The Northern Lass
Introduction1The Northern Lass was a huge success not only when it was first staged in 1629 both at the outdoor Globe Theatre and in the smaller indoor Blackfriars performance space, but also well into the eighteenth century, when its particular emphases on music and song and its genuinely charming female protagonist alike appeared to chime with the theatrical sensibilities of the era. The registered success of those first performances is partly preserved in the archive due to the comparable failure of another play at much the same time. Ben Jonson had been Brome’s mentor and chief influence but in 1629 it was the work of the protégé that was clearly in the ascendant. Jonson himself acknowledges this in the dedicatory poem that he contributed to the 1632 quarto publication of Brome’s playtext: I had you for a servant once, Dick Brome,
And you performed a servant’s faithful parts.
Now you are got into a nearer room
Of fellowship, professing my old arts.
And you do do them well, with good applause . . .n101832Jonson had not always been quite so generous about the success of Brome’s plays in comparison with his own. In the maelstrom of poetic exchanges that followed the failure on the stage at its first performances of Jonson’s own play of 1629, his inn-based romance, The New Inn, Jonson himself had ruefully declared that ‘Brome’s sweepings’ fared as well as properly crafted plays, though he thought better of that sideswipe and excised the remark from the version of the poem now known as the ‘Ode to Himself’ when it was included in the 1631 octavo printing of the play.n10184 3Paratextual materials to the printed versions of early modern drama are often important indicators as to their initial reception and the dedicatory poems attached to the 1632 quarto of The Northern Lass are no exception. A particular clue to the initial stage success of The Northern Lass lies in the poetic responses by playwrights and poets other than Jonson and their focus on the character of Constance. F.T., for example, talks of how his beautiful heroine has become ‘common’ property (A3r) and in a second poem on the same theme asks the rhetorical question ‘Who would not have a copy of this lass?’ referring both to published playtext and character, and Thomas Dekker describes her as ‘A girl / Twice worth the Cleopatrian pearl’ (A4r, spelling modernised).4Constance (or at least the boy actor interpreting her role) appears, then, to have charmed or seduced a number of audience members. Brome’s dedicatory letter for the 1632 publication, addressed to Richard Holford Esquire, suggests as much: ‘A country lass I present you, that Minerva-like was a brain-born child, and jovially begot, though now she seeks her fortune. She came out of the cold North, thinly clad; but wit had pity on her, action appareled her, and plaudits clapped her cheeks warm’ (1632, A2r, spelling modernised). As well as the stereotypical constructions of southern sunshine in stark juxtaposition to the nipping and biting airs of the ‘cold North’, the dedicatory letter performs a number of striking actions which recast both the writer and the recipient as participants in the play. Brome himself seems to assume responsibility for having brought Constance to London (in the play this is the action presumably carried out by her uncle and guardian, Sir Paul Squelch, in whose Middlesex property she is resident by the start of the dramatic action). In turn, Holford, from whom he and she (both play and character) seek patronage, is recast as Sir Philip Luckless, the nobleman with whom Constance falls in love on her first encounter with him. It is an intriguing revisiting of the tropes and actions of the play. Holford (1600-61) was a Gray’s Inn lawyer who owned and rented properties in the Drury Lane area at around the time that Christopher Beeston was developing the Cockpit Theatre.n10185 At the very least this early patron locates Brome in the theatre-literate circles of the Inns of Court that we also know to have been the mainstay of contemporaries such as James Shirley. In the same document, Brome talks of the play having enjoyed several performances before falling out of the repertory in the previous three years: ‘which gained her many lovers and friends, by whose good liking she prosperously lived until her late long silence and discontinuance’ (1632, A2v, spelling modernized). The latter reference to the play’s ‘compelled’ discontinuance may refer to theatre closures in 1631 necessitated by an outbreak of the plague in London, though Matthew Steggle has speculated there may have been some now buried legal trouble with the play that silenced it. 5Certainly, as users of this edition will find, Constance is a striking character from the history of the early modern stage, all the more so when she is embodied in performance (as our workshopping of central scenes involving the character indicated and which the full staged reading of the play at Shakespeare’s Globe as part of the ‘Read not Dead’ series in London in November 2008 confirmed). Her part serves to challenge a number of critical donnés and suppositions about early modern drama and dialect as well as female roles. Voice and dialect in the play6Jonathan Hope has made a persuasive case that what we find in the few Shakespearean examples of dialect and accent are not observed accents but an inherited literary tradition of the same. Conducting a detailed study of Edgar’s assumption of the so-called ‘Kentish’ accent in 4.6 of Lear, Hope traces its provenance in Golding’s translation of the Mercury-Apollo episode involving cattle-rustling in the Metamorphoses.n10186 Arguing that Shakespeare could have presented an accurate version of this if he wished, Hope offers an insightful reading of that text’s negotiations of performance and the ’artificial control of language’ as a display of learning and judgement in his account of Edgar. What persuades less is when that argument is widened out to suggest a general fact about early modern culture and attitude to accent and dialect, in the theatre and elsewhere. At least, the argument does not fare well when widened out to Brome since he, unlike Shakespeare who when he does represent dialect and accent phonetically does so in the context of ’national identity’ (witness the various soldiers in Henry V), appears to be interested in accent represented phonetically as a key to regional identity. Extended (and largely accurate) phonetic representations of dialect appear in plays such as The Damoiselle and The Sparagus Garden and nowhere more so than in his portrayal of Constance, The Northern Lass of this playtext’s title.7In the plotline of the play, Constance has come to London from a fairly sheltered life in the Bishopric of Durham to live in the house of her guardian and uncle, the Justice of the Peace, Sir Paul Squelch. Her linguistic associations with Durham therefore remain largely intact when she speaks in the play; and, while the ‘difference’ of her speech is a point of comment by several characters, she is not necessarily a subject of mockery, except by characters such as Captain Anvil who are scarcely represented sympathetically within the play.n10187 In 2.1. 207 Audrey Fitchow notes to her brother, Walter Wigeon, that Constance (as yet unseen and unheard on the stage) ‘sings, and speaks so pretty Northernly’. In the printed version of the play Brome appears to have provided guidance for the boy actor performing Constance as to how to pronounce or stress certain dialect terms or phrases by recording them phonetically. For example, Constance’s touching if aberrant narrative to Mistress Trainwell in 2.2. 225 of her first encounter with Sir Philip Luckless in Squelch’s orchard:And what did he then do, trow you, but tuke me thus by th’hand, and thus he kust me; he said I were a deaft lass, but there he feigned . . . Then by and by as he walk’d, he ask’d mine uncle gin he would give him me to make a lady till him. And by my trouth Mistress Trainwell, I lee not, I blushed and luked upon him as I would fain a hed it so. Mine uncle said ‘yes’, and Sir Philip shuke my hand, and gude feath my heart joyed at it. God gin the priest had been by.8Work during the project with a range of actors fresh to the text revealed that it took a relatively short time to adjust to delivering Constance’s speeches and their particular idiosyncracies of language, suggesting that in terms of the script working as a practical tool for the performers Brome had achieved his end. Audiences fresh to Brome also found it reasonably easy to follow and comprehend the jist of the meanings and all of this points to a rather subtler deployment of regional accent than the early modern stage is usually given credit for. As Katie Wales has pointed out (partly in reference to another Brome play that heavily features dialect, The Late Lancashire Witches), ‘there was ambivalence . . . in the connotations of Northerness and Northern dialect in the literature of the period . . . It cannot be assumed that condescension to the North and Northern English was the only attitude.’n10188 The different quality of Constance’s ‘voice’ in the play is, of course, also achieved by her association with song and the performance of song, and it is notable that most of the identifiable ballads she delivers are themselves either northern in provenance or feature northern dialect terms. Her voice is consistent throughout the play in this respect and this helps to reaffirm her ostensible function as something of a moral touchstone in those scenes in which she appears alongside the rather more ramshackle gathering of Londoners who for the most part occupy the space and speech communities of the play. There is, of course, also a notable instance of the impersonation of Constance’s northern tones when Camitha Holdup, the prostitute employed by Sir Paul as his mistress but also to perform the role of his niece in exchanges with the marriage-hungry Walter Wigeon, puts on Constance’s Northern delivery (Camitha herself has West Country origins) and sings northern bawdy ballads herself in the process. 