Peregrine shifts the meaning of scholar from "student" to "man of learning", prompted by the paradoxical contrast between the youthful doctor/professor [he references Blaze and Joyless's descriptions of Hughball in 1.1. speeches 26-27] and the aged pupils, and this yields a further gloss on Hughball's pretensions" (p.261). Fortunately the discussion with the actors was fully recorded and shows how a united effort on the part of two editors (Cave and Leslie), the director (Brian Woolland) and the actor (Sam Alexander) reached towards an interpretation that made distinct sense in the context of the way Peregrine had become deeply enamoured with the antipodean world: he had concentrated and listened intently and was now beginning to discover potential inconsistencies in the rules governing that world of inversions. This was proof that Peregrine was not mad in the conventional way and his question posed a challenge not only to Hughball's authority (as Parr intimates in his annotation) but also to Letoy's in devising the play-within-the-play as therapeutic cure. The following link connects to the extract from the workshop covered by the earlier illustrated commentary on this scene. [go to text]

gg1159   wiped (idiomatic) took the words out of my mouth [go to text]

gg1159   My lips (idiomatic) took the words out of my mouth [go to text]

gg3195   Threescore sixty [go to text]

n1555   with your heels now That is: say your thanks and then, if you are wise, make a dash for it. There is behind the phrase the implied threat: Get out quickly before we change our minds about how to treat you. [go to text]

gg1160   Gratias thanks [go to text]

gg1161   the while meanwhile [go to text]

gs148   proper handsome, distinctive, really masculine (the modern equivalent would be 'sexy') [go to text]

gg914   undo ruins [go to text]

gg1162   wares goods (whether used in the singular as "ware" or plural) [go to text]

gg1163   moved provoked, disturbed [go to text]

gg1164   settle resolve, bring to a state of composure [go to text]

gg475   sweetmeats sweet food such as sugared cakes or pastries, candied fruit or marzipan, or any other confectionary [go to text]

gg1165   comedians actors [go to text]

gg1166   pause the while take an interval (such was the practice at the indoor or hall theatres of Brome’s day) [go to text]

n1556   [LETOY, DIANA, MARTHA and BARBARA] ex[it]. Quarto reads ‘Exit’, which should properly be in the plural (‘Exeunt’) since Letoy escorts out all three women: Diana, Martha and Barbara. [go to text]

n1557   here The simple word holds complex resonances. Joyless, as a confirmed countryman, is glad that he must not of necessity continue to reside in London or be within Letoy’s sphere of influence; but the reference is also to the shifting uncertain world of the theatre and the challenging play that is being staged, from which Joyless is struggling to remain detached. Taken within the sentence as a whole and in its specific conjunction with ‘always’, the word invites audiences to be curious as to the likely outcome of all that they are watching (at a point where most likely an interval was held in the Caroline theatre) and to muse on their relation to ‘here’ (as meaning Brome’s drama in performance). [go to text]

n4148   I thank you, sir, for the poor men’s release It is an issue for director and actors what Peregrine, the Doctor and the actors in the Antipodean fantasy do while the onstage audience comment at such length on what they have seen before they quit the stage for their refreshments. In workshop, the group found that simply to "freeze" looked bizarre, particularly for Peregrine who should be involved in the fantasy as part of his cure. It was decided to play the foregoing sequence as if the Doctor enticed Peregrine to join with the Antipodeans and question them about their lifestyle, while Letoy conversed with Diana and Joyless. All this was effected in the simplest manner in mime to the rear of the playing space but was established for the theatre audience sufficiently so that, when Peregrine's dialogue resumed here, it was clear he had established a good rapport with the Antipodeans, which made his acceptance of their hospitality quite logical. [go to text]

gg1167   confines region (the OED takes this to be the principal meaning up to 1670) [go to text]

gg1168   viands food (but more specifically, meat) [go to text]

gg1169   tak’st understand, apprehend, interpret (someone’s condition) [go to text]

gg1170   right (adv.) accurately, sensitively [go to text]

gg1171   humanity civility, kindness [go to text]

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