What Knowledge Comes from Foreign Parts?
An Introduction to The Demoiselle, or The New Ordinary1In the opening scene of The Demoiselle, a familiar scene unfolds. Having sold off the majority of his possessions, a ruined gentleman, the baronet Sir Humphrey Dryground, mortgages his land to the usurer Vermin. This moment echoes innumerable Jacobean and Caroline comedies; notably, it recalls the opening of Thomas Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One (first performed by the Children of Paul’s c. 1605), in which Witgood - who could be a younger Dryground - ruefully declares, ‘All’s gone! Still thou’rt a gentleman, that’s all; but a poor one, that’s nothing.’n10665 Like Witgood, Dryground does not face ruin passively; instead, the sale of his lands is intended to enable a financial scam that underlies the action of the play. Unlike Witgood, however, Dryground is a reformed prodigal, a man whose schemes are not intended merely to recover his own fortune, but to make amends for the crimes of his youth.2Like earlier comedies such as The Sparagus Garden and The New Academy, The Demoiselle focuses on the interrelated fortunes of a set of families, between which there are carefully worked contrasts and equivalences. There are four patriarchs, Vermin, Bumpsey, Dryground and Brookall - two of whom are wealthy, and two of whom impoverished, the latter as a result of the schemes of Vermin himself - but only one mother, Bumpsey’s wife Magdalen. While the two wealthy men are both citizens (Bumpsey is a successful tradesman who has made his fortune through what he calls his ‘thrifty industry’ [DM 1.2.speech129], the impoverished pair are gentlemen and, in Dryground’s case, minor gentry. The families are already interlinked as the play opens. A number of years ago, Dryground and Brookall were rivals for the love of the woman who became Dryground’s wife, a narrative which recalls the origins of the feud between Striker and Touchwood Senior in The Sparagus Garden; in this case, however, the rift between the two men has a later origin. Brookall tells Valentine, Dryground’s son:He won her without loss of my known friendship,
But since her death, you cannot but have heard,
He basely wronged my sister and, in her,
Me, and my family, whored her, and cast her off
On the appointed marriage day. [DM 2.1.speech401]3After his wife’s death, Dryground seduced and then abandoned Brookall’s sister, Eleanor, who was pregnant with his child; Eleanor fled, and has not been seen for fourteen years. These links between the families intensify: at the opening of Act 1, Scene 2 Valentine has just married Bumpsey’s daughter, Jane; by the end of the play another inter-family marriage will have taken place, and a third and fourth will be projected.4Propelling the narrative is Dryground’s scheme to raffle off the virginity of Frances, who is presented to the audience as a young woman who pretends to be French and is, in addition, possibly Dryground’s illegitimate daughter. This plot echoes that of an earlier Brome comedy, The Novella, in which Victoria sets a price of two thousand ducats on her own virginity, and, as it turns out, the sale is not seen through in either play. At the conclusion of The Demoiselle, Frances is revealed not only to be no daughter of Dryground’s, but to be no ‘daughter’ at all: ‘she’ is in fact the son of Brookall - supposedly travelling in France, but actually scheming with Dryground to regain their collective fortunes - and he will eventually marry Vermin’s daughter, Alice. Mirroring this marriage, at the close of the play Dryground’s actual daughter, Phyllis, looks set to marry Vermin’s son, Wat. Meanwhile, having aimed to make amends for his behaviour towards Eleanor by helping her family, Dryground unexpectedly finds that he is able to beg her forgiveness in person.5Critical responses to The Demoiselle have tended to focus on particular characters and aspects of the play. For R.J. Kaufmann, Vermin ‘stands squarely in the middle of the play and all the action is in some way related - thematically or otherwise - to his reeducation’; his account of the play can be found in a chapter on ‘Usury and Brotherhood’, and his focus is on the ways in which usury ‘literally subverts the family and the hierarchy of loyalties which makes for the good community’.n10666 Caroline Shaw, on the other hand, generally assents with Kaufmann’s reading, but argues that he downplays the importance of Bumpsey as comic commentator; ‘Under the moral guidance of Bumpsey’, she writes, ‘natural love, parental and romantic, triumphs over selfishness and greed’.n10667 Taking a broader view of the play in his seminal book Theatre and Crisis 1632-1642, Martin Butler suggests that The Demoiselle functions in a way similar to the medieval estates satire, defined by Jill Mann as ‘a satiric representation of all classes of society’.n10669 For Butler, the play’s ‘parad[e] of social types’ and its ‘emblematic style’ leads it to present a ‘theatrum mundi, an exposure of a society bound together by law not love … The strategy enables [Brome’s] indictment of a corrupt England to be comprehensive and memorable while remaining fully dramatic’.n10670 In the most recent book-length study of Brome’s works, Matthew Steggle draws on and extends Butler’s reading, situating the play’s legal references in terms of its evocation of a key part of London, the Temple Walks, which was the haunt of lawyers but also a legal sanctuary where debtors might escape prosecution. He argues that The Demoiselle ‘presents not a single system of law and justice but a number of interlocking and indeed competing ones … But the system that brings order at the end of the play is predicated, perhaps unsurprisingly, not on legal obligation, nor on commercial advantage, but on family ties and mutual respect’.n106716While extremely valuable, all of these readings tend to overlook the importance of Frances’s role in the play, something which is the focus of Alison Findlay’s account in her excellent essay ‘Gendering the Stage’. Comparing The Demoiselle with Ben Jonson’s The New Inn, first performed by the King’s Men in 1629, Findlay analyses The Demoiselle in terms of the interrelation between gender and performance. Both plays, she argues, use the transvestite ‘to critique the commodification of women and the corrupt capitalist world of self-interest’.n10672 As this suggests, her approach is at times analogous with that of Kaufmann - Kaufmann in fact notes in passing the parallel between Dryground’s scheme to raffle Frances’s virginity and ‘the practice of fathers like Vermine [sic] who auctioned off their daughters to the highest bidder’n10673 - but the play is viewed from a different angle, and through the lens of feminist theory. Findlay’s focus on Frances is mirrored in one of the most recent accounts of The Demoiselle, in Athina Efstathiou-Lavabre’s ‘“False Frenchmen” in Richard Brome’s Plays’; Efstathiou-Lavabre examines the complex treatment of stereotypes about French behaviour in Brome’s drama, and in The Demoiselle in particular.n106747In this introduction, I intend to bring together some of these approaches to The Demoiselle, focusing on its theatrical, cultural and social contexts. If we think in terms not of usury specifically, but of the broader concept of consumption - of fashion, of foodstuffs, of money and, not least, of women - we find a means to bring together a number of the play’s generic and thematic concerns. Another focus of attention will be the ways in which The Demoiselle reworks aspects of the plays of Jonson, Brome’s former employer and mentor. Although Jonson is a pervasive influence throughout Brome’s career, his death in August 1637 seems to have given Brome a renewed interest in the older dramatist’s plays, and allusions to plays such as Epicoene, Bartholomew Fair, The Devil is an Ass and The New Inn, form an insistent sub-text to The Demoiselle.8In terms of its content and style, The Demoiselle is an intriguing combination of the novel and the traditional, the realistic and the stylised, the specific and the universal. Although Brome draws on the structures of city comedy and its Caroline variant, the so-called ‘place-realist’ comedy, he also critiques a number of the generic and thematic assumptions at work in such plays. He does so through a paradoxical combination of the highly modish - as seen in the play’s intense pre-occupation with French fashion and decorum - and the traditional, or even archaic, as seen in the frequent recourse to an emblematic dramaturgy which has its roots in older forms such as the morality play or the estates satire. The play is intensely embedded in the local cultural and social contexts of late 1630s London, and its universalism actually draws strength from the very specificity of its references.The Theatrical Milieu9The Demoiselle seems to have been one of the last plays written by Brome during his long-standing, if periodically fraught, relationship with the Salisbury Court playhouse, then occupied by Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men. This company had taken over the Salisbury Court by October 1637, when the playhouses finally reopened after a prolonged outbreak of plague,n10675 and Brome seems to have written for them until Easter 1639, when he finally moved to work with William Beeston at the Cockpit. As G.E. Bentley and Matthew Steggle have noted, the allusion in The Demoiselle’s prologue to poets angling to be called ‘Sir Laureate’ [DM 1.1.speech2] looks like an allusion to the situation in the months after the death of Ben Jonson in August 1637, during which a number of writers jostled for the position of Poet Laureate.n10676 The eventual winner was William Davenant, who was granted the title and a royal pension in December 1638. Brome’s allusion may be to the rivalry, or to Davenant’s eventual appointment, but the prologue clearly refers to the situation between late 1637 and late 1638.10Steggle offers further support for this dating in the suggestion that Frances’s comment in Act 5, Scene 1, that Magdalen carries her hands ‘like de comedien dat act de shangling’ [DM 5.1.speech888], is an allusion to the recent staging of Brome’s The English Moor, performed by Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men shortly after the playhouses re-opened in October 1637, in which Timothy Reade (who was probably in the cast of The Demoiselle) played Buzzard, who disguises himself as the natural fool and ‘changeling’ Timsy. It has also been suggested that the allusion may be to Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, itself current on the stage in the mid-late 1630s, in which Antonio impersonates a natural fool in order to gain access to Isabella, the wife of the keeper of the lunatic asylum.n10677 However, further support for Steggle’s interpretation can be found in another allusion to Buzzard in the Praeludium, or Induction, written for a revival of Thomas Goffe’s The Careless Shepherdess at Salisbury Court in the late 1630s or early 1640s.n10678 In a dialogue between playgoers, Landlord reminisces about plays that he has seen at Salisbury Court, declaring,I heard a fellow
Once on this stage cry Doodle, doodle, doo,
Beyond compare; I’d give the other shilling
To see him act the changeling once again.n1067911Thrift responds, ‘I never saw Reade peeping through the curtain / But ravishing joy entered into my heart’. Landlord quotes Buzzard’s distinctive howl of ‘Hey toodle loodle loodle loo’ [EM 4.5.sp819], and comparison with the reference in The Demoiselle suggests that Frances’s comment is a meta-theatrical joke, drawing attention to the skills of the Salisbury Court performers who are currently in action on stage.n1068012It is worth paying some attention to this group of actors, as their composition may have had some effect on the design of Brome’s play. Although nothing is known about the boy actors who played female roles in The Demoiselle, the principal adult actors probably included those listed as shareholders in the Salisbury Court company in the 1640 lawsuit Heton vs. Brome: Richard Perkins, Anthony Turner, William Sherlock, John Young, John Sumpner, Edward May, Curtis Grevill, William Wilbraham, Timothy Reade and William Cartwright the younger.n10681 The majority of these were mature men: the oldest was probably Perkins, the company’s leading actor, who is mentioned in Philip Henslowe’s Diary as a member of Worcester’s Men in March 1602;n10682 his known roles include Barabas in an early 1630s revival of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Sir John Belfare in James Shirley’s The Wedding, Captain Goodlack in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Fitzwater in Robert Davenport’s King John and Matilda, and Hanno in Thomas Nabbes’s Hannibal and Scipio.n10683 Turner, Sherlock and Greville are all first traced in the late 1610s and early 1620s.n10684 Cartwright testified that he was in his eightieth year on 17 December 1686, meaning that he was born in 1606/7, and so was in his early thirties in 1639;n10685 Reade, who seems to have been born in 1606, was around the same age.n10686 His earliest recorded role is in Shirley’s The Wedding (Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, 1626), in which he played the female role of Cardona; by the 1630s he was becoming known as a performer of comic roles such as Buzzard in The English Moor.n10687 Three further actors, Sumner, Wilbraham and Young, played adult roles in Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men plays of 1625 and 1626, and so may also have been in their early thirties, or possibly older.n10688 Finally, Edward May played an adult role in 1631, meaning that he was probably at least in his mid-late twenties.n1068913The composition of the company therefore seems well-suited to The Demoiselle, which requires at least fifteen actors, six of whom must play female or juvenile roles (I count Frances among these, as the actor playing this role must convince as a woman until the play’s final stages). Although early modern acting companies do not always seem to have cast naturalistically in terms of the relative ages of actor and role, it is striking to find that The Demoiselle includes five demanding roles for mature men: Dryground, Vermin, Brookall, Bumpsey and Sir Amphilus. In this, it is similar to The English Moor, performed by the same company, which also has five roles for older men, four of whom (Meanwell, Rashley, Quicksands and Testy) are described as ‘old’ in the dramatis personae. The Demoiselle also includes some satisfying roles for boy actors, notably those of Frances and Magdalen; like many plays of the Caroline period - and many of Brome’s plays in particular - it displays a sharp interest in female experience and female subjectivity.n10690 One interesting quirk in the casting is the fact that Trebasco does not appear on stage after Act 3, Scene 2: it is therefore possible that his role was doubled, as all of the other major characters are assembled on stage by the end of Act 5, Scene 1. Depending on the age of the actor, Trebasco would have been able to double Wat, Dryground, Frances or Alice: each of these doubling strategies would, if adopted in performance, create different effects, and connections between roles.The Cultural Milieu14The late-1630s context established by this dating has important effects on our understanding of The Demoiselle. In the first place, the play alludes - as we have seen - to specific cultural controversies, such as the struggle for the laureateship. ‘Readers and audients make good plays or books; / ’Tis appetite makes dishes, ’tis not cooks’ [DM 1.1.speech2], declares the play’s prologue, encapsulating the deliberately low-key and deferential manner in which Brome customarily presents himself as author. This very lack of pretension was, however, in itself a statement in the literary arena of the late 1630s, as the prologue makes clear:Our playmaker - for yet he won’t be called
Author, or poet, nor beg to be installed
Sir Laureate - has sent me out t’invite
Your fancies to a full and clean delight,
And bids me tell you that though he be none
Of those whose tow’ring Muses scale the throne
Of kings, yet his familiar mirth’s as good,
When ’tis by you approved and understood,
As if he’d writ strong lines and had the fate
Of other fools for meddling with the state.
