The Novella
Critical IntroductionThe Critical Background1A fact which quickly impinges on anyone studying The Novella is the lack of extended critical commentary on the play. There are several possible reasons for this. There has been no scholarly edition of the play since Pearson’s in 1873. It is a difficult piece to categorise and situate easily in a particular genre: The Novella is not a city comedy, nor a comedy of humours, of manners, of place realism or of political satire.n11018 Though early critics such as Clarence Edward Andrews referred to it as “pure romance”, it does not sit comfortably under that label either.n11019 More than is the case with many of Brome’s plays, The Novella is best viewed or imagined in terms of performance, as some of its excellences are not so readily appreciated from the page (particularly its resolution which makes great play with costumed disguises and the impersonation of one character by another, which is not easily envisaged in a straight reading). Its timing within Brome’s theatrical career might lead one to see it as a fledgling effort, but it was staged by the King’s Men (still the leading theatre troupe) in 1632. That they listed The Novella among the plays for which in 1641 the company sought the protection of the Lord Chamberlain (to prevent any rogue printer issuing texts without their permission) argues for its continuing success.n11020 The play is not apprentice work, but a highly ambitious dramaturgical performance, especially (as will be argued anon) in its deployment of stage space, its command of a notably ambiguous tone and its deployment of what today would be termed a creative intertextualuality. That The Novella is not easy to categorise by genre is not a defect: its strength is its remarkable experimentation, which will be the focus of this introduction. 2By far the most extensive area of printed critical discussion relates to the play’s possible sources. Andrews (p.80) in 1913 refers back to the work of Schelling and Hazlitt and their concern to locate a source in Italian renaissance comedy or the novelle of Bandello but offers no new insights of his own. The most convincing case was put in 1933 by Robert Boiles Sharpe, who argued for a pervasive reliance on Brome’s part on two particular travel documents of the period that made extensive reference to life in Venice: Thomas Coryat’s Crudities (1611) and, to a lesser extent, Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (1617).n11021 Bentley (3, p.85) thought Sharpe overstated his case but it is remarkable how many of the details by which Brome brings a sense of actual place to his onstage realisation of life in Venice derive from Coryat. Just how close to Coryat’s text is Brome’s borrowing will be clear from parallel texts offered in the annotations to this edition. The influence may have been more pervasive still: it is often to Coryat that one must turn to find explanations of terms or strange references used in Brome’s dialogue and it was equally revealing to appreciate, when deploying the OED to garner exact period meanings of words, how frequently substantiating quotations from Brome were preceded by ones from Coryat. Place realism is the hallmark of Brome’s early comedies, The Northern Lass and The City Wit (and of many of his later works), and it would seem wholly appropriate that he should turn to a noted account of Venice, its geography, its architecture, political structures, canals, culture and its famous courtesans for the means to give his representation of the city as lived in by his characters a convincing verisimilitude in spectators’ minds. That he should have turned to Coryat is not surprising, since Jonson numbered Coryat among his circle and contributed a dedicatory “character of the author” and a verse acrostic based wittily on Coryat’s name to the first edition (these head the mass of panegyric poems in English and Latin, which number over one-hundred pages at the start of the publication). That Brome as a member of Jonson’s household had knowledge of Coryat and his travels is highly likely (presumably Jonson himself possessed a copy).n11022 3The case that Fynes Moryson’s travel writings were a further source for Brome is less clear-cut. Though he travelled to Venice some years before Coryat in 1594, Moryson’s account of his journey was later in getting into print. There is little or nothing in Itinerary that finds its way into The Novella (in fact its account of Venice reads more like an index to Coryat’s description, which far exceeds it in terms of detail, colour and vitality); but that 1617 volume was a radically cut-down version of Moryson’s manuscripts, from which he planned to issue an expanded edition; he indeed prepared one such for printing some three years later, delayed until 1626 to have it licensed for publication, and died in 1630 before it had gone to press.n11023 As the projected volume was not published until 1903, it is difficult to see how Brome might have access to the material. Sharpe makes out a case for three routes by which Brome might have seen the manuscript (association of members of Moryson’s family with Jonson; in the shop of John Beale to whom the augmented Itinerary was licensed; or through the good offices of Lucius Cary while settling Moryson’s estate). This is plausible evidence but not as convincing as it might be (Bentley thought Sharpe had “grossly exaggerated his case”), chiefly because he does not offer any explanation or defence of his suppositions.n11024 The fact remains, however, that Moryson’s writings provide the closest source yet discovered to Brome’s main plot-line. Whether Brome had read the manuscript or had heard the story encapsulated