9In all likelihood early modern London audiences would have had highly attuned ears for dialect and could adjust to those instances where dramatists used it purely for comic effect — the kind of ‘stage Englishes’ explored by Paula Blank in her comprehensive study, Broken Englishn10189 — and those, such as here, where the accuracy and therefore the socio-cultural connotations of the linguistic representation seem key. Yorkshire dialect of the kind represented by Constance in the play would surely have been familiar to London ears in the sense that the city of York was a significant location in terms of Caroline politics, not least in 1629 when The Northern Lass was staged.n10190 Sir Thomas Wentworth, himself a Yorkshire man, had been appointed Lord President of the Council of the North just a year earlier and the city was a gathering point for northern businessmen and political aspirants who would also have had regular business in London, along with those present in the capital for the purposes of pursuing business and lawsuits.n10191 York was also a city with strong theatrical and publishing connections which added to the sense of cultural interaction and flow with the capital. It is this cultural world that the ballad-collecting Wigeon refers to when he speaks of Constance in terms of another northern item for his collection: ‘dear sister, to the country lass again. You said she spoke and sung northernly. I have a great many southern songs already; but northern airs nips it dead. “York, York, for my money”’ (2.1. 215).10The specific significations of the ballad culture portrayed in The Northern Lass will be discussed in more detail in the next section on the musical elements to this play, but it is worth pausing momentarily in this introduction to stress the linguistic innovation that Brome’s creation of Constance and her distinct language register in this play constitutes. If the fifth act scenes with Squelch in disguise as a Spaniard being spoken to in Cornish by Salomon Nonsense on the grounds that Cornwall is the shire geographically nearest to Spain would seem to be examples of the more usual early modern practice of using county or foreign accents for comic ends, the often moving presences, literal and aural, of Constance and Camitha Holdup in this play ensure that we cannot make the comic or parodic the only version of Brome’s interest in linguistic diversity and speech communities in his plays.n10192 Music, song, and ballad-culture11As the above discussion of accent and dialect in The Northern Lass makes clear, this is a play deeply concerned with the power of voice to perform certain utterances and social roles, and in particular the cultural and performative power of song and music.n10194 As well as being known for her striking and ‘pretty’ Northern accent, Constance is a renowned singer. It is notable that her prospective suitor, Wigeon, has heard prior to ever meeting her in person that she ‘sings, and speaks so pretty northernly’ (2.1). At several moments in the play, the audience witnesses Constance’s recourse to song and its ability to enchant and beguile listeners. The seductive qualities of voice are made manifest on the stage. 12The first instance of this is in 2.2 when Wigeon’s hapless tutor, Captain Anvil, has come to Squelch’s residence in the guise of Sir Philip Luckless under the mistaken apprehension that it is a high-class brothel. Constance, spatially positioned in the above, in the diegetic world of the play standing on a balcony looking down at this noisy and offensive intruder into her intimate domestic space, sings to distract Anvil, while Mistress Trainwell goes downstairs and prepares for a face-to-face encounter with him. Constance will also sing when disguised as one of the wedding masquers who arrive ostensibly to ‘celebrate’ the Luckless-Fitchow marriage in Act 3 (though in practice their arrival is more a carnivalesque invasion akin to that of the Ladies’ Collegiate to Morose’s household in 3.6 of Jonson’s Epicœne (1609), a play whose tropes and structures Brome appears to have had at the forefront of his imagination at several points during the composition and creation of this play — Triedwell’s invective against the institution of marriage to Fitchow in 1.2 directly reworks Truewit’s haranguing of Morose on the subject of ‘goblin matrimony’ in Jonson’s play (2.2.32). As further proof of his poor judgement despite his professional status as a Justice of the Peace, Sir Paul, Constance’s uncle, makes an aural connection between the female masquer’s lovely singing voice and that of his niece but never makes a direct correlation. Voice as an identifying category of character remains however a deep concern of the playwright throughout this play, which makes it all the more puzzling why he renders his vocal and articulate heroine so resolutely silent at the denouement. It is a silence that is all the more puzzling in performance, as the staged reading at the Globe Theatre in 2008 made all too clear. An audience that have been seemingly trained or nurtured to regard Constance as a moral touchstone find themselves all at sea in the confusing fifth act of disguises and revelations, where she is given no lines or action in what unfolds before them.13Since song is the cultural form to which Constance instinctively turns in social situations to achieve voice and agency in proceedings which may be threatening to her, it should not therefore surprise us that it also to song that she turns in her state of emotional and mental breakdown following the marriage of the man she has fallen so deeply in love with to the rich city widow, Audrey Fitchow (Wigeon’s sister). In those scenes in which we witness Constance in her state of distracted melancholia, it is song which serves as both consolation for and utterance of her dejected condition. The songs of this play have been the subject of considerable scholarly investigation in part due to the survival of witnesses to their lyrics and music in a manuscript collection held in the New York Public Library, MSS Drexel 4041 and 4257.n10195 Several of the songs there, including ‘A bonny bonny bird had I’, ‘As I was gathering April flowers’, ‘Some say my love is but a man’, and ‘Nor love nor fate dare I accuse’ are attributed to John Wilson, longtime composer and performer with the King’s Men, further suggesting the significance of these songs to the compositional process and the performative impact of the play. While Tiffany Stern is surely right to suggest that on the whole songs even ones important to the play’s plotline are often ‘lost’ from the print survivals of these performances, the history of the songs in The Northern Lass and by extension in Brome in general may suggest some important variations to that pattern.n10196 Critics such as R. W. Ingram long ago recognized the ‘semi-operatic’ quality of Brome’s play and certainly they seemed to draw the interest of eighteenth-century practitioners with a fondness for additional songs and music, but the embeddedness of song in the plotlines and effects of this play, particularly but not solely in the Constance or ‘fake’ Constance scenes, suggests as well a more integrated understanding of musical and song-based culture on the part of Brome that went beyond pure theatrical effect or innovation.n10197 14Brome was clearly fascinated by both the cultural manifestations of melancholia as a state of mind and behaviour, and its theatrical possibilities and potential. As well as The Northern Lass and the previously discussed lost play The Love-Sick Maid, also dated to 1629, the year in which Ben Jonson too would explore the topic of love-melancholy in The New Inn, Brome would make the theatrical ‘curing’ of Peregrine’s melancholia the heart of the action in The Antipodes.n10198 His parody of the neoplatonic excesses of the Caroline court, and in particular the circles and networks