[DM 1.1.speech2]15In its comments about playwrights ‘whose tow’ring Muses scale the throne / Of kings’ the prologue critiques the pretensions of courtier-poets such as William Davenant, one of the main writers of court masques in the Caroline period and also a prolific writer for the commercial stage. As we have seen, Brome criticises in particular the unseemly rush among court poets to succeed his old employer and mentor, Ben Jonson, as poet laureate.16The following lines may sharpen the attack on late-1630s literary culture further: unless the prologue belongs to a revival, they are too early to refer to the indiscretions of the Red Bull company with their scandalous play The Whore New Vamped in September 1639, or to the involvement of Davenant and Sir John Suckling in the second Army Plot in May 1641.n10691 They may, however, refer to the Star Chamber trial of the ‘puritan’ writers John Bastwick, Henry Burton and William Prynne in spring 1637, after which all three men were fined, condemned to the pillory, and had their ears cropped.n10692 Prynne, who had already had the best part of his ears removed in 1634, in the wake of the publication of his voluminous anti-theatrical tract Histriomastix, was additionally branded on his cheeks with the letters S and L (standing for ‘seditious libeller’). Prynne was a frequent target of satire from dramatists, and Brome may allude to him elsewhere, in both The Demoiselle and The Antipodes (see [NOTE n3559], [NOTE n4462], [NOTE n3642], and [NOTE n6509]). The prologue may thus draw attention to the unsettled literary and cultural scene of the late 1630s and early 1640s, juxtaposing those who jostle for royal favour with those who attack royal privilege. Ironically, after Brome’s departure, Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men were to recruit precisely the kinds of courtier and amateur poets criticised here, including Thomas Killigrew, Lewis Sharpe and Richard Lovelace.n1069317As is well known, the most offensive passage in Histriomastix was an index entry added late in the publication process, ‘Women-Actors, notorious whores’, which Prynne glossed in detail, writing, ‘dare then any Christian women be so more than whorishly impudent, as to act, to speak publicly on a stage (perchance in men’s apparel, and cut hair, here proved sinful and abominable), in the presence of sundry men and women?’n10694 Given that Histriomastix was published in spring 1633, not long after performances by Henrietta Maria and her ladies of Walter Montagu’s court pastoral The Shepherd’s Paradise during the Christmas season of 1632-3, it is not entirely surprising that Prynne found himself before the Star Chamber. In fact, Histriomastix criticises every aspect of female participation in Caroline drama, including female playgoing, female playreading, and the representation of women on stage. Notably, in this context, Prynne compares at length the performance of female roles by women and by boys, arguing that ‘both of them are evil, yea extremely vicious … the superabundant sinfulness of the one, can neither justify the lawfulness, nor extenuate the wickedness of the other’ (215).18Prynne’s critique highlights the interest that the commercial stage of the 1630s was taking in female performance, a topic that has recently been explored in detail by Sophie Tomlinson. Tomlinson contends ‘that Caroline drama authored by men deserves greater recognition both as spotlighting “the social relations of women”, and for its energetic engagement with the figure of the actress’, and she suggests that ‘The distinctiveness of Stuart representations of female identity and agency derives from their simultaneous embracing of and recoiling from women’s use of theatrical arts’.n10695 While dramatists do not, in general, share Prynne’s revulsion at the idea of the actress, they are intriguingly ambivalent about the effects of female performance.19This interest and ambivalence is clear in The Demoiselle, in which Frances’s masquerade as a Frenchwoman is juxtaposed with Magdalen’s enthusiasm for another kind of role-playing: the attempt to refashion herself into a higher class status, with its attendant social sophistication; it is particularly evident in Act 5, Scene 1, in which the two kinds of performance are brought together. Furthermore, as Alison Findlay has described, Frances’s assumed nationality, and her role as a performer within the fiction, associate her with the French-born queen, Henrietta Maria.n10696 Henrietta Maria was an enthusiastic sponsor of French culture: Karen Britland notes the Caroline court’s ‘receptivity to French fashion that her presence helped to facilitate and which she was concerned to promote’.n10697 Part of this promotion was embodied in the performance of French drama at court, and the incorporation of French genres and motifs into English-language plays such as Montagu’s The Shepherds’ Paradise, and into the court masque, which began to incorporate the style of the French ballet de cour.n10698 Notably, the queen appeared in court theatre herself, taking leading roles in performances of The Shepherds’ Paradise and an earlier production, Honorat de Bueil, seigneur de Racan’s Artenice (1626), and in court masques including The Temple of Love (1635) and Luminalia (1638). As Findlay suggests, ‘Brome’s preoccupation with female performance perhaps responded to an explicit regendering of the stage by the inclusion of female actors in court dramas’ (410).20Another influence on the treatment of gender and theatricality in The Demoiselle is the long-standing theatrical tradition of transvestite performance, and its effect on plots which also involve cross-dressing. As Farah Karim-Cooper suggests, in plays in which a boy actor plays a male character who impersonates a woman, the ‘particular configuration of cross-dressing is important because the construction of gender becomes a doubly theatrical as well as prosthetic exercise’.n10699 Brome’s use of this motif is highly self-conscious and theatrically allusive: in particular, the treatment of Frances’s disguise mirrors closely that of the title character in Jonson’s Epicoene, a play which was current on the stage in the mid 1630s,n10700 and which Brome echoes repeatedly throughout his career. Like Epicoene’s, Frances’s true gender is concealed from the audience until the play’s final stages, and the revelation of Frances’s identity mirrors the coup de théâtre in Epicoene, in which the boy actor’s wig is removed.n10701 In both plays, this moment reveals the extent to which gender on the early modern stage was constructed through costume; as Findlay comments, ‘Frank shows how all women reproduce themselves as artefacts, effectively constructing themselves from the transvestite viewpoint of the male gaze’.n1070221The use of Epicoene is not the only echo of Jonson’s work in The Demoiselle. While the name ‘Frances’ is appropriate for Brome’s transvestite heroine in many ways - it is an archetypal name for a prostitute, it is sexually ambiguous and its aural echo of ‘Français’ helps to reinforce the character’s supposed nationality - it also has important theatrical echoes.n10703 Brome’s ‘Frank’ is clearly indebted to the character of the same name in Jonson’s The New Inn, who is presented to the audience as a boy, is disguised as a girl during the course of the play, but who eventually turns out to be the genuinely female Laetitia, the lost sister of Lady Frances Frampul. As Findlay notes, ‘Brome’s Damoiselle [sic] seems to be deliberately constructed as a mirror image of Jonson’s text, in that his “Frank” is a cross-dressed boy’.n10704 It is possible that a theatrically aware audience member would have perceived the links between the two plots and would have suspected that Frances’s gender is not what it seems; on the other hand, if a spectator recalled their Jonson too vividly, they might expect a complex double-bluff which never, in fact, appears.22In addition, Lord Frampul’s disguise as the host, Goodstock, in The New Inn also seems to have influenced Brome’s presentation of Dryground’s masquerade as a disreputable landlord. Although the narratives surrounding the two characters diverge - Lord Frampul’s identity is concealed until the end of The New Inn, whereas the audience are in on Dryground’s performance as Osbright - both men are guilty of abandoning those close to them. Lord Frampul fled his family after the birth of his second daughter, Laetitia, while Dryground deserted his fiancée, Eleanor Brookall, after consummating the relationship and fathering (although he does not know this) Phyllis. As Tomlinson remarks of The New Inn, male desertion is not a ‘catastrophe imposed by arbitrary Fortune’; instead, these plays explore ‘the implosion of an early modern family from within’.n1070523While critics have also seen affinities between The Demoiselle and plays such as The Staple of News and The Magnetic Lady,n10707 the other major appropriation of Jonsonian theatre in Brome’s play is from The Devil is an Ass, first performed by the King’s Men in 1616. This play is deeply interested in female impersonation and in the ventriloquisation of the female voice and female experience.n10708 In Act 1 Wittipol, a young gallant, is allowed to speak to the unhappily married Frances Fitzdottrel, but her husband refuses to allow Frances to respond; Wittipol therefore ventriloquises Frances’s response and speaks for her. A different approach to female impersonation is taken in Act 4, when Wittipol is required to masquerade as an English widow who has travelled widely and adopted Spanish dress, and is therefore known as the ‘Spaniard’. The scheming Merecraft tells Fitzdottrel:all our women here
That are of spirit and fashion flock unto her,
As to their president, their law, their canon,
More than they ever did, to oracle Forman.
Such rare receipts she has, sir, for the face;
Such oils, such tinctures, such pomatumns,
Such perfumes, medicines, quintessences, etc.