in the relevant passage as an anecdote is in a sense immaterial: the resemblance of plot with tale is extraordinary and difficult to justify, if it is to be dismissed as a coincidence.n11025 4It is worth quoting the passage from Moryson in full, as much for the many differences as for the similarities with Brome’s comedy:The like thing happened about that time in Vicenza a Citty vnder the Venetians; where a yong Cortisan arriuing, and setting a very high price vppon herselfe, such as the gentlemen of the Citty, howsoeuer desirous of new game, would not giue, after they had in vayne tried all meanes to make her fall in the price, they called the hangman, and one gaue him a dublett, an other a hatt, and so for all gentleman like attire, and all ioyntly furnishing him with the mony she demaunded, they sent him to her that night, and the next morning all coming to her Chamber, the one cast his dublett, the other his hatt, and so the rest of the attire into the fyer, and then the hangmans man bringing him his apparel, after their departure, the miserable Cortisan perceiuing how she was scorned, fled secretly out of the citty, and was neuer more seene there.n110265Here is undeniably the basic outline of Brome’s main plot involving Victoria: the courtesan who sets a high price on her virginity, the attempt of numerous men to take advantage of her by inveigling her into lowering the stated price, the plan to disgrace her socially by arranging for her unwittingly to associate with the state hangman. But as Moryson tells it, it is a crude tale of male vindictiveness, the courtesan is in no way characterised except as “young”, “new game”, “miserable”, no motivation is given either for the woman’s behaviour in setting her particular price nor the men’s in seeking to dishonour her, and the plot against the woman succeeds. If told as an anecdote, one wonders what tone prevailed in the telling. As written, it reads like a male chauvinist story, told by such a chauvinist. That is not one’s reaction to the play, where it is male chauvinism which is meticulously placed, judged and condemned while the young woman (Victoria) triumphs over adversity.6The moral nature of the would-be courtesan, Victoria, is an issue worth dwelling on. Helen Kaufman in an article on “The Influence of Italian Drama on Pre-Restoration English Comedy” writes appreciatively of The Novella because in her view it “so closely resembles Italian intrigue comedy in plan, in characterization and in its reflection of middle-class society in sixteenth-century Italy”. She lists those features that resemble the Italian prototype: There are of course the usual plethora of disguises and the old trick of substitution in which a Moor takes the lady’s place in a midnight rendezvous. Probably The Novella illustrates as well as any of the English comedies of this period a persistent motif of Italian drama, the ability of a clever woman to get the man she loves in spite of the obstacles set up by an avaricious father. It repeats also that significant deviation from Roman comedy which occurs in so many Italian plays, the substitution of the respectable girl for the courtesan of Latin drama.n110277While there is much here that is perceptive and informative, the degree to which Kaufman’s engagement with Italian comedy subtly distorts her perception of Brome’s play and its points of difference from Italian originals that she describes is also apparent. The Novella sustains two plots: Flavia does escape the obstacles set by an avaricious father but only through the ingenuity of her maid, Astutta, and the willingness of her lover, Francisco, to impersonate a woman; she herself continually verges on a hysteria that completely incapacitates her. Victoria also triumphs over an avaricious father but he is her lover, Fabritio’s parent, Guadagni (her own father having long since died). In her progress to that triumph Brome does not substitute her for the courtesan of Latin comedy, rather he requires her to devise a means to play the courtesan and yet retain her virgin honour. If Brome knew and followed an example of Italian comedy, he did not imitate it to the point of plagiarism: as always in his handling of source material and influences, he manipulated and transformed it to the point where he became wholly master of the inherited material. The variations that Brome works on his sources should be the focus of interest and critical attention. Even the “plethora of disguises” cannot properly be deemed “usual”, since the device is in general pursued less by Brome as a means to complicate the plotting than a way of foregrounding and embodying issues of integrity and moral scruple. Few of the techniques and situations that Brome uses in the play can be described as “stock” or conventional in the way that they are handled: invariably they are redesigned and nuanced to convey a specific psychological point. Spectators engage (in other words) not with what is so familiar that it verges on the banal, but with the unexpected that surprises and informs through the very nature and degree of its inventiveness.8Clarence Edward Andrews’s terse analysis of Brome’s “sources” is instructive in this context. Poor Brome fails the test on two counts: The Novella is dismissed as “the least interesting” of his comedies because “there is no Jonsonian influence discernible”; on the other hand, however, Andrews is troubled by the fact that critics have detected distinct parallels between details of Flavia’s predicament and that of Jessica in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and “between Victoria’s characterisation of her lovers [...] and the dialogue between Portia and Nerissa” in the same