satelliting the orbit of the French Queen consort Henrietta Maria would also revisit related ideas, as its title, The Love-Sick Court suggests.n10199 As the 1629 analogue of Jonson’s The New Inn indicates, other dramatists were clearly exercised by similar ideas and thinking in the Caroline period; John Ford created a sustained dramatic exploration of love-melancholy that same year in The Lover’s Melancholy. These dramatists were all in some respects responding to the publishing phenomenon that was Robert Burton’s compendious work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621 but which went through several editions, a mark of its popularity and the general interest it provoked.n10200 In this study, love-melancholy was a major category of analysis. In this respect Constance, and the particular scenes in which we as an audience witness efforts to “cure” her of her distracted condition, are indicative of Caroline theatrical fashions.15The fake doctor who ‘operates’ on Constance’s love melancholia is, in practice, Oliver Pate, Luckless’s household servant in disguise. He encourages another of Constance’s suitors, the hapless Cornish gentleman Salamon Nonsense, to feign the role of Luckless, the man she truly loves and whose seeming disinterest in her has provoked her state of melancholia. This is another instance in the play of social role-play and feigning and one of several problematic impersonations of Sir Philip and in many respects is part of an ongoing exploration in Brome’s work of theatre’s capacity both to perform psychotherapy but also to be psychologically damaging in its ability to feign and deceive. But these scenes are doubly significant and self-consciously metatheatrical in that they carry a strong inter-theatrical relationship with two earlier Shakespeare dramas, Hamlet (1601), in which the rejected Ophelia sings bawdy ballads as her mind loses a full grasp on her surroundings and which in turn presage her death in the willow-edged river, and his collaborative 1613-14 drama, co-authored with John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen in which the Jailer’s daughter’s unrequited love for Palamon leads to her own breakdown.n1020116But in the case of Constance it is interest in a particular type of performance that fascinates Brome’s creative instincts most, and that is singing. Brome’s interest in music throughout his canon is well established. In terms of musical categories and subgenres, it is ballad culture that is most overtly evoked in the songs performed in The Northern Lass by both Constance and Camitha Holdup, who, as previously noted, assumes the role of Constance as part of an elaborate scheme by Sir Paul Squelch to conceal his keeping of a mistress. Ballads are mentioned very early in the play’s proceedings, when Wigeon, reacting to news of The Northern Lass as a potential bride, thinks of her as a kind of northern commodity akin to the ballads from Yorkshire that he has been readily purchasing.n10202 This professed interest in ballads bursts out in Wigeon’s behavour in interesting ways - in Act 5 when he breaks into song (5.2. 924) and encourages a form of communal singing, but as ever the act of shared experience is also an exclusionist one. The song is deployed partly to isolate and taunt his own sister Fitchow and the tribal, misogynist deployment of ballad culture here is disturbing.n10239 17If ballad is a vocal form that suggests folk and popular culture, Constance also actively engages in a more courtly or elite form of enunciation when she participates in the aforementioned wedding masque for Sir Philip. Brome utilizes the masque as a dramatic form in diverse and interesting ways throughout his career. In A Jovial Crew the inset masque performed by the beggars not only revisits some of the social issues raised by the play and tests the ability of spectators such as Oldrents and Justice Clack to recognize their own predicaments, but it also seems strangely prescient of the civil disorder that was set to engulf England in the years immediately following the play’s first performance on the London stage. The Antipodes is in many respects structured around a play within a play motif that demonstrates much influence from masque. Brome is unusual in the canon of early modern dramatists in that he has no recorded activity at the court whereas his mentor Jonson and his direct contemporaries such as James Shirley were more heavily invested in court masquemaking and noble entertainments. But the influence of the form is everywhere visible on the commercial stages of his plays in performance, which offer a very tangible example of the two-way flow of influence and interaction between court and city culture at this time.18We can see in both the melancholic and musical tropes of this play, then, strong examples of Brome’s recurring practices of recycling and revisiting tropes both from his own canon and early modern drama more generally, but it would be wrong to imply that this renders The Northern Lass in any ways a hackneyed or derivative drama. In many respects, not least its lively northern heroine, and with its strong grouping of female characters, pre-empting in many respects the feminocentrism which it has been argued would become a defining characteristic of 1630s commercial drama, this is also a highly innovative and experimental play, one which was much loved and appreciated well into the eighteenth century, not least for its musical and proto-operatic elements but also the perceived sensibility of the characterization of Constance. Shakespeare and intertheatricality19The specific song-form of ballads also endorses the intertheatricality already mentioned by linking Constance once again in the audience’s minds with those two important precursor characters, Ophelia from Hamlet and the Jailer’s daughter from The Two Noble Kinsmen. In the case of the Jailer’s daughter, Brome goes beyond the song-based connections by repeating in a more sustained manner her love-melancholy induced ‘madness’ or state of deep distress in his portrayal Constance’s own highly visible breakdown: one of the most discomforting effects of this ‘comedy’ in performance consists in the enforced witnessing of Constance’s despair by both onstage and ‘real’ audiences. The attempt at ‘curing’ Constance of her overbearing passion for Sir Philip by asking an alternative suitor to feign the part of the man she loves is also a direct reworking of the ‘cure’ of the Jailer’s daughter. In 4.3. of the Shakespeare and Fletcher play, the ‘Wooer’ is instructed to be like Palamon (the knight with whom the daughter has fallen so helplessly and hopelessly in love) in all respects, dressing as him, singing to her, and bringing her flowers. In 5.2 we are told that he has even been kissing her in this guise (there is, I think, something deliberately disturbing in this kind of countenanced sexual assault), his performance only faltering when it comes to the singing: ’I have no voice, sir, to confirm her that way’ (5.2.16).20In The Northern Lass the scene where Nonsense attempts to persuade Constance that he is Sir Philip is actually an example of a failed performance. Unlike the Wooer in The Two Noble Kinsmen he fails to persuade Constance that he is the man he says he is, finding himself instead subject to her physical violence as a punishment for his advances. This is recycling but with a difference, repetition with variation, as it were. Brome engages in a form of productive sampling, both of his own plays and those of others (as well as literary texts in general — the presence of romance texts such as the Arcadia in his canon deserves further research in this respect). Brome shows one of the key properties of adaptation and remediation in action in this regard. The scene is yet further evidence of Brome’s deep interest in the idea and operation of performance throughout this play - three different characters, for example, perform the role of Sir Philip Luckless (Brome showing him to us early on in the play to enable this kind of self-conscious layering to happen with the audience’s full knowledge and understanding and indeed complicity in the humour being generated by each of these performances). 21 The analogy between the two female roles of Brome’s Northern Lass and Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Jailer’s daughter persists when the audience observes that on our first sighting of Constance, she is describing an event in flashback, that ‘kiss’ on the hand from Sir Philip. In its retrospective narrative, but also in its wilful over-determination of the event, her speech is entirely comparable to the Jailer’s daughter’s soliloquy at 2.4 of The Two Noble Kinsmen, where she describes attending to the incarcerated Palamon:When I come in
To bring him water in a morning, first
He bows his noble body, then salutes me thus:
’Fair, gentle maid, good morrow; may thy goodness
Get thee a happy husband.’ Once he kissed me;
I loved my lips the better ten days after.