And such a mistress of behaviour;
She knows, from the duke’s daughter, to the doxy,
What is their due just, and no more!n1070924Merecraft and his associate, Engine, who are enjoying manipulating the credulous Fitzdottrel, plot to have a boy impersonate the Spaniard; having toyed with employing a professional actor, the King’s Men’s Richard Robinson, they eventually employ Wittipol (played, in all probability, by Robinson himself). Just as Frances professes to be able to teach French fashion, the Spaniard claims to instruct in Spanish manners, and both plays feature sustained scenes of instruction in which the transvestite character tutors ‘real’ women in appropriate and fashionable conduct. One key difference between the scenes is that Wittipol’s instruction is directed at two women who already have pretensions to up-to-date fashion and behaviour, Lady Eitherside and Lady Tailbush, whereas in The Demoiselle Frances tutors the culturally naïve Magdalen Bumpsey.n1071025Furthermore, Brome’s satire of the penetration of foreign culture in London is embedded far more firmly into his play’s narrative than Jonson’s. In The Demoiselle, French fashion is initially introduced as a symbol of Caroline consumer culture. In Act 1, Scene 2, Bumpsey makes a financial bargain with Valentine, his new son-in-law; giving the younger man ‘the free possession / Of half I have’ [DM 1.2.speech160], he vows to match Valentine’s use of the money with his own half:Together we will live,
And I’ll along with you in your own course,
And, as you play your game, you win or lose all:
Thrive and I’ll thrive; spend you, and I will spend;
Save, and I’ll save; scatter, and I’ll scatter. [DM 1.2.speech162]26French fashion begins to seep into the narrative of The Demoiselle early in Act 2. Discussing the bargain with Bumpsey, Valentine tells Ambrose and Oliver,I’ll tell you how he runs at waste already:
This morning the French tailor brought a gown home,
Of the fashion, for my wife; he bought one
Straight, ready-made, for his old gentlewoman,
That never wore so rich in all her life. [DM 2.1.speech193]27A little later, The Demoiselle is herself introduced, again in the dialogue between the three young men. Oliver remarks of Osbright,’Tis above twenty years since he went over,
And was reported dead (they say) soon after,
In France, I take it. But, then, it seems, he lived,
And got this damsel there? Is she French-born? [DM 2.1.speech210]28Valentine replies,Yes, she was born and bred there, and can speak
English but brokenly. But for French behaviour
She’s a most complete demoiselle, and able
To give instructions to our courtliest dames. [DM 2.1.speech211]29French culture is thus associated with consumer spending and with the kind of cultural capital that can be gain through appropriate conduct. Both of these elements return later in the play. At the start of Act 3, Scene 2, Bumpsey, Magdalen and Jane enter ‘all in brave clothes’, wearing the products of Bumpsey’s patronage of the French tailor mentioned in Act 2. Magdalen announces her intention to ‘uphold the fashion, learn and practise / Behaviour and carriage above my ’parel’ [DM 3.2.speech573], an intention which leads directly to the instruction scene at the beginning of Act 5. Like Jonson’s comedies, The Demoiselle thus registers the material and behavioural infiltration of England and, in particular, English women by foreign matter.30In its satire of the adoption of French dress and manners, The Demoiselle is a typical product of the Caroline theatre. In 1638, around the time of the first performance of Brome’s play, Henry Peacham lamented the influence of French culture on the English, writing,I have much wondered why our English above other nations should so much dote upon new fashions, but I wonder at our want of wit that we cannot invent them ourselves, but when one is grown stale run presently over into France, to seek a new, making that noble and flourishing kingdom the magasin of our fooleries[.]n1071131Emilie E.S. Gordenker notes that the costume of the sitters in English portraits begins to show the influence of French style around 1628; she also comments that ‘Younger women tended to choose more modern attire for the portraits than their mothers did’: in a 1628 group portrait of the family of the Duke of Buckingham, for instance, the younger women wear ‘a more modern French style of dress, including fan-shaped collars and virago sleeves’, whereas the Duke’s mother combines the new styles with ‘a somewhat old-fashioned ruff’.n10712 This generational gap is evident in The Demoiselle, in which it is the example of Valentine and Jane that pushes Bumpsey and Magdalen into the adoption of fashionable styles.32Critics such as Ton Hoenselaars and Athina Efstathiou-Lavabre have explored in detail the representation of Francophilia in The Demoiselle. For Efstathiou-Lavabre, ‘Rather than endorsing the supposed veracity of the representation or stereotype under consideration, the dramatist mocks and satirizes the English characters’ use of stereotypes, along with the fervor linked to adopting French fashions in the English capital’.n10713 This ‘fervour’ is the subject of sustained discussion in Jean Howard’s recent book Theater of a City, in which she examines the ‘discourse of manners and deportment’ in 1630s ‘academy plays’ such as Shirley’s The Ball, Brome’s The New Academy and William Cavendish and Shirley’s The Variety, with their repeated incorporation of academies of manners and French dancing masters. This discourse is, she argues, ‘an important means for negotiating stresses within the social fabric whether those involved attempts to carve out - or beat back - new ways of marking social distinction or whether they touched on anxieties about women’s participation in polite society’.n10714 She also notes, discussing Rachel’s desire to attend the academy in The New Academy, ‘the raw social climbing that lies behind the craze for instruction in manners’ and, it is implied, the founding of high-class academies such as Francis Kynaston’s Museum Minervae, which operated in London between 1635 and 1639.n10715 The Museum Minervae is satirised directly in Brome’s The New Academy, and it is possible that Brome still had it in mind when writing The Demoiselle - in addition to all of the other resonances of Frances’s name, it also, of course, recalls that of Francis Kynaston.33By concealing Frances’s true gender, Brome imbues his presentation of the craze for foreign manners with greater danger than we find in The Devil is an Ass or the other 1630s academy plays. In The New Academy, Joyce and Gabriella, who have taken refuge in the academy, are presented as being put at risk as a result of their employment there. Joyce complains to Strigood, ‘what we suffer in our reputation / Abroad is dangerously doubtful’, and Gabriella clarifies their situation:Here we are viewed and reviewed by all comers,
Courted and tempted too; and though we’re safe
In our chaste thoughts, the impious world may say
We are set out to common sale. [NA 3.2.speech696]34In The Demoiselle, Brome dramatises the same anxiety that the sophisticated female instructors of the academy of manners might actually be accomplished cosmopolitan whores of the kind that repeatedly appear in early modern comedy.n10716 Told that ‘Osbright’ has a daughter, Oliver immediately leaps to the kind of conclusion feared by Joyce and Gabriella, saying,Oh! Has he daughter there? Mark that, Nam.