play, when they satirically discuss the suitors gathering to undertake the test with the caskets.n11028 While it is clearly sound to imitate Jonson, copying Shakespeare is anathema. Unfortunately, Andrews is wrong on both counts: there is a decided Jonsonian element within The Novella and Brome’s handling of Shakespearean “parallels” by no means verges on plagiarism or imitation. In both cases Brome’s treatment is highly innovative, because less a matter of “parallels” and “influences” than intertextual referencing. Moreover Jonson and Shakespeare are not the only dramatists whose works pervade Brome’s comedy: Webster is a distinct presence too. The unusual combination of their voices is what brings to the comedy (perhaps more particularly to the strand of it that centres on Victoria) its distinctive tone.Intertextuality9That Brome should reference Shakespeare’s early comedy, The Merchant of Venice, in The Novella is not surprising, since both plays are set in Venice. How he uses those references is the debate with which we must now engage. Echoes in Caroline drama of plays by an older generation of dramatists for many years fuelled a general dismissal of later Stuart drama as demonstrably showing signs of a creative decline or even a marked decadence. As Shakespeare came steadily into eminence as the foremost English renaissance playwright, so those echoes, especially of his works, came to be viewed as borrowings, even downright plagiarism, as if later dramatists were somehow too lazy, inexpert or amateurish to invent new material themselves. But critical theories emerging from post-modernist movements in art and cultural thinking have begun to defend the conscious deployment of “echoes” as a process of intertextuality, where one writer engages with another in a critical, creative even deconstructive dialogue through the medium of their chosen and shared art-form. Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari have brought respectability to significant referencing as establishing an aesthetics of difference, where noting parallels between texts is less important than investigating why they exist (why the second author in the relationship wishes to open up a dialogue with the first).n11029 The technique invites a reader or in the theatre a spectator to be flexible in response, to celebrate creativity in the multiple and divergent ways in which a particular character, convention or dramatic situation may be developed. The method is a highlighting of each component for its distinctive originality: it endorses the rich potential of both the basic experience and the manifold possibilities of its representation in art. (Familiarity with Romeo and Juliet is not essential for an appreciation of Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore but knowledge of Shakespeare’s play does deepen one’s engagement with how Ford develops his very different tragedy out from an analoguous situation and a similar grouping of characters.) “Sources”, “influence”, “borrowings” all imply a hierarchical relationship between the components, inviting a judgemental response where one is deemed the other’s superior. Intertextuality or referencing, the term I have preferred to use in this argument, sustains the components in a state of poise, of careful balance, where each reflects the particularity of the other. What has intrigued me in editing The Novella has been why Brome has referenced in this way a number of plays by his predecessors, or (to put the question somewhat differently) what might be his dramaturgical purpose is so doing.10Webster is perhaps the most surprising dramatist to be referenced in this manner. When we first meet (in 2.2) the courtesan, Victoria, and her retinue which comprises her pimp, Borgio, and a black maid, Jacconetta, it is at a moment immediately before she is to launch her career in Venice. She appears in all the finery that traditionally defined a courtesan as a type. Clearly her appearance immediately defined her for the Caroline audience, but that definition is generic not individualising. (In the opening act of The Weeding of Covent Garden, Dorcas makes her entrance on a balcony, “habited like a courtesan of Venice” and is appraised by watchers below for what she is claiming herself to be: the finery advertises her trade, irrespective of her private personality.n11030) That Victoria should be nervous is perhaps to be expected, given how important for her future career this debut performance will be, but her anxiety in the scene runs deep. If she is to be in time a courtesan, she is neither to the manner born nor inured and hardened by her choice of profession. Victoria is accompanied by her bravo but his tone and manner are just as uneasy: where one might have expected him to sport a brazen front to the world, he is darkly satirical, brooding, and decidedly a malcontent. Jacconetta as befits a maid does not contribute greatly to the conversation (for much of the opening of the sequence she is clearly required to put the finishing touches to Victoria’s appearance) but when she does, it is noticeably on an equal level with her employers. What spectators have before them in tableau is a trio: a courtesan named Victoria, a malcontented pimp and a blackamoor girl. The grouping is perhaps familiar: Webster in The White Devil (1612) presents us with another such trio: a somewhat reluctant mistress (deemed publicly within the play to be a courtesan), who is also significantly named Vittoria; her pimp, Flamineo, who is also her brother and he possesses a more than jaundiced disposition; and her blackamoor maid, Zanche, a merrily amoral sensualist. Their scenes together crackle with tensions and suspicions (each sibling thinking he or she is the object of the other’s exploitation) and these eventually erupt into murderous antagonism. Brome could not have expected all members of his audience to make the connection that he evokes here, but the title page of the 1653 text of The Novella informs readers that it was first “Acted at the Black-Friars by his Majesties Servants”, an indoor theatre that could command an audience of regular patrons who were informed theatregoers. Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi had been revived by the King’s Men for performance at court on 26 December, 1630, which usually indicates that further public performances had been staged (more likely, given the scenic demands of the play, at Blackfriars rather than the Globe) around the same period. Though The White Devil did not belong in the King’s Men’s repertory, it had been revived by Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men at the Cockpit during the 1629-1630 season, to judge by the title-page of the 1631 quarto of Webstser’s tragedy, which states “As it hath bin diuers times Acted, by the Queenes Maiesties seruants at the Phoenix, [otherwise known as The Cockpit] in Drury-Lane”. In other words both of Webster’s tragedies had been staged close to the date of composition of Brome’s play and, if he could recall significant moments in those two dramas for his creative purposes so, one supposes, might a substantial proportion of his audience. The leading question is: what might be his dramaturgical purpose in reminding such informed spectators of Webster’s Vittoria at the point of introducing to them the central, titular character of his comedy to whom he gave the same name?11Prior to this scene, all we have learned of Victoria is that she has but “lately come to town”; is fabulously beautiful (Horatio describes her as “above excellent”); that she is in consequence attracting young and old admirers to her house by day and night (Piso views her house as drawing “The admiration of all /The rampant gallantry about the city”); and that she has set a phenomenal price on her virginity (“Mark but the price she’s cried at: two thousand ducats /For her maidenhead, and one month’s society”).n11031 The contrast between the expectation this sets going and Victoria’s first onstage appearance (some three scenes later) is perplexing and that confusion is augmented by the referencing of characters from Webster’s tragedy, who may be viewed as the prototypes of Brome’s trio. The enigmas that surround both Victoria and Borgio are not resolved until the final act of The Novella. The pair, we discover, are siblings (like Vittoria and Flamineo) and each has been independently motivated throughout the earlier acts of the play by a covert scheme. She has taken on the role of courtesan as a cover behind which with some degree of safety (the reason for the high price of her favours is to keep off unwelcome or suspect admirers) she can search for her former lover, Fabritio. As her brother and defender of the family honour, Borgio in disguise has followed Victoria to Venice, intent on watching over her, protecting her interests, guarding her reputation. If at her first appearance she is uneasy, it is because of what her assumed role may reveal about men, about herself, about her abilities as an actress in playing an alter-ego who is also psychologically her opposite: the virgin is choosing to act the whore to achieve a particular end. If Borgio is uneasy in his first scene, it is that he too in playing a role is wary of how successfully he may impersonate a type who is his diametric opposite and one that requires of him a lubricious tone and diction that his “true” self finds morally repellent. By evoking intertextually the presences of Vittoria and Flamineo within the scene, Brome dramatises the types that his siblings have chosen to perform. The restless, questioning, enigmatic tone perhaps intimates (if a spectator picks up the referencing) that these are roles that the impersonators find it difficult to assume, that they perhaps possess a degree of conscience and scruple that the prototypes do not readily share.12Of course, it is only at the very end of the play that spectators are given confirmation that Victoria and Borgio are characters of scruple and integrity. Surprises and revelations in theatre tend to work best (run less of a risk of appearing anticlimactic or banal) if audiences are led to have some suspicion of what is going to happen or be revealed; then, when that outcome is proffered, it is at least plausible (particularly if and when an audience troubles to reflect back on how the dramatist structured the progress towards that dénouement). The Websterian referencing anticipates, and to some degree prepares for, the discovery that Victoria and Borgio/Paulo are sister and brother; more importantly, it establishes the sense that nothing is quite what it seems in the scene, so that the discovery that both have spent the action of the play in purposeful disguise is more for alert or informed spectators the confirming of a suspicion than a wholly new disclosure. The referencing takes away the potential sensationalism involved in a last-minute resolving of the situation so that the focus is more on the psychological complexity of the characters involved. While the situation surrounding Flavia is plot-driven (it is there that the characters with names derived from the stock types of commedia dell’arte chiefly function), that involving Victoria is more concerned with the psychological layering that defines identity and at times (as will be discussed later in the introduction) plotting in the traditional sense of the term is virtually dispensed