Would he would do so ev’ry day.(2.4.21-7)22We also see Constance destabilized by her participation in the household masque performed to mark Sir Philip’s hasty wedding to Fitchow. This in turn recalls 3.5 of The Two Noble Kinsmen where the Jailer’s daughter finds herself taking part in a country dance scene. She enters (at line 56) singing a ballad fragment, possibly ’The George Aloe and the Sweepstake’, a sea-shanty dated to 1611 and also a fragment of a nursery rhyme about an owl. This balladic content to her performative distress is a direct precursor both of Constance’s ‘madness’ and Holdup’s imitation of the same in The Northern Lass as well as a conscious reworking in its own right of Ophelia’s particular form of insanity in Hamlet. 23These intertheatrical allusions go deep in terms of shaping a response to Constance’s state of distress in The Northern Lass.n10242 In 4.1 of The Two Noble Kinsmen the Wooer’s account in flashback of his riverbank encounter with the daughter directly recalls Ophelia’s singing and her watery demise on the willow-garlanded riverbank. In all these reworkings of the theatrical and narrative tropes the role and function of song, and the cognitive impulse towards it as performative practice, is being tested and explored:As I late was angling
In the great lake that lies behind the palace,
From the far shore, thick set with reeds and sedges,
As patiently I was attending sport,
I heard a voice - a shrill one; and attentive,
I gave my ear, when I might well perceive
’Twas one that sung, and by the smallness of it
A boy or woman.(4.1.52-59)24She apparently describes bringing flowers (again recalling Ophelia) and she sings ’Nothing but ’Willow, willow, willow’ (l. 80). This is the same song that yet another Shakespearean heroine will perform prior to her death: Desdemona in Othello. Later in The Two Noble Kinsmen the Jailer’s daughter will sing snatches of ballads also associated with Ophelia, such as ‘Bonny Robin’. All these reenactments confirm a circulation of tropes and icons among all these plays that mobilize parallel audience responses as well as encouraging a set of mutually informative comparative analyses. In the case of the Jailer’s daughter we might, on the basis of Ophelia, suspect a drowning but in truth the repetitions swerve in a new direction, since the Wooer rescues her. In 5.4 we are informed in a conversation between her father and Palamon that she is well again and married. It is a strange note of dissonance, one of several in the play. In a full-blown comedy we might expect to see the happy ending onstage. Instead the daughter, elsewhere so eloquent and engaged with the audience in her plight, is silenced and even removed from the stage. In the case of Constance, though suicidal tendencies are hinted at, she too is rescued, by Sir Philip himself, and swiftly seems to return to a stable self. But like the Jailer’s daughter she is effectively silenced as a dramatic subject in the play. In the fifth act’s maelstrom of revelations and resolutions, Constance is talked about but never speaks for herself. It is a point I find myself consistently returning to that this most vocally present of characters is virtually absent, and certainly mute, for the fifth and final act. It is a performance of social containment that leaves a rather sour taste in the mouth.25There was a revival of interest in Fletcher’s theatre-work in particular in the Caroline period, and this led to the revival of several of his plays, single-authored and collaborative, in the spaces of commercial and courtly theatre alike.n10240 The Two Noble Kinsmen would prove part of this revival of interest with a 1634 publication.n10241 While this was some 5 years after Brome’s The Northern Lass was first composed and performed, it suggests that Fletcher’s work along with Shakespeare’s was in the cultural ether as early as 1629 and may even go so far as to suggest that plays, such as Brome’s, that cross-referenced earlier Elizabethan and Jacobean drama contributed to the trend for revivals of this kind in the ensuing decade. Certainly The Two Noble Kinsmen’s Oxford editor, Eugene M. Waith, has noted evidence of a post-1625 performance which may have figured directly in Brome’s own theatrical memory: A fragmentary record from the King’s office of the Revels seems to show that The Two Noble Kinsmen was revived for performance at court in 1619, and since two stage directions in Q include the names of actors who were with the King’s Men in 1625-6 there must have been another revival in those years, probably after November 1625, when the theatres reopened after eight months during which the death of King James and an outbreak of the plague had kept them shut.n1020726It should not perhaps come as any surprise that a playwright so engaged with the mechanics of theatre and its social and aesthetic possibilities as Brome would also be interested in the contemporary repertoire as a mine of tricks, details, and inspiration when creating his dramas. The intriguing blend of the innovative and the derivative that has already been seen as a core element of The Northern Lass is present, then, in the play at the level of dramaturgy and characterization, but is also key to the manipulation of audience interpretation and response by the playwright throughout. Courtship and wooing rituals27Courtship and marriage rituals and the expectations attached to both are explored with a considerable degree of sensitivity to the woman’s position by Brome in The Northern Lass. The strange formalities of betrothal and their availability for misinterpretation are raised early on in the play when in the second scene we receive Constance’s account of her encounter with Sir Philip Luckless in her uncle’s orchard. To the innocent and naïve Constance, just arrived in the urban metropolis from the relative protection of her northern upbringing, the encounter had seemed fraught with meaning and signification. And already the key issue here is memory, the way in which Constance remembers and therefore ‘reads’ the significance of the encounter. She describes how Sir Philip on being introduced to her by her uncle took her by the hand and kissed her (2.2. 225). Constance has perhaps been schooled in the idea of the ‘handfasting ritual’, the practice by which a couple might, by the holding of hands before a witness, be formally betrothed prior to a church ceremony. It is the form of ‘marriage’ (per verba de presenti) performed by the Duchess of Malfi and her steward Antonio before the witnessing servant Cariola in John Webster’s 1612 tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi (1.1.477-81), and it is also the form of real-life betrothal that Charles Nicholl has brilliantly evidenced as part of Shakespeare’s direct experience of London life in his rented rooms in Silver Street in his innovative biography The Lodger.n10208 Certainly Constance reads Sir Philip’s gesture as akin to an engagement or profound expression of commitment. It is this belief which, we realize in retrospect, drove her governess and confidante Mistress Trainwell to explode angrily into Sir Philip’s residence in the opening scene of the play to berate him for his intentions to marry the rich widow Audrey Fitchow, thereby betraying Constance. In the process, Trainwell handed Sir Philip a letter from her young charge but since he mistakenly believed it to come from a London prostitute called Constance (who will later be revealed to be Camitha Holdup, a West Country girl fallen on very hard times in the capital), this has only served to set a whole set of confusions in train.28This narrative account of a remembered meeting might seem to be an oddly static means of bringing the theme of handfasting and courtship into the play and yet in performance the result is anything but static. This scene which operates as a veritable site of memory and representation as Constance performs the roles of both her past self and Sir Philip for the benefit of the onstage audience of the rather more skeptical Mistress Trainwell (who rapidly interprets the scene in a very different way to Constance herself) enables the audience to be both won over to Constance’s open enthusiasm for the world and for experience, and to be charmed by the nature of her relationship with the older woman Trainwell who has clearly taken her northern charge to her heart in a manner akin to those contemporary seventeenth-century audiences who seem to have fallen a little in love with Constance herself. It is a scene that also performs the significance of gesture, not least hand gestures, which have been read by performance theorists as a central plank of early modern performance styles.n10209 There are layers of subtlety here that indicate both the precision and the skill of Brome’s dramaturgy.29But Constance’s site of memory is not the only instance of performed courtship or indeed handfasting in the play. As with the impersonations of Sir Philip, Brome deliberately uses his now familiar method of repetition with variation to allow the audience to see a theme from several different angles within a single drama. Constance’s overdetermined encounter in the orchard with Sir Philip (surely a playful version of Adam and Eve’s own sexual awakening in an orchard?) is not even the first such example in the play. The opening exchanges between Sir Philip Luckless and his kinsman Triedwell indicate that the prospective marriage with the wealthy city widow Fitchow which concerns Triedwell so much (he regards his friend as willing his life away to a domineering older woman for the sake of the financial security that she represents — another familiar theme from early modern drama, and in particular from the genre that has come to be known as ‘city comedy’) has already been sealed by a form of handfasting: ‘Lustily promised. Absolutely contracted’ (1.1. 