No gaming say’st thou? ’Ods me, and they play not
At the old game of old there, I dare— [DM 2.1.speech208]35When Valentine cuts him off, saying ‘I dare be sworn thou dost ’em wrong’ [DM 2.1.speech209], Oliver merely replies, ‘She’s too stale, is she?’ [DM 2.1.speech210]. From this moment on, the play consistently provokes the idea that Frances may be what the young men assume her to be, and this fear is only finally dispelled with the revelation of ‘her’ true identity and gender late in Act 5.36As this suggests, although Howard does not discuss The Demoiselle in detail, a number of her conclusions about the academy plays also hold true for this play. The academy plays, she argues, dramatise a situation in whichA new social language is being developed, but it has not yet been widely learned or fully accepted. Hence the nervous anxiety in ballroom and academy plays about learning to handle the body properly and the neurotic obsession with laughing at those who cannot. Hence also the salacious overtone to the many scenes of instruction in these plays. … What is being created is a scopic regime focused on the minutest details of the well-disciplined body, a body whose parts can easily be sexualised[.]n1071737This ‘scopic regime’ is clear in The Demoiselle. Magdalen is required to curtsy on demand, is condemned for her poor execution of the curtsey, and is subsequently told by Frances that under her tuition,An eye, a lip, a finger shall not move,
A toe trip unregarded, but your geat [gait]
And your whole graceful presence shall attract
(Beyond affection) admiration [DM 5.1.speech900]38In performance, these lines can be accompanied by the physical manipulation of the actor playing Magdalen, as in this extract from our workshop on this scene
. Magdalen is typical in many ways of the unsophisticated social climber who wishes to use the academy as a short-cut to accomplishment and a fashionable poise, and she is clearly the object of laughter in the sequence, subjected to the indignity of being manipulated and controlled by the younger, foreign woman. The ‘nervous anxiety … about learning to handle the body properly’ is also evident in the moment at which Magdalen shows off her ‘swaddled’ leg: this is to some extent at least a parody of the sexualisation of body parts found in other academy plays.n1071839Brome also satirises Magdalen’s desire to acquire cultural capital by juxtaposing her consumption of French manners with another kind of consumption: that of alcohol. A stage direction at the beginning of Act 5 specifies that there be ‘Wine on a table’, and in her first speech of the scene Magdalen declares, ‘I will make bold with t’other glass of wine. At a word, I like your French carriage the better, that it allows elder women to drink wine.’ [DM 5.1.speech865]. Given that her name is pronounced ‘maudlin’, Magdalen to some extent reverts to type here, and she proceeds to drink continuously through the scene of instruction.n10719 When Wat discloses that the ordinary is (as he thinks) a brothel, she cries, ‘Oh good lack! What will become of us? Where are we now, Jane? Betrayed! Betrayed! Our honours are betrayed. O my poor Bump; how will thou take this at my hands, though I carry them never so courtly?’ [DM 5.1.speech939]. Dryground underlines her state by declaring, ‘Sfoot, she’s in her maudlin fit! All her wine showers out in tears’ [DM 5.1.speech940]. Magdalen is carried off-stage by Alice and Jane, and her wails of ‘Oh, oh, oh—’ turn to cries of ‘Aye, aye, aye’ when Dryground advises ‘Take the bottle with ye’ [DM 5.1.speech944]. Reconciled with Bumpsey at the end of the scene, Magdalen implores him ‘Think me not drunk, good Bump. A little fashion-sick, or so’ [DM 5.1.speech1037], repeating a phrase coined by Bumpsey himself in Act 3, Scene 2, when he cried ‘This is most excellent! My old beast is / Infected with the fashions: fashion-sick!’ [DM 3.2.speech574].40While Magdalen’s drinking is treated in a comic fashion, there were substantial cultural taboos on women’s drinking in general in the early seventeenth century. Many commentators quote the Biblical prohibition in Ecclesiastes 26.8 (‘A drunken woman is a great plague, for she can not cover her own shame’) and an alleged punishment introduced in ancient Rome: in the words of Richard Young, ‘Romulus made a law, that if any woman were found drunk she should die for it, taking it for granted that when once drunk, it was an easy matter to make her a whore’.n10720 This association between drinking and female promiscuity is a common feature of anti-drinking texts: in a 1612 sermon Thomas Taylor notes the ‘fearful fruits and effects of drunkenness: as wandering eyes, lustful looks, tongues speaking lewd things, gestures, and actions, more seemly for brute beasts then either women or Christians’.n10721 Similarly, the historian Bernard Capp notes that in early modern defamation and civil proceedings, the ‘female drunkard was a figure of particular contempt’ and female drunkenness ‘commonly associated with images of filth, animality, and prostitution’, with insults such as ‘drunken beast’, ‘pissabed quean’ and ‘drunken bitch whore’ being aimed by one woman at another.n10722 Dramatists are often more forgiving, or at least more ambivalent, in their presentation of women who drink, but these associations cannot always be dispelled.n1072341In his depiction of Magdalen’s drinking, Brome again draws on Jonson, in this case Bartholomew Fair (Lady Elizabeth’s Men, 1614), in which Mistress Overdo and Win Littlewit are plied with alcohol at the fair and convinced to dress themselves as courtesans, much to the embarrassment of the overbearing and interfering Overdo; according to a stage direction towards the end of the play, ‘MISTRESS OVERDO is sick, and her husband is silenced’.n10724 Brome replaces Jonson’s literal sickness with a metaphorical ‘fashion-sick[ness]’, but female drunkenness is nonetheless associated with the possibility of prostitution. Particularly important in Brome’s representation of Magdalen’s consumption of wine are stereotypes relating to the drunken older woman and the drunken foreigner. In a late seventeenth-century pamphlet, Thomas Tryon argues that ‘Wine and strong drink should be sparingly drunk by women till they are past child-bearing, because the frequent and common drinking of strong drinks does generate various distempers in the female sex, such as are not to be discoursed of in this place, which their children often bring with them into the world’.n10725 On the other hand, Taylor comments that ‘The moderation of the elder women should be an example to the younger … For a matron to make shipwrack of shamefastness, modesty, sobriety, gravity, and whatsoever else may be the grace of that sex, and age, by giving place to this one inordinate desire, what a grievous sin were it? How many sins attend it?’n10726 Seventeenth-century texts very rarely depict young women as drunk, but the bibulous - and, in many cases, bawdy or downright lecherous - older woman is a common stereotype, and one which can be traced at least as far back as Terence’s Andria, in which the midwife Lesbia is described by the maid, Mysis, as ‘a drunken, harebrained woman, far unfit to take charge of a woman in travail of her first child’.n1073542Drunkenness is often linked with foreignness in early modern texts and, especially, with the Dutch and Germans; Hoenselaars suggests that Brome is here adopting a ‘once successful antiforeign device’ from earlier drama and manipulating it ‘in order to ridicule English characters on the Caroline stage’.n10736 We might nuance this further, however, by looking more closely at Magdalen’s consumption of wine. As Louise Hill Curth and Tanya M. Cassidy describe, ‘Traditionally, the majority of wine consumed in England was imported from France … By the beginning of the seventeenth century, French wines were clearly the market leaders’.n10737 In his 1637 pamphlet Drink and Welcome, John Taylor comments that while English brewers have profited from the widespread drinking of ‘Metheglin, bragget, beer, and headstrong ale’, in recent yearsour land is overflown with wine:With such a deluge, or an inundation
As hath besotted and half drowned our nation.
Some that are scarce worth forty pence a year
Will hardly make a meal with ale or beer:
And will discourse, that wine doth make good blood,
Concocts his meat, and make digestion good,
And after to drink beer, nor will, nor can
He lay a churl upon a gentleman.
Thus Bacchus is adored and deified,
And We Hispanialized and Frenchified,
Whilst noble native ale and beer’s hard fate
Are like old almanacs, quite out of date[.]n1073843As Taylor’s poem suggests, to drink wine in the 1630s was to make a statement about one’s class, cultural sophistication and openness to foreign influence. Brome thus brings together a complex set of anxieties about unrestrained female consumption; remarkably, he does this without demonising Magdalen, something which is underlined in Bumpsey’s relaxed and tolerant acceptance of his wife’s behaviour: ‘Peace, peace’, he tells her, ‘All’s well. At least I know your disease.’ [DM 5.1.speech1036]. Magdalen may transgress the limits of acceptable female behaviour, but she is nonetheless an attractive and funny dramatic character, and it would be hard for even an early modern audience to judge her too harshly.44Interestingly, Brome’s deportment lesson sequence does not merely mock female pretentions and weaknesses. While Jonson’s satire in The Devil is an Ass was focused on women’s desire to mould and improve their bodies, plays of the 1630s devote their attention equally to male and female behaviour; this may be one reason why the satire in The Demoiselle does not confine itself to a critique of women’s habits, despite the apparently feminised space that is created at the start of Act 5. Responding to Magdalen’s declaration that she will adopt a low neckline because she is free from wrinkles and ‘French flea-bites’ (that is, the marks of vermin or venereal disease), Frances attacks male hypocrisy in matters of dress:’T has been suggested by invective men,
Women, to justify themselves that way,
Began that fashion. As on t’other side,
The fashion of men’s brow-locks was perhaps
Devised out of necessity to hide
All ill-graced forehead, or besprinkled with
The outward symptoms of some inward grief,
As, formerly, the saffron-steeped linen,
By some great man found useful against vermin,
Was ta’en up for a fashionable wearing.