with in many of the scenes in which she appears. Victoria and Borgio challenge interpretation continually throughout the play: the referencing of The White Devil offers one possible reading of them which, set against other different kinds of referencing as their scenes progress, begins to intimate the superficiality of judgemental interpretations based on initial impressions. The referencing, here and later, is a dramaturgical strategy inviting spectators to interrogate their perceptions and how they are framed culturally (since the calling on Webster is part of the cultural conditioning, then and now, that determines whether a spectator is or is not informed).13The disgruntled relations between mistress and pimp grow into a quarrel, which subsides and a wary but respectful friendliness ensues; Victoria presents herself on her balcony while Borgio waits in the piazza below, welcoming into the house those men who can afford an appropriate fee for admission. When he rejoins Victoria “above”, they joke about her numerous clients and it is here that the next referencing occurs. Andrews was the first to note “the parallel between Victoria’s characterisation of her lovers [...] and the dialogue between Portia and Nerissa” (he is referring to the conversation between mistress and maid in the second scene of Act One).n11032 To compare the two sequences is immediately to sense how inaccurate the word “parallel” is in Andrews’s comment. In both there is satirical comment at the expense of foreigners that makes play with stereotypical national quirks, but the tone is markedly different as is the prevailing situation. Portia talks with a companionable female and, though there is a degree of tension occasioned by the terms of her father’s strange will, no suitor has yet succeeded in properly solving the challenge of the caskets so the pair can treat the queues of failed and failing lovers with dismissive wit. Victoria discusses with her pimp how to him, her go-between, her first clients appear; the satire is hedged about with imagery drawing either on warfare, ambushes and siege-tactics (musters, armies, encounters, encampments and quarters, batteries and forts) or on the hunt (with its packs of hounds, birds of prey and beasts on heat).n11033 Beside Brome’s frank dialogue, Shakespeare’s appears sexually innocent. After Webster’s Vittoria, Brome ends the scene by invoking Shakespeare’s Portia, seemingly her absolute antithesis. Again the result for spectators of so juxtaposing recollections of the duplicitous whore and the virgin possessed of a keen integrity is teasing and enigmatic: much depends on how one chooses to interpret the image clusters. The dialogue and the referenced context involving Portia and Nerissa seem to be in opposition, leaving one to question how relaxed is Brome’s Victoria in the wit and worldly wisdom that obtain throughout this episode. It is to be noted that the two strands of imagery occur exclusively in Borgio’s speeches, though Victoria initiates the cluster drawing on warfare with her use of the term “muster roll” and she does seemingly acquiesce in his barely disguised bawdy. The impact is again to suggest that role-play is involved at some level. But which of the two roles evoked (Vittoria or Portia) does Victoria own and which assume? The audience has watched her publicly advertise herself as a Venetian courtesan, which suggests that the former (Webster’s Vittoria) is the image of her moral identity. But why then does Brome call Shakespeare’s Portia to spectators’ minds?14Shakespeare’s strategy with the dialogue between Portia and Nerissa is twofold: it whets spectators’ appetites to see examples of these caricatures of men which the two women laugh over, and that laughter helps to instruct them how to respond when the examples are presented. Brome’s dialogue excites a similar curiosity, but there is a less certain indication of how spectators should respond, should any of the men described by Borgio appear onstage. Although in both cases a selection of suitors is offered to the audience’s view, there is a marked difference in how dramaturgically their encounters with the heroine are treated. Portia greets Morocco and Aragon in turn, outlines the conditions of the test before them, presents the three caskets and then stands back an observer to await the outcome of their respective choices; both fail the test and are required promptly to depart. Far from being as passive as this in the proceedings, Victoria is an active participant in the test: in fact, as the men find to their chagrin, she is the test, which consists chiefly in finding a means to break down her resistance. Rather than being the means to further their lust, she is, they find, the obstacle to their fulfilment: she has a voice in her own defence and is not afraid to use it. It is as spectators recognise this fact that Portia is displaced from the process of referencing and Marina from Shakespeare’s Pericles takes her place. Shakespeare’s late play on which he collaborated with George Wilkins, contrasts a father’s response to chance and misfortune with that of his lost daughter. It had been revived by the King’s Men in the season of 1631, roughly contemporary with Brome’s composition of The Novella. Sir Henry Herbert records in his office book: “Received of Mr. Benfielde, in the name of the kings company, for a gratuity for ther liberty gaind unto them of playinge, upon the cessation of the plague, this 10 of June, 1631 — 3l.10s. 0d. This was taken upon Pericles at the Globe.”n11034 Marina, Pericles’ daughter, is threatened with murder, captured by pirates and sold into a brothel in Mytilene, where to the despair of the bawd and her