8).n10210 30A later example of handfasting comes to us in the form of another narrative account of a remembered offstage scene.n10211 This time though we could not be further from Constance’s sweet and touching recollections, and indeed hero-worship of the focus of her affection; in the fifth act Walter Wigeon in a boastful and uncontrollable mood offers an almost bestial account of his wooing of Holdup (who, of course, he believes to be the love-sick Northern Lass): ‘the little viper hung upon me’ (5.2. 922). Brome immediately counters this with a more comic onstage variation on this theme when the audience is made witness through a sequence of asides to Sir Paul Squelch’s deal with his housekeeper Mistress Trainwell in the midst of his most compromised position in the Act 5 plotline of Spanish disguise. Trainwell offers to help him get out of the fix he finds himself in by creating a kind of self-consciously staged ‘metamorphosis’ into his real self while claiming to have been testing his community all this while and thereby retaining his dignity as a J.P., but only if he agrees to give her the security that is sought by so many characters in this play, male and female alike, by marrying her: ‘I’ll do’t, here’s my hand,’ is Squelch’s rapid response (5.3. 1036). It is a plot resolution that does not quite come out of the blue — there are interesting hints in Act 3 when we first see Squelch and Trainwell locking horns in his household that, despite all the surface sarcasm, there is some degree of understanding and affection, and perhaps even attraction, between this odd couple: he even appears to confess that he might have married her: ‘the truth is my purpose was to have cast my self and fortune wholly upon you’ (3.1. 521). 31The closing pact with Trainwell in Act 5, a character with whom the audience has shared much insight and good will throughout the play, undoubtedly goes some way, if not all the way, to recuperate Squelch from the charges of misogyny and mistreatment of women that he seems open to elsewhere in the play. Squelch’s seemingly unfeeling subjection of his ward Constance to the vicissitudes of the London marriage market against her will and personal feelings and his willingness to subject the vulnerable Holdup to his sexual will, using her fear of the violent punishment of prostitutes to inveigle her into serving as his mistress, is as deeply uncomfortable for theatre audiences as Wigeon’s similar abuses of Holdup in the play (both when he believes her to be Constance and when her true identity and the existence of her illegitimate child is revealed). As ever in Brome’s work, the stereotypical character of the Justice of the Peace is far from proving to be the moral and ethical centre of the society depicted; other comparable characters include the loathsome Justice Clack in A Jovial Crew who is also seen abusing his position toward women both in his personal and his professional roles. 32Camitha/Constance Holdup (there is slippage between those names in the play as her real identity and her assumed persona as a London prostitute and then her performance in the part of Squelch’s niece in the London lodgings he has installed her in blend and blur) constitutes another of the remarkable female characters in this play. Her autobiography is carefully set out for us in her pleas before Squelch when she is brought before him by Constable Vexhem to be tried for prostitution (and potentially whipped or imprisoned in Bridewell for her actions). Her father, we learn, was himself a commissioner of the peace in Devon and Cornwall but fell in with pirates and smugglers and was eventually removed from his office in disgrace (Squelch has heard of him so the case was obviously notorious). The adept social historian that Brome can often be seen to be in his plays is present in this glimpse into the close and complicated engagement with smuggling and pirate communities that British coastal communities had at this time.n10212 It is, of course, a fleeting moment in performance but it resolutely gives Camitha Holdup a place, a provenance and an identity and makes it virtually impossible for audiences to ignore or remain cold-hearted or insensitive before her plight. Brome further ensures our sympathetic position towards this character as with the other significant women in the play by giving her a brief but powerful soliloquy in 4.3: ‘If my deceit now should be discovered before my work be ended, my brain-tricks might, perhaps, instead of all these fair hopes, purchase me the lash’ (733). Here she reflects on the very different implications of the plots and schemes of the play for a vulnerable member of society like her. Money and status, as both Squelch’s and Luckless’s actions in the play indicate, enable a certain freedom from consequences that Holdup cannot enjoy. It is worth adding at this point that Luckless is scarcely a pristine hero, for all Constance’s hero-worship of him. He begins the play willing to ensnare himself in a marriage without love for financial and social gain and he is unrepentant about a past involving prostitutes and even the possible siring of illegitimate children (remember that he rejects the letter from Constance that Trainwell brings him because he believes it to be from ‘Constance’ Holdup, who he has recently learned has given birth to an illegitimate child and from whom he therefore clearly fears paternity allegations and claims). He too becomes part of the group of men in the play who are willing to abuse a woman such as Holdup simply because of the social category in which they locate her; but the audience is allowed no such simplistic response to her character as indicated by that remarkable soliloquy. Luckless is given no such comparable opportunity to address the audience and this may also serve to indicate where Brome wishes the main sympathies of his audiences to lie in this play.33The other fleeting moments of soliloquy in the play are, tellingly, all given to women characters. Audrey Fitchow is certainly the exponent of one of these, possibly of two such moments. In the first instance the audience bears witness to her authorship of a prenuptial agreement that will ensure that she will have the upper hand in the marriage to Sir Philip and that she will enjoy control over household expenditure and appointments: ‘In the meantime, let me study my remembrances for after marriage: Imprimis: To have the whole sway of the house and all domestical affairs: as of accounts of household charges, placing and displacing of all servants in general; To have free liberty to go on all my visits; and though my knight’s occasions be never so urgent, and mine of no moment, yet to take from him the command of his coach . . .n10213’ (1.2.128). This could be read as endorsing the understanding that Fitchow is simply a well-worn stereotype of the rich city widow who will henpeck any man who is willing to betroth himself to her, but the alternative reading would need to acknowledge that the money she demands the right to spend here is her own (her legacy from previous marriages) and that it is Luckless after all who is engaging in marriage for financial gain. This might increase the space for audience sympathy and insight into Fitchow’s character and this is further endorsed by the second possible soliloquy that work on this edition with professional actors has identified. At the end of the scene in which that remarkable exchange between Fitchow and Triedwell has taken place, in which he comes to dissuade her against marriage to his kinsmen, ostensibly because he loathes her, only to find himself falling in love with her in the course of the exchange, Fitchow at least potentially reveals herself to the audience in a rare moment of self-doubt and confusion:Gone in a dream [To Howdee?] Well, I perceive this juggling
This strain was only to explore the strength
Of my affection to my luckless knight.