Some lord that was no niggard of his beauty
Might bring up narrow brims to publish it;
Another, to obscure his, or perhaps
To hide defects thereof, might bring up broad ones,
As, questionless, the straight, neat-timbered leg
First wore the tronks and long silk-hose. As likely
The baker-knees, or some strange shamble-shanks,
Begat the ankle-breeches. [DM 5.1.speech908]45Frances’s speech parodies a specific characteristic of anti-cosmetic discourse identified by Karim-Cooper, who comments, ‘Anti-cosmetic sermons and pamphlets do not represent women as composites, but repeatedly reduce them, in long lists, to the parts of their bodies or the accoutrements that they might attach to their frames’.n10739 Some pamphlets extend their attack to men; for instance, A Discourse of Auxiliary Beauty, published in 1656, which excoriates those who attempt to remedy defects in their appearance through artificial means:Some highly please themselves in those artificial eyes, hands, legs, noses, teeth and hair, which make up those breaches of the body, which age, or sickness, or other accidents have occasioned, either to the inconveniency of motion, or the deformity of their aspect: How many both men and women, who pretend to high piety and strictness, do (yet without any scruple) by a thrumbed stocking, a bumbast or bolstered garment, by iron bodies, and high heeled shoes, endeavour to redeem themselves, from that may seem less handsome, and (vulgarly) ridiculous, or antic; levelling hereby the inequality of crooked backs, and crump shoulders; setting up one foot parallel to the other: filling out the leanness of their dwindled legs, and the like.n1074046Frances thus turns the tables on men who would critique women’s use of fashion and cosmetics; like the author of A Discourse of Auxiliary Beauty, she suggests that men and women are both equally implicated in Caroline London’s consumer culture. Moreover, the references to older fashions such as ‘tronks and long silk-hose’, popular in the 1610s, suggests that men have been engaging in such activities for decades. As Findlay notes, ‘The knowledge that comes from foreign (male) parts - the Damoiselle’s revelations about male fashions - is that these are performative constructs too’.n10741Comic Form and the Social Milieu47Commodification, and its effects on social structures and ethical concerns in an urban environment, is a classic focus of interest in Jacobean and Caroline city comedy, but in The Demoiselle the critique takes on a particular force. The play’s full title, The Demoiselle, or the New Ordinary, does not just give two alternative titles: it also suggests the extent to which character and location are to be identified. This is made explicit to the audience in Act 3, Scene 1, when Dryground asks Wat,How like you your new mistress, sir, my daughter,
The maidenhead here, the new ordinary -
The Demoiselle, or what you please to call her? [DM 3.1.speech442]48He then proceeds to elaborate his plan:DrygroundThis I have designed to put her off -
I mean her maidenhead - at such a rate
Shall purchase land.
WatHow, good Sir Humphrey, how?
DrygroundShe shall be rifled for.
WatHow! Rifled, sir?
DrygroundYes, rifled Wat; the most at three fair throws,
With three fair dice, must win and wear her, Wat. [DM 3.1.speech468-472]49The plot centres on this grotesque identification of a young woman, her virginity and the place in which it is apparently for sale. Of course, as it turns out, nothing is what it seems, but this does not diminish the outrageously unpleasant nature of Dryground’s supposed course of action.50Elsewhere, the apparent raffle of Frances’s virginity is juxtaposed with many other forms of consumption. As we have seen, Bumpsey vows to match the spending of his son-in-law, Valentine Dryground, thinking the young man to be as prodigal as his father; as a result Magdalen attempts to invest in the kind of cultural capital that will enable her to live up to her fine new clothes, but finds herself engaged in consumption of a different kind. While the Bumpseys are treated relatively kindly, other forms of consumption - in particular those linked to financial exploitation - are treated more harshly. In Theatre and Crisis, Butler aptly describes The Demoiselle as ‘a sweeping broadside against the systems of usury and law in which his sympathies are unequivocally with the victims of these two professions, the beggar-maids and ruined gentlemen cast off from society’ (211). The play opens with a ruined knight, Dryground, who having wasted his inheritance mortgages his land in order to gain more funds, and Vermin, the man who hopes to consume those lands. Throughout, Vermin is imagined as having swallowed the goods and estates of other men; Brookall, one of his victims, describes him as ‘the vermin / That hath devoured me living’ [DM 4.1.speech692]. The criticism is not merely of an individual; for Brookall, the law itself has become a devourer, gulping his means of support into its ‘Hydra-throated maw’ [DM 2.1.speech352]. As Butler suggests, the situation of the ruined men - in particular Brookall, who has been far less actively engaged in his own ruin than Dryground - is productively juxtaposed with the plight of Phyllis, who cheerfully begs in order to be able to support her mother. The role of men such as Vermin is again pointedly invoked in the sequences in Acts 2 and 4 in which the usurer refuses to give any money to Phyllis: as Kaufmann points out, since Vermin’s ‘sin is unnatural greed for money its opposite virtue would be almsgiving’.n1074251In his depiction of Vermin, Brome follows other writers of city comedy. As Butler notes, the names of some characters, and the imagery surrounding them, carry ‘suggestions of a beast-fable’ of the kind also found in Jonson’s Volpone. Vermin’s name links him with various kinds of degraded animals, including parasitic insects; Butler comments that he is ‘inhumanely and cruelly devoted to getting wealth, and … ends the play merely as “vermin” assailed as a common pest by his enemies’.n10743 Similarly, Vermin is consistently associated with the devil - in Act 2, for instance, Valentine tells Oliver, ‘Thou’lt ne’er endure [Vermin’s] breath: it stinks of brimstone’ [DM 2.1.speech228] - a tactic adopted by Jacobean dramatists such as Middleton, who calls his usurer in A Trick to Catch the Old One Dampit, associating him with hell and the infernal.n10744 Middleton and Brome draw on a long dramatic heritage; as A.B. Stonex notes in a wide-ranging account of the stage usurer, this figure may derive at least in part from quasi-allegorical representations of avarice in Tudor morality plays.n10745 Stonex describes Vermin as ‘a late and loathsome descendant of Avarice’, and suggests that this play exemplifies ‘the simplest form of the plot containing the usurer [Vermin], his rebellious daughter [Alice], and the prodigal [Wat]’.n1074652The morality play lineage of the usurer appears even more strongly in another Caroline play, Robert Davenport’s A New Trick to Cheat the Devil, performed some time between 1625 and 1639, when it was printed.n10747 This play features an inset masque sequence in which a series of emblematic figures, each carrying a motto, appear to the ruined gentleman Slightall, who has just called on the devil to help him. One figure enters ‘with money bags’ and the motto ‘I am an usurer’; Slightall expands on this, commenting ‘I am an usurer, Satan’s eldest son, / And heir to all his torments’; he tells the usurer, ‘thou hast swallowed / Young heirs, and hell must one day swallow thee’.n10748 Slightall eventually exchanges his soul for unlimited financial support from the Devil, commenting,I see the Devil yet hath more honesty
Then hath his son, the usurer; for to him
A man may pawn his soul a thousand times
Ere he can get a penny, but the father’s
Of a far more free nature
(G1r)53Brome’s dramaturgy is less obviously emblematic than Davenport’s, and The Demoiselle is more ‘realist’ in many respects than A New Trick to Cheat the Devil. However, The Demoiselle depends on a kind of double vision: Vermin is simultaneously a realistically drawn character and a character type, with the morality play associations of the usurer (deployed so explicitly by Davenport) acting as a kind of sub-text for his actions.54Similarly, Phyllis’s begging is initially treated in a realistic fashion. Vermin and Sir Amphilus both refuse to give her money on her first appearance in Act 2; Vermin threatens her with whipping, and although Sir Amphilus initially describes her as ‘the prettiest merry beggar’ [DM 2.1.speech337] - itself an attempt to categorise Phyllis according to a set of romantic and sexual clichés that Brome investigates in detail in The Jovial Crew - he is ready to flee as soon as he thinks that she is about to turn her attention onto him. As the play goes on, however, she is increasingly enveloped by a romance narrative in which she is given a miraculous fortune by Bumpsey and Valentine - who are now competing to see who can be the most generous - and eventually gains ‘father, friends, and husband in one day’ [DM 5.1.speech1048].55As this suggests, the emblematic aspects of Brome’s dramaturgy in The Demoiselle do not mean that the play does not incorporate realistic elements; indeed, Caroline comedy is often marked by its sustained engagement with real locations, and the specifics of social relationships as they pertain to particular locations, a tendency which has led to the term ‘place-realist comedy’ often being applied.n10749 Examples include Shackerley Marmion’s Holland’s Leaguer (Prince Charles’s Men, 1631), Thomas Nabbes’s Covent Garden (Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, 1632), James Shirley’s Hyde Park (Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, 1632), and Brome’s own The Weeding of Covent Garden, The Sparagus Garden and The New Academy. As Steggle notes, place-realism in itself was nothing new, since it appears in many Elizabethan and Jacobean city comedies: ‘what develops in the 1630s’, he argues, ‘is a growing interest in using such place-realism to offer commentary on national politics’.n1075056In The Demoiselle, place-realist technique is particularly crucial to the effect of Acts 2 and 4, explicitly set in the Temple Walks, a key location in terms of the play’s representation of financial and legal exploitation. Here too, however, Brome’s technique is not purely realist. On two occasions the appearance of mute, emblematic figures is specified in the octavo text. In Act 2, Scene 1, Phyllis declares,I have allowance here, as well as any
Brokers, projectors, common bail, or bankrupts,
Panders, and cheaters of all sorts, that mix here
’Mongst men of honour, worship, lands and money.