pimp she talks would-be clients out of pursuing their lust and charms them into behaving decently with her. Again what occurs in Brome’s comedy is not a precise parallel, since there is not an exact fit of correspondences; rather Marina illuminates the characterisation of Victoria through points of contrast. Marina’s clients come to the brothel out of an openly expressed sexual need; Victoria’s clients are mostly frauds, poseurs, pretending they can afford her extortionate fee while hoping they can cheat their way into her favours and her bed. Victoria has to use her intelligence to penetrate the sham façade that each suitor presents to her, but in a manner that encourages each of them to expose his shortcomings as much to himself as to her. Her circumstances as courtesan are such that she cannot resort to satire, scorn or disgust without risk to her reputation: she must remain civil, equable, a model of politeness.n11035 Each encounter is a contest of wills and wits that changes its tone and focus according to the suitor’s nature and mode of wooing. Invoking Marina and her persuasive arts of oratory and argument allows Brome to imply what the outcome of the encounters will be, so that spectators can focus their awareness on how Victoria triumphs over men who rapidly come to seem adversaries rather than suitors. But again an ambiguity prevails as a notable difference: it could be interpreted that Victoria’s insistence on the full fee as the price of her virginity springs from mercenary not moral motives. Though by the end of Act 3, spectators may have come to admire the energy and flexibility of her mind, they may still have doubts about Victoria’s moral standing. The presence of Webster’s Vittoria is not yet wholly suppressed, and she was motivated by a quest for luxury, wealth and status. Brome expertly plays off his various references, positive and negative, as if encouraging spectators to quest yet more searchingly for the truth of Victoria’s identity and the secret of her enigmatic self-presentation. The accumulation of references, far from being confusing for a knowing audience, strengthens one’s impression that she is involved in some serious form of role-play.15The other plot concerning Flavia is not without its intertextual referencing too. When her father, Guadagni, is required to leave their home to meet with lawyers and settle the legal arrangements for her marriage, he urges her: Make thee happy.
Look to my house and havings, keep all safe.
I shall be absent most part of this day.
Be careful, girl: thine own special good
Requires thee to’t; and therefore I dare trust thee.[NV 1.2.speech582]16E.K.R.Faust seems to have been the first to note that there are elements of Flavia’s elopement with Francisco that resemble the flight of Jessica and Lorenzo in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.n11036 But the marked allusion here is to Shylock’s preoccupation with the safety of his house and goods. Both women are presented as trapped within patriarchal constraints and both are locked into their homes, requiring their lovers to effect their escape. But the referencing helps to highlight Flavia’s greater dependency on others: Brome takes care to show how quickly she can rouse Guadagni’s rage, if she so much as crosses his wordn11037 and throughout the play his imminent arrival into her presence or the raising of his voice is enough to bring her close to fainting.n11038 Jessica is altogether more self-possessed and determined to take her own way. The contrast helps to point up the equally important contrast with Victoria as a woman of great strength of character and independence of mind. Flavia has the inclination to be disobedient, but it requires her maid, Astutta, and Francisco actually to guide her at every step. The corollary of this is that Flavia collapses at the least set-back, fears disaster will overwhelm her and resorts to melodramatic, suicidal fantasies, that Astutta delights in satirising. It is in this context that Brome invites a different kind of referencing. When Francisco comes to her in the guise of a pedlar-woman, it is to present gifts, which supposedly come from the man that Guadagni is attempting to force Flavia to marry. Flavia refuses to look at what she believes are expensive trinkets and with rhetorical grandiloquence announces that the only gifts fit for her in her present state are “Lucrece’ knife or Portia’s coals /Or Cleopatra’s asps” [NV 4.1.speech423]. She imagines a grand self-sacrifice as proof of her devotion; and remarkably the gifts which are proffered from the pedlar’s box exactly match her mood: “a halter [noose], a knife [and] a vial [of poison]”.n11039 Again we encounter here a Websterian effect: one recalls Bosola bringing the gift of a coffin, hangman’s cords (also a noose) and a bell to the imprisoned Duchess of Malfi and he too appears in disguise, as “the common Bell-man” come to bring her “by degrees to mortification”.n11040 In Webster’s tragedy the parade of objects is to test the degree to which the Duchess is absolute for death. Beside her humility and Christian resignation, Flavia’s death-wish is seen as so much adolescent posturing. The referencing of The Duchess of Malfi at once foregrounds for the informed spectator the issue of role-play. Francisco has a literal disguise and (presumably) a changed voice elevated falsely to the female register to make his impersonation ring true; his role-play is a conscious choice and is undertaken with a particular objective. Flavia, by contrast, is lacking in self-knowledge and wholly unaware not only that she is playing a role but one that exposes her as absurd. Her self-pitying stance renders her ridiculous