For which, if both their cunnings I not fit,
Let me be called the barren wife of wit.[NL 1.2.speeech178]34If this is a soliloquy — the workshopping of the scene and Brome’s failure to provide a firm exit for her man-servant Humphrey Howdee in this scene suggested we have to leave the options open here but that the scene certainly works well if we opt for these lines as soliloquy — it is an important counterpoint to all the stereotypical versions of the city widow the audience has already been subject to both in the opening exchanges of this play and in the traditions and fashions of early modern drama more generally. It will also play beneath the assertions of Howdee in a later exchange with Pate about the regular violence meted out to him by his mistress (2.2). It is worth noting that because we never see any actual examples of such violence (though we see plenty of examples of Fitchow’s volatile temper) there is at least space to consider Humphrey as exaggerating for effect here — he and Oliver seize the moment of a scene to themselves as it were. Admittedly the world depicted by Brome’s play is one of casual and easy violence (Anvil seems to tour the city streets facing regular beatings and physical encounters of this kind) so perhaps the servants’ account of their lives should not be so easily dismissed, but the point remains that the depiction of Fitchow is far more ambivalent and open-ended than much criticism on the play has previously suggested. There is, of course, also the sense that Triedwell begins to be from the moment they meet a tempering presence and that is played out for the audience when he stops her anger in a scene towards the close of the play: ‘Forbear, sweet lady, let him be mad by himself’ (5.2. 899). The striking exchanges between Triedwell and Fitchow at 1.2 which involve a carefully orchestrated series of asides and contrapuntal duets share linguistic and poetic rhythms with scenes between ‘warring lovers’ in more familiar Shakespearean plays such as Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew. In those plays despite the surface aggression of their exchanges and duologues both Benedick and Beatrice and Katherina and Petruchio are linked by the sharing of the verse lines in which they conduct the exchange, even at the level of sharing the iambic pentameter. That linguistic act is repeated here to great effect by Brome and gives a strong undertow of sexual attraction and compulsion to this scene that provides a rich basis for actors’ interpretation. As work on this edition as a whole has indicated, though sometimes Caroline drama has been seen as being fairly reckless in its moves between verse and prose registers (James Shirley is often invoked alongside Brome to make this point), Brome is in fact always aware of the verbal and poetic choices he is making and that he is a master of a particular hybridized version that might be called ‘poetic prose’, a form in which Constance The Northern Lass is often heard in this play, perhaps also serving to add a songlike or musical undertow to her everyday speech that would serve to confirm the importance of the ways in which we hear or listen to women in this play. 35Constance herself never has a formal soliloquy in the play as such, although we might regard the almost aria-like qualities of her song-performances, which are stand-apart moments in the action in the way that aria functions in opera, as parallel moments of revelation and intimacy for the watching audiences of the play. The third female who is in fact accorded a brief soliloquy in the play is Mistress Trainwell, Constance’s recently assigned governess and obvious confidante. Brome appears to have had a particular fascination with the role of long-term female housekeepers and the easy slippage between their status as servants and confidantes to the master and/or mistress of the household and Trainwell, both in the easy confidences she encourages from Constance, and her tetchy but somehow necessary relationship with her employer Sir Paul, a legacy as we have learned of her high standing with his late wife, is a carefully drawn instance of this social type. As yet a further instance of Brome’s recycling tendencies she is directly comparable to Friswood in The Sparagus Garden who also ends the play married to her erstwhile master, the Justice of the Peace, William Striker. It is through Trainwell’s eyes that we view a number of key comic scenes in the play, not least that when Anvil appears in the guise of Luckless at Squelch’s residence in the sadly mistaken belief that he is attending a high-class brothel, as she prepares to humiliate Anvil for his insolence. This kind of soliloquy — where she looks to the audience for succour and support in a confusing situation — is scarcely akin to the deep psychologizing of a Hamlet and I would not want to overstate the case for Brome’s use of soliloquizing in the play, but nevertheless it is significant that it is women who are given these moments of direct exchange with the audience and this must in the end impact greatly on their judgement of and interaction with the sexual relations being depicted on the stage.The Culture of Service in the playn1021436Trainwell’s complicated status as a housekeeper to a widowed male employer is just one instance of the delicate and detailed way in which Brome attends to the life of service in his plays. His heavily populated plays are particularly thick with servants and liveried employees and most are given names, voices, and back-stories to boot. The Northern Lass features some particularly fine examples, including the ambitious Humphrey Howdee — his ambition is brilliantly embodied by Brome in his eagerness always to be onstage and part of the action, so much so that he makes entries every time he thinks he hears his own name, when invariably what has been uttered on stage is a simple greeting: ‘how d’ye?’. It is Howdee who offers the audience the details of Fitchow’s alleged violence towards him, so much so that he apparently bears the scars of an attack from a mourning ring for her late husband, the civil lawyer from whom she has developed such a fine understanding of the law as relating to marriage and divorce hearings. He reveals all this in a telling little scene with Luckless’s servant, Oliver Pate, soon after the marriage between their master and mistress has taken place. Since the households are being merged, each servant is anxious to get the measure of their new boss. Howdee will finally get his wish to become a fuller part of the action of the play and the society in which he moves when he is used as part of the plot to fool Squelch and enable Wigeon’s marriage to Constance (Squelch prefers the Cornish suitor Salamon Nonsense for his niece). Pretending that he has been sacked from Fitchow’s newly-married household, Howdee appears willing to serve as a gentleman-usher to Constance, though in truth, and to the full knowledge of the audience, he is actually pledging to serve Holdup in disguise. Pate too will prove to be an important initiator and enabler of plot dynamic in his disguise as the doctor who aims to cure Constance of her melancholia, which in the process enables Sir Philip to gain access to her and whisk her away to be married to him off-stage. In the final rush of revelations in the fifth act we will learn that Pate has not confined his acting skills to the medical profession but also, at the conniving Triedwell’s behest, performed the part of the clergyman who ‘married’ Luckless and Fitchow offstage in Act 2, thereby rendering the marriage null and void in the eyes of the law and freeing Sir Philip to marry Constance after all and Triedwell to marry Fitchow himself (though in a fascinating little twist Brome seems to display Triedwell experiencing distinctly cold feet when the possibility of that marriage becomes a reality!: ‘Your love indeed, lady. Which (and which Cupid pardon me for) now that I see I may enjoy, I am not so eagerly taken with, yet if you will —‘ (5.3.1069)). What this attention to detail in terms of the servant culture that shores up the society world of the play offers is another range of reflections on power and relationships akin to those that have accrued around issues of gender and status elsewhere in the play. Scenes involving indentured servants such as Howdee and Pate also draw out attention in a very material way to the households and household structures that are the driving force of this play and which will be examined in more detail in the following section of this introduction. 