[DM 2.1.speech339]57As she speaks, according to a stage direction, ‘Lawyers and others pass over the stage as conferring two by two.’ In Act 4, Scene 1, Brookall makes a similarly broad comments on the habitués of the Temple Walks, saying:These walks afford to miserable man
Undone by suits leave yet to sit, or go,
Though in a ragged one, and look upon
The giants that over-threw him, though they strut
And are swol’n bigger by his emptiness.
[DM 4.1.speech692]58As he speaks, ‘lawyers and others pass over the stage’. There might be various ways to handle the Temple Walks sequences in performance, as our workshop on the scene suggested (see [NOTE n6486]); one particular issue might be whether they interact with, or even seem aware of, other characters on the stage. In any case, even if Phyllis attempts to engage them, the lawyers retain an impersonal, even detached, quality. As Butler comments, Brookall and Phyllis become ‘choric commentators or presenters of a picture’, and the Temple Walks are ‘a realistic setting which the presenters lead us to understand symbolically. It is a displaying of the professions; we see less people than a gallery of social types that the pervasive imagery of hell and devils invite us to reinterpret as a moral gallery too, an anatomy of the world’.n1075159As such comments suggest, the stylisation of these sequences does not mean that they lack political or social force. Butler links the presentation of the law in The Demoiselle with the reliance of Charles I ‘on using law courts as a means of enforcing policy, developing legal devices as fiscal expedients, and appealing to judicial opinions as a substitute for a sanction he could not rely on parliament to provide’.n10752 Similarly, Steggle argues that by the time it has finished, ‘the play has asked us a number of difficult questions about the mechanisms not just of usury but also of law and justice in Charles’s England’.n1075360The force of Brome’s critique is achieved in part through the play’s dramaturgy. The Demoiselle is extremely tightly plotted; as we are reminded on several occasions, its events take place during the course of one day, and much of its action takes place in two clearly defined locations, the Temple Walks and the ‘new ordinary’ established by Dryground with Vermin’s money. It is also self-conscious about its generic status as comedy. Dryground tells Wat in Act 3,Now, Wat, observe me,
As an ingenious critic would observe
The first scene of a comedy, for fear
He lose the plot.
[DM 3.1.speech452]61Like The New Inn, Brome’s play has classical precedents in Roman New Comedy. Martin Butler traces the narrative concerning Laetitia in The New Inn back to Terence’s Andria, ‘in which a lost daughter is hidden under an assumed identity’;n10754 in The Demoiselle, the audience are teased with the possibility that Frances is Dryground’s long-lost daughter, only to find that she is concealed under a different assumed identity, that of the beggar-maid. In this play, too, the Terentian motif of the clandestine marriage is brought into play, as the marriage of Frances and Alice is presented to Brookall and Vermin as a fait accompli. Elsewhere, the presence of Sir Amphilus also regularly lightens the tone. Kaufmann notes, with implicit frustration, ‘Amphilus’s role makes no sense except thematically. He accomplishes nothing and influences no one’.n10755 However, Sir Amphilus’s role makes perfect sense theatrically: like clown roles elsewhere in Caroline drama, such as Hodge in John Clavell’s The Soddered Citizen (King’s Men, 1630), his narrative function is negligible, but his theatrical purpose is to entertain the audience with his stage dialect, his flights of linguistic and poetic fancy, and his double act with the more down-to-earth Trebasco.n10756 These connections and techniques perhaps help to remind an audience that The Demoiselle is, and will remain, a comedy, despite the extremely problematic character of what we assume to be Dryground’s scheme, and the seriousness with which Vermin’s activities are presented.***62Like many of Brome’s plays, The Demoiselle has received no known theatrical revivals since the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642. This is a shame. The play is eminently stageable, although like Jonson’s Epicoene it would benefit from performance by a single-sex cast - male or female - which would give Frances the invisibility necessary for her/his successful masquerade and would allow the ambiguity of the character full reign. Although its plot may seem fiendishly complex, Brome’s dramaturgy in The Demoiselle is remarkably deft, giving the narrative a notable clarity; the play includes some of the dramatist’s most carefully worked large-cast scenes, and some of his most accomplished handling of shifts in tone and mood. The play also provides some excellent opportunities for experienced comic actors, especially in the set-piece sequences involving characters such as Bumpsey, Sir Amphilus and Magdalen. This introduction has focused much of its attention on the seventeenth-century contexts of The Demoiselle, as these are elements which require the most explanation for modern readers and practitioners. Such a focus potentially has, however, the unfortunate effect of making the play’s concerns seem remote or archaic. In fact, like many other early modern plays, the attraction of The Demoiselle lies in the way in which it feels both excitingly alien and surprisingly modern. While the play is thoroughly embedded in its late-1630s cultural moment, the issues that it raises and the human relationships it depicts are nonetheless wholly accessible to modern eyes and ears.
n10665 ‘All’s gone! Still thou’rt a gentleman, that’s all; but a poor one, that’s nothing.’
n10666 ‘literally subverts the family and the hierarchy of loyalties which makes for the good community’.
n10667 ‘natural love, parental and romantic, triumphs over selfishness and greed’.
n10669 ‘a satiric representation of all classes of society’.
n10670 ‘theatrum mundi, an exposure of a society bound together by law not love … The strategy enables [Brome’s] indictment of a corrupt England to be comprehensive and memorable while remaining fully dramatic’.
n10671 ‘presents not a single system of law and justice but a number of interlocking and indeed competing ones … But the system that brings order at the end of the play is predicated, perhaps unsurprisingly, not on legal obligation, nor on commercial advantage, but on family ties and mutual respect’.
n10672 ‘to critique the commodification of women and the corrupt capitalist world of self-interest’.
n10673 ‘the practice of fathers like Vermine [sic] who auctioned off their daughters to the highest bidder’
n10674 ‘“False Frenchmen” in Richard Brome’s Plays’; Efstathiou-Lavabre examines the complex treatment of stereotypes about French behaviour in Brome’s drama, and in The Demoiselle in particular.
n10675 when the playhouses finally reopened after a prolonged outbreak of plague,
n10676 during which a number of writers jostled for the position of Poet Laureate.
n10677 wife of the keeper of the lunatic asylum.
n10678 Steggle’s interpretation can be found in another allusion to Buzzard in the Praeludium, or Induction, written for a revival of Thomas Goffe’s The Careless Shepherdess at Salisbury Court in the late 1630s or early 1640s.
n10679 I heard a fellow Once on this stage cry Doodle, doodle, doo, Beyond compare; I’d give the other shilling To see him act the changeling once again.
n10680 drawing attention to the skills of the Salisbury Court performers who are currently in action on stage.