as she pushes herself to emotional extremes. Again: the contrast with the containment and control of the Duchess as she suffers inhuman cruelties imposed on her from without adds to the comic satire of Brome’s inventing.17Referencing or intertextuallity in all these instances has a similar outcome: it provokes a spectator to question the degree to which conscious or unconscious role-play obtains at that moment in Brome’s plotting and, if so, what its function might be within the structuring of the play overall. Intertextuality interweaves with metatheatricality here, drawing spectators’ attention to issues of representation and the original (not imitative) dramaturgical choices that Brome might be making at such moments. Quite deliberately (or so it would seem) he is making it difficult for his audiences to read Victoria; and the referencing heightens the sense of her as enigmatic, as eluding precise definition, if her predicament and his representation of it can summon to mind seemingly conflicting reminders of other playwrights’ staging of self-possessed and confident women (Portia), women as courtesans (Vittoria) and women whose innate integrity is belied by their situation (Marina). Whatever role one tries to superimpose on Victoria’s identity is never the perfect match: each serves only to accentuate her diversity; and only the final act of the play reveals her in her full complexity. The exact opposite is true of Flavia: each role that she is matched with, be it Jessica or the Duchess of Malfi, shows the degree to which she is a flighty teenager, the victim of her uncontrollable moods. That the comedy of her characterisation springs from her being completely unconscious of the extent to which she is indulging in role-play neatly offsets the unpredictability of Victoria. Intertextuality enriches more than Brome’s characterisation, however, (though that is a significant dramaturgical achievement): it allows the play to engage thematically with the social implications of disguise in relation to moral identity.The Venetian courtesan and her patrons18The real status in Venetian society of the courtesan was perhaps never fully understood or appreciated amongst the protestant English. Coryat in Crudities makes no effort to distinguish between courtesans and whores and when he writes his account of visiting the courtesan, Margarita Emiliana, he anxiously feels the need to justify going by stressing that his ambition was to teach her proper Christian morals.n1104119How he summons his rhetoric, classical reference, traditional maxims and epigrams to persuade the reader that there is no “staine or blemish to the reputation of an honest and ingenuous man to see a Cortezan in her house and note her manners and conversation”! Coryat did not appreciate the longstanding tradition of the “honest courtesan” (the “cortigiana honesta”), a well-educated and refined woman, often of high social standing, whose gracious favour was sought after and who predominantly entertained men as an expert conversationalist, performer, hostess, singer, dancer and notable wit. Her sexual expertise was but one of a host of abilities (and one often only exercised in relation to a particular patron, who generally financed her household and wellbeing): her body was not the prime source of her income; the qualities of her mind and personality were prized as highly as her physical charms and facial beauty. The research of such writers as Margaret Rosenthal, Guido Ruggiero, Edward Muir and Mary Lavin has done much to bring the tradition to larger understanding.n11042 It is not clear how much of this more generous, less judgemental view of the courtesan was known to Brome. One suspects little, and that his predominant interest dramaturgically was, like Shakespeare’s with Marina, in showing a virgin risking her reputation by placing herself in the sex market but preserving her honour, chastity, social status and integrity despite her surroundings and the pressures these bring to bear on her. However, because he chooses to halt his plot and devote the whole third act to Victoria’s encounters with her various client-suitors, he has space to develop his representation of a courtesan and in so doing brings Victoria surprisingly close to the actual Venetian model in respect of her intellectual and cultural gifts: she sings and dances, shows herself adept at witty repartee and communicates a vibrant social self that has little directly to do with her sexuality. (In fact she repels direct overt approaches from Piso and Don Pedro as a personal affront.) Her intelligence is put to the test and at times severely exercised in how she chooses to respond to the various styles of wooing that her suitors adopt. While sustaining an audience’s interest in Victoria, Brome further extends his investigation into forms of role-play, as he examines how men approach women socially when their objective is sexual. 