37The troubled relationship between Squelch and those he employs to do his bidding in the legal world proves equally fraught and fractious as those between household employers and employees. While the unnamed clerk seems happy enough simply to do his master’s bidding, it is poor Constable Vexhem who suffers Squelch’s wrath and manipulation when he finds himself dispatched to prison instead of the female sex-worker he brought in to Squelch to be tried for that purpose. The scene has obvious comic potential and this is maximized later in the form of Vexhem’s knowing and savoured revenge when he recognizes Squelch in disguise in the fifth act and refuses to help rescue him from his own trial, swearing in a parodic echo of Squelch’s own earlier words that he is in his ‘right mind and Middlesex’. The Middlesex allusion is another instance of Brome’s comprehension of the localised cultural geography of the law in this period when J.P.s had a distinctly county and parish identity and Middlesex in particular had gained a reputation for a particularly arbitrary exercise of the law.n10215 But with his typical ability to see a situation from many angles, Brome also asks us to think about the back-story to Vexhem’s life in a way that lifts the event far beyond the realm of safe comedy. Squelch’s later efforts to have his sexual fill of his newly installed mistress are interrupted by the clerk’s visitation to the lodgings in which he has placed her to inform him that Vexhem’s wife is on the rampage, seeking justice for her unfairly imprisoned husband. Her plight is genuine — we learn that she is heavily pregnant, so much so that the clerk fears she might give birth in Squelch’s household — and with the chief breadwinner of the house incarcerated her existent children face the grim realities of the poorhouse. It could be argued that Brome limits the extent to which an audience is invited to worry about this offstage, unseen character who is only ventroiloquized for by the clerk and yet we must pay due attention to his decision to bring her story onto the stage at all. It would be my argument that this is yet another instance of the potency of the off-stage space in Caroline drama and that Mistress Vexhem should be added to our list of the sympathetic female portrayals in this play.Spaces and sites in the play38Brome has long been regarded as a fine writer of urban spaces on the stage. The Northern Lass is perhaps rather different from plays such as The Weeding of Covent Garden and The Sparagus Garden with their very precise London geographical locales, what, in another critical era, was referred to as a form of ‘place-realism’, but, nevertheless, the evocation of social life in Caroline London is palpable and significant.n10216 The action of the play takes place in a series of interlinked households and in the process a number of related spaces just offstage are also conjured up for the benefit of the audience. We begin the action in the aristocratic household of Sir Philip Luckless and the first sign that he may have misunderstood which Constance Mistress Trainwell was delivering the letter from in this scene comes when a servant informs him that Trainwell has departed in her coach. To many in the Blackfriars theatre audience (many of whom, it should be added, would have arrived at the theatre by coach themselves), it would seem unusual for a bawd (which is what Sir Philip has taken Trainwell to be) to own her own coach, although the social situation was enough in transition in the late 1620s for there to be at least potential for confusion. Jonson’s play of the same year The New Inn is equally interested in the changing social patterns of coach travel when the tailor’s wife Pinnacia pretends to be a countess by riding in one with her husband disguised (and subordinated) as a footman .n10217 John Taylor the Water Poet had reflected on these social transitions in a pamphlet published some years earlier, The World Runnes on Wheeles (London, 1623).n10218 Already then although in terms of the stage space we are resolutely inside, the audience is being asked to conjure up as a performance world the streets, sites, and cultural activities of wider London. 39The second scene of the first act locates us in the household of the Middlesex Justice of the Peace, Sir Paul Squelch. As already established in previous discussions of this scene, we are in the company of The Northern Lass, Constance, and her watch and ward, Trainwell. Constance is resident in her uncle Squelch’s house (we never learn the details as to why, though clearly he is using the opportunity to find a suitable match for his niece in marriage and, since he seems prepared to settle a dowry on her, he appears to be in the formal role as guardian to her in this respect) and is describing an event that took place some days earlier in the orchard attached to his property. This mention and evocation of the orchard serves several important purposes, spatial and suggestive. A picture is painted for the audience of a considerable suburban property with gardens and land attached — this helps to confirm Squelch’s wealth and social status, which are very much on display (and sometimes under pressure) in the course of the unfolding drama. If a director chooses to stage this scene in the orchard itself (we at one stage work-shopped it using a garden bench to play with this kind of spatial association) it becomes a very literal site of memory and reenactment. Orchards allow for easy comic play with the ideas of sexuality and temptation as well and we might also add that Constance here appears as the very antithesis of Eve: innocence and naiveté colour her conversation at every turn.40In the same scene we have a visitor to this household, Captain Anvil, who has come in the guise of Sir Philip himself in the mistaken belief that he is visiting the bawdy-house managed and controlled by the “bawd” Trainwell. While it seems to occur to Anvil that this is a surprisingly grand house (he compares it to the Place Royal or the elegant Place des Vosges in Paris, a square created by Henri IV), this just seems to confirm to him what a high-class establishment this is compared to the seedy brothels he is used to frequenting. In turn, of course, it also suggests to the audience that high-class sexual establishments were not uncommon in Caroline London, a fact which Sir Philip’s apparently conscienceless frequenting of prostitutes referred to in the first scene would appear to confirm.n10219 In a series of subtle, often spatial, gestures Brome is able to convey some deep truths about contemporary society.41The next household we enter is that of Sir Philip’s bride to be, the wealthy city widow Fitchow. In some ways she is the embodiment of a stereotype, as we see her first in full control of this space and then plotting the ways in which she will also be in full control of the marital household once she is wed to Luckless (reading aloud to us as she does that loaded prenuptial agreement).n10220 We need, though, to go beyond merely identifying these household locales and to consider the practical and aesthetic ways in which they would have been represented on the stage of the Blackfriars Theatre. Those household servants who are so clearly delineated among the staff of the Luckless, Squelch, and Fitchow abodes, for example, enable Brome to suggest the different rooms, thresholds, and portals of the property. If, as Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann suggest, prologues function as portals into a play, so servants guard the threshold of the house:n10221 Beavis at Squelch’s house, though it should be noted that it is further evidence of Trainwell’s significance that it is really she who seems to have spatial control of this property; Howdee at Fitchow’s; Pate at Luckless’s. The significant impact of these servant characters in this play both in terms of dialogue, plot and inference has already been discussed, but in very pragmatic terms they enable Brome to create and limn his stage spaces. They announce the arrival of certain characters, grant or deny them access to certain areas of the properties being presented to us. This all comes to a wonderful and excessive climax in the final act when we see Beavis attempting to act as security guard and bouncer at the door, restricting entry to the feast that Squelch has somewhat uncharacteristically ordered to be held at great expense. In practical dramatic terms Brome makes us aware of the stage architecture of the Blackfriars, its doors and galleries, in ways that are productive of meaning. We have already mentioned the symbolic use of the above stage area to separate Constance from the rather more tawdry world of the street and the bawdy misinterpretations of Anvil when he comes to the Squelch residence in disguise. It might also be argued that this spatial positioning of Constance links her subliminally to performance, since it is from here that she delivers her first set-piece song in northern dialect. The other ‘Constance’ of the play, Camitha Holdup, uses not the space ‘above’ but the arras or tapestry hangings that we know were also a feature at the Blackfriars to perform her part as the melancholic and distracted Northern Lass.n1022242What she performs at this moment in the action for the onstage audience of Wigeon is a ‘phantom pregnancy’ but for the audience with privileged understanding of Holdup’s past there is a painful reminder of the offstage reality of her illegitimate child and the world of potential suffering and hardship that he has been born into. Another unavoidable echo or site of memory is surely the pregnant body of Mistress Vexhem too? Brome returns in a later play, The Sparagus Garden, to the potential stage semiotics of the pregnant female body although in that play too it proves to be a ‘fake’ achieved with the handy stage property of a cushion. That he called his ‘pregnant’ heroine Annabel in that play might also have consciously directed audiences to remember a rather more violated and tragic version of the pregnant female on the Caroline stage, the Annabel of Ford’s tragedy of incest, Tis Pity She’s a Whore. What seems clear is that Brome was fascinated by the capacity of the boy actor’s corporeal presence on the stage to signifiy all manner of female conditions and that as with other aspects of theatre he was keen to experiment with the possibilities of this in his plays. Any discussions of households as material and social spaces in this play needs to consider which of their residences becomes the household that Luckless and Fitchow ostensibly share after their hasty marriage. We see the servants, Pate and Howdee, discussing the merging of the households and it might seem from the internal evidence that the house they have moved into is Fitchow’s. She appears to refer to the space through personal possessives, although it might be argued