n10681 Richard Perkins, Anthony Turner, William Sherlock, John Young, John Sumpner, Edward May, Curtis Grevill, William Wilbraham, Timothy Reade and William Cartwright the younger.
n10682 as a member of Worcester’s Men in March 1602;
n10683 Hanno in Thomas Nabbes’s Hannibal and Scipio.
n10684 all first traced in the late 1610s and early 1620s.
n10685 and so was in his early thirties in 1639;
n10686 was around the same age.
n10687 by the 1630s he was becoming known as a performer of comic roles such as Buzzard in The English Moor.
n10688 and so may also have been in their early thirties, or possibly older.
n10689 meaning that he was probably at least in his mid-late twenties.
n10690 female subjectivity.
n10691 or to the involvement of Davenant and Sir John Suckling in the second Army Plot in May 1641.
n10692 and had their ears cropped.
n10693 Thomas Killigrew, Lewis Sharpe and Richard Lovelace.
n10694 in the presence of sundry men and women?’
n10695 ‘The distinctiveness of Stuart representations of female identity and agency derives from their simultaneous embracing of and recoiling from women’s use of theatrical arts’.
n10696 Henrietta Maria.
n10697 ‘receptivity to French fashion that her presence helped to facilitate and which she was concerned to promote’.
n10698 ballet de cour.
n10699 ‘particular configuration of cross-dressing is important because the construction of gender becomes a doubly theatrical as well as prosthetic exercise’.
n10700 a play which was current on the stage in the mid 1630s,
n10701 in which the boy actor’s wig is removed.
n10702 ‘Frank shows how all women reproduce themselves as artefacts, effectively constructing themselves from the transvestite viewpoint of the male gaze’.
n10703 ‘Français’ helps to reinforce the character’s supposed nationality - it also has important theatrical echoes.
n10704 ‘Brome’s Damoiselle [sic] seems to be deliberately constructed as a mirror image of Jonson’s text, in that his “Frank” is a cross-dressed boy’.
n10705 ‘the implosion of an early modern family from within’.
n10707 While critics have also seen affinities between The Demoiselle and plays such as The Staple of News and The Magnetic Lady,
n10708 ventriloquisation of the female voice and female experience.
n10709 all our women here That are of spirit and fashion flock unto her, As to their president, their law, their canon, More than they ever did, to oracle Forman. Such rare receipts she has, sir, for the face; Such oils, such tinctures, such pomatumns, Such perfumes, medicines, quintessences, etc. And such a mistress of behaviour; She knows, from the duke’s daughter, to the doxy, What is their due just, and no more!
n10710 Magdalen Bumpsey.
n10711 I have much wondered why our English above other nations should so much dote upon new fashions, but I wonder at our want of wit that we cannot invent them ourselves, but when one is grown stale run presently over into France, to seek a new, making that noble and flourishing kingdom the magasin of our fooleries[.]
n10712 ‘a somewhat old-fashioned ruff’.
n10713 along with the fervor linked to adopting French fashions in the English capital’.
n10714 touched on anxieties about women’s participation in polite society’.
n10715 operated in London between 1635 and 1639.
n10716 early modern comedy.
n10717 A new social language is being developed, but it has not yet been widely learned or fully accepted. Hence the nervous anxiety in ballroom and academy plays about learning to handle the body properly and the neurotic obsession with laughing at those who cannot. Hence also the salacious overtone to the many scenes of instruction in these plays. … What is being created is a scopic regime focused on the minutest details of the well-disciplined body, a body whose parts can easily be sexualised[.]
n10718 this is to some extent at least a parody of the sexualisation of body parts found in other academy plays.
n10719 Magdalen to some extent reverts to type here, and she proceeds to drink continuously through the scene of instruction.
n10720 it was an easy matter to make her a whore’.
n10721 ‘fearful fruits and effects of drunkenness: as wandering eyes, lustful looks, tongues speaking lewd things, gestures, and actions, more seemly for brute beasts then either women or Christians’.
n10722 being aimed by one woman at another.
n10723 associations cannot always be dispelled.
n10724 ‘MISTRESS OVERDO is sick, and her husband is silenced’.
n10725 ‘Wine and strong drink should be sparingly drunk by women till they are past child-bearing, because the frequent and common drinking of strong drinks does generate various distempers in the female sex, such as are not to be discoursed of in this place, which their children often bring with them into the world’.
n10726 ‘The moderation of the elder women should be an example to the younger … For a matron to make shipwrack of shamefastness, modesty, sobriety, gravity, and whatsoever else may be the grace of that sex, and age, by giving place to this one inordinate desire, what a grievous sin were it? How many sins attend it?’
n10735 ‘a drunken, harebrained woman, far unfit to take charge of a woman in travail of her first child’.
n10736 ‘in order to ridicule English characters on the Caroline stage’.
n10737 By the beginning of the seventeenth century, French wines were clearly the market leaders’.
n10738 our land is overflown with wine: With such a deluge, or an inundation As hath besotted and half drowned our nation. Some that are scarce worth forty pence a year Will hardly make a meal with ale or beer: And will discourse, that wine doth make good blood, Concocts his meat, and make digestion good, And after to drink beer, nor will, nor can He lay a churl upon a gentleman. Thus Bacchus is adored and deified, And We Hispanialized and Frenchified, Whilst noble native ale and beer’s hard fate Are like old almanacs, quite out of date[.]
n10739 ‘Anti-cosmetic sermons and pamphlets do not represent women as composites, but repeatedly reduce them, in long lists, to the parts of their bodies or the accoutrements that they might attach to their frames’.
n10740 Some highly please themselves in those artificial eyes, hands, legs, noses, teeth and hair, which make up those breaches of the body, which age, or sickness, or other accidents have occasioned, either to the inconveniency of motion, or the deformity of their aspect: How many both men and women, who pretend to high piety and strictness, do (yet without any scruple) by a thrumbed stocking, a bumbast or bolstered garment, by iron bodies, and high heeled shoes, endeavour to redeem themselves, from that may seem less handsome, and (vulgarly) ridiculous, or antic; levelling hereby the inequality of crooked backs, and crump shoulders; setting up one foot parallel to the other: filling out the leanness of their dwindled legs, and the like.
n10741 As Findlay notes, ‘The knowledge that comes from foreign (male) parts - the Damoiselle’s revelations about male fashions - is that these are performative constructs too’.
n10742 ‘sin is unnatural greed for money its opposite virtue would be almsgiving’.
n10743 assailed as a common pest by his enemies’.
n10744 associating him with hell and the infernal.
n10745 as A.B. Stonex notes in a wide-ranging account of the stage usurer, this figure may derive at least in part from quasi-allegorical representations of avarice in Tudor morality plays.
n10746 and the prodigal [Wat]’.
n10747 performed some time between 1625 and 1639, when it was printed.
n10748 ‘thou hast swallowed / Young heirs, and hell must one day swallow thee’.
n10749 ‘place-realist comedy’ often being applied.
n10750 ‘is a growing interest in using such place-realism to offer commentary on national politics’.
n10751 ‘a realistic setting which the presenters lead us to understand symbolically. It is a displaying of the professions; we see less people than a gallery of social types that the pervasive imagery of hell and devils invite us to reinterpret as a moral gallery too, an anatomy of the world’.
n10752 ‘on using law courts as a means of enforcing policy, developing legal devices as fiscal expedients, and appealing to judicial opinions as a substitute for a sanction he could not rely on parliament to provide’.
n10753 ‘the play has asked us a number of difficult questions about the mechanisms not just of usury but also of law and justice in Charles’s England’.
n10754 ‘in which a lost daughter is hidden under an assumed identity’;
n10755 ‘Amphilus’s role makes no sense except thematically. He accomplishes nothing and influences no one’.
n10756 his narrative function is negligible, but his theatrical purpose is to entertain the audience with his stage dialect, his flights of linguistic and poetic fancy, and his double act with the more down-to-earth Trebasco.
.