from the prenuptial document that she would assert her ownership and control over any space. Elsewhere there do appear to be references to the household as Sir Philip’s, but this might also simply be the statutory accordance of rights in property after marriage to the male. What is clear however is that any ‘merging’ is strictly limited by an immediate falling out over The Northern Lass between the newly weds and Fitchow’s decision to debar Sir Philip from the marital bed (ironically this non-consummation of the marriage would also have enabled their quickie divorce in act five even without Pate’s revelation that he was the fake minister who heard their invalid marriage vows).43Households proliferate when we also find ourselves in various other London lodgings including that at which Sir Paul lodges Camitha Holdup, and those where Constance is taken to be ‘cured’. From internal evidence we can deduce that the latter is likely to be somewhere on a major thoroughfare such as the Strand which had both a street face and a face onto the waterside of the River Thames, since the characters escape, much to poor Trainwell’s confusion, by various means; Sir Philip and Constance in a coach on streetside, Pate, the fake doctor, by means of a boat accessed from the water stairs at the back of the property. Some of the original waterstairs from this period are still visible on the Thameside edge of Strand properties today, a resonant trace of the literal places and spaces and movements through them that are such a defining element of Brome’s London plays. This evocation of the Strand and the surrounding neighbourhoods serves to locate Brome’s London comedies in directly analogous spaces to the town plays of his contemporaries like Shirley, but it also serves as another intertextual echo of Jonson’s 1609 Epicœne, which was also set in this metropolitan region and which as well as sharing so many themes with The Northern Lass not least the loveless and unconsummated marriage at its heart also demonstrated a deep interest in the space of the household, its intimate inner rooms and its more public reception spaces; its private and public faces.n1022344There are other notable ways in which these households are realized in The Northern Lass other than through direct references to them or even the movements of characters onto and across the stage or between different spatial levels and that is through the deployment of handheld properties. Letters in particular are the prime means of communication in the play and in this way audiences witness the physical movement of properties between spaces and households and the potentials for misinterpretation and misdelivery that occur in the process. As with so much else in this play it is both an instantly recognizable and seemingly age-old theatrical convention and something locally specific to the quotidian activities of the Caroline society that Brome is seeking to represent on the stage. There is then in this play the creation of a vibrant sense of the neighbourhoods, central and suburban, of Caroline London. In another telling small instance in the plot, Holdup is given money to spend by the newly profligate Squelch (as he repeats ad absurdum he has money and he ‘will be merry with it’) and in the process what is conjured up for the audience are the shops and shopping malls such as Royal Exchange, also a telling landmark in the area of the Strand, available for people to spend on the new commodities and luxuries of the day.n10224 Brome’s cultural geographical and sociospatial sensitivity does not rest solely in the specific and the particular detail, however, but also in the larger geographical and spatial gestures of this play which in a sense have already been invoked and explored by the earlier discussion of voice and dialect. York, the Bishopric of Durham and the region of the north both in its real and its imaginative manifestations is another of the potent offstages of this play. Through the portrayal of Constance and the careful creation of her iterative presence on the stage Brome is able to conjure up the theatrical and political culture of that region, once again moving us away from the simple cliché of the cold, primitive north (though that too is evoked in the easy complacencies of characters such as Anvil). The sense of cultural flow into and out of London is also palpable; other characters in the play have traveled to London from provinces and regions: alongside the comic capital made of the Cornish spoken by Nonsense, we are asked to consider in detail Holdup’s journey of social decline from her West Country existence as the daughter of a JP in a coastal town. In the matter of space as all else in this play, Brome asks us to see things from all sides.Conclusion45There is a danger that in the case I am attempting to make here for the serious aspects to Brome’s comedy that I might downplay the text’s revelry in the simply ridiculous. The aforementioned wooing scenes with Salamon Nonsense in 2.2, who throughout the play seems able only to paraphrase lines fed to him by the other characters onstage, or the endless violent outcomes for Anvil of his egotistical schemes (he receives several beatings onstage and has clearly been subject to others offstage), are different examples of Brome’s rich comic register. Other examples which were brought to light in the November 2008 Globe Theatre staged reading of the play and our workshopping included many of the scenes involving Cockney ‘chappie’ Walter Wigeon and Brome’s typical fun with the comic business involving servants like Humphrey Howdee (see 1.2 for example). Nowhere is that comic register more manifest, however, than in the fifth and final act. In a familiar move Brome deploys the happening and event of a feast to bring all the characters onstage and into direct collision with each other (let alone with the multiple plots and conspiracies of this potentially confusing play). Assembled at Squelch’s household for a feast at which the host appears notoriously absent (in truth he is there but in disguise himself as a faintly ridiculous Spaniard). What Brome offers us in the rapid sequence of confused identities, revealed selves and conscious metamorphoses is a kind of downscaled parodic masque, another potent collision taking place in this regard between popular and elite cultural manifestations. Perhaps the faintly ridiculous atmosphere of this closing act made it hard for Brome to find a place and space for the ethical and moral voice that I have suggested Constance represents elsewhere in the play, but her silence and inaction in this scene remains an uncomfortable fact of the play in performance. Her silencing as she is reabsorbed into mainstream society is reminiscent of the loss of agency by Frances Fitzdotterel in Jonson’s 1616 play The Devil is an Ass but somehow it feels all the more frustrating here when Brome has worked so hard to make her voice heard throughout.
n10183 I had you for a servant once, Dick Brome, And you performed a servant’s faithful parts. Now you are got into a nearer room Of fellowship, professing my old arts. And you do do them well, with good applause . . .
n10184 the 1631 octavo printing of the play.
n10185 Christopher Beeston was developing the Cockpit Theatre.
n10186 cattle-rustling in the Metamorphoses.
n10187 who are scarcely represented sympathetically within the play.
n10188 ‘there was ambivalence . . . in the connotations of Northerness and Northern dialect in the literature of the period . . . It cannot be assumed that condescension to the North and Northern English was the only attitude.’
n10189 Broken English
n10190 not least in 1629 when The Northern Lass was staged.
n10191 the capital for the purposes of pursuing business and lawsuits.
n10192 Brome’s interest in linguistic diversity and speech communities in his plays.
n10194 the cultural and performative power of song and music.
n10195 MSS Drexel 4041 and 4257.
n10196 some important variations to that pattern.
n10197 went beyond pure theatrical effect or innovation.
n10198 in The Antipodes.
n10199 The Love-Sick Court suggests.
n10200 a mark of its popularity and the general interest it provoked.
n10201 leads to her own breakdown.
. The intertheatrical references persist, of course, in Holdup's performance as Constance in her melancholic condition, in which she also sings ballads, often of a Northern inflection and frequently of a more sexual nature than those of Constance actually strengthening the connections to Ophelia and the Jailer's daughter.n10202 that he has been readily purchasing.
n10239 the tribal, misogynist deployment of ballad culture here is disturbing.
n10242 Constance’s state of distress in The Northern Lass.
n10240 commercial and courtly theatre alike.
n10241 this revival of interest with a 1634 publication.
n10207 an outbreak of the plague had kept them shut.
n10208 his innovative biography The Lodger.
n10209 a central plank of early modern performance styles.
n10210 ‘Lustily promised. Absolutely contracted’ (1.1. 8).
and.n10211 a remembered offstage scene.
n10212 that British coastal communities had at this time.
n10213 yet to take from him the command of his coach . . .
n10214 The Culture of Service in the play
n10215 a particularly arbitrary exercise of the law.
n10216 the evocation of social life in Caroline London is palpable and significant.
n10217 .
n10218 The World Runnes on Wheeles (London, 1623).
n10219 would appear to confirm.
n10220 (reading aloud to us as she does that loaded prenuptial agreement).
n10221 so servants guard the threshold of the house:
n10222 the melancholic and distracted Northern Lass.
n10223 its private and public faces.
n10224 the new commodities and luxuries of the day.