20In his play, Every Man In His Humour, Jonson interrogates the concept of gentlemanliness to question what exactly constitutes such a quality and what kind of man merits the title of gentleman.n11044 Brome develops this line of enquiry further to look at how gentlemanly are men’s tactics of wooing a woman and, more importantly, how gentlemanly they are in defeat. Piso treats Victoria with thinly disguised misogyny as just a whore for sale, hoping (presumably by degrading her in her own eyes) to get her at a low rate out of gratitude for the interest he takes in her. His arrogance is monstrous, but it falls short of his cruelty when Victoria firmly refuses to be cowed by his overbearing disdain (he admits he thought of her as little better than a “beast”) [NV 3.1.speech283]. He politely informs her that beauty and chastity, like all “merchantable ware”, are overprized, since they will, “if you overslip the season, grow /Suddenly fulsome, straightway stale, then rotten” [NV 3.1.speech285]. Horatio by contrast wishes to gain Victoria’s favour through a display of his cultural talents, since his income cannot rise to her required fee. He arrives in the guise of a Frenchman, posing as the acme of fine manners: he composes poems, sings them to a tune of his devising and, when all else fails him, dances with her. What is comic about this sequence is his absolute obsession with himself and the figure he is cutting rather than with the woman to whom he is ostensibly paying his respects. He possesses no sense of decorum, no discernment of what is appropriate behaviour in a woman’s presence: he especially deserves an audience’s laughter for his song which recommends the efficacy of make-up for disguising the effects of ageing, which is hardly flattering! And Brome makes sure audiences get the point of the satire by having the poem both read aloud and then sung.n11046 Victoria’s dismissal of him is pointedly apt in recommending that in future he display his vaunted talents as a theatre performer when with luck he would attract the interest of an older woman “by stirring up /The embers of affection, rather lust”.n11047 She is all courtesy; he all misguided effort. For the subject of a man’s education as a gentleman (and Horatio claims his training in his skills was a costly business), knowing members of Brome’s audience might have referenced Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, a textbook in the art of self-fashioning that had a continuing popularity into the Caroline period.n11048 It defined a gentleman as attentive to the honour of others in dealings with his fellow men and scrupulously so in his relations with the opposite sex; and it prized above all other qualities the acquisition of an utter nonchalance (sprezzatura) when publicly displaying one’s attributes, talents, knowledge, skills. Piso and Horatio fail miserably by comparison with such a standard: hauteur is no substitute for delicacy of feeling nor effortful self-advertisement for sprezzatura.21Don Pedro is astonished that Victoria does not instantly succumb to his Hispanic machismo and, when she refuses to submit, threatens rape. His only concern is for his honour that must be satisfied by possession of her. Like the two men who precede him, he is condemned by his own words and manner. Borgio saves Victoria by setting Swatzenburgh, a Dutchman, to attack him: Don Pedro rapidly quits the stage being all bluster and bogus heroics.n11049 Swatzenburgh’s gallantry appeals to Victoria at least initially, but even he ruins the first impression he imparts by later in the play turning up with the money to pay the required fee but in disguise to test Victoria’s honour. Testing becomes a masculine obsession over the last two acts: Francisco comes in disguise to Flavia to test her commitment to him, just as Swatzenburgh comes later to Victoria in the attire of an English factor; and Fabritio, Victoria’s one-time lover, comes dressed as a Dutchman, identical to Swatzenburgh, ostensibly to see the famous courtesan. The approach with his real self and identity disguised in this way reminds audiences of seeing Pantaloni, Fabritio’s elderly father, similarly seek her out under cover of darkness in the opening scene, anxious that he should not be recognised in seeking to bed a whore. To test in this manner is to set one’s self up as judge, but each of the men in turn is himself found wanting. And Brome does not let his spectators off the hook too easily: Piso and Horatio, having failed with Victoria, spy on her from “above” (that is from the upper playing level) while she is being courted by Swatzenburgh in his role as an Englishman. In other words, the theatre audience observe and listen to two onstage spectators, as (directly confronting them) these watch and comment on this scene and on Victoria’s behaviour within it. The concept of the appraising masculinist gaze may have been framed and theorised only recently, but Brome stages that gaze in operation and stages it critically in these linking sequences from The Novella. Because Victoria’s moral identity remains an unknown quantity throughout, the appraisals can be viewed objectively by the theatre audience for what they reveal about these men, as they arrogantly claim by reason of their “superiority” the right to evaluate her in a manner that severely objectifies her. It shocks Jacconetta, the blackamoor maid, to catch Piso and Horatio in their voyeuristic act:Gentlemen, forbear
Indeed it is not civil in you to pry beyond
Your hospitable usage. Pray forbear.[NV 5.1.speech732]22Arguably the most startling behaviour in the scene for the theatre audience is Borgio’s: he too comes to spy on Victoria and the disguised Swatzenburgh but armed “with pistols”.n11050 Is this perhaps a further referencing of Webster’s The White Devil and the nightmarish scene (5.6) where Flamineo, the architect and witness of his sister, Vittoria’s moral decline, enters with a case of pistols and forces her and her maid, Zanche, to join with him in a suicide pact? The text requires that Borgio’s pistols be primed and at the ready, so how would Brome have spectators read his presence in this scene of courtship, lurking in the shadows behind Victoria and her suitor? The stage direction gives the noun in the plural, which suggests that he aims at both the targets before him. In performance this visual dynamic brings an ominous tension to the episode, which it is difficult to gauge from a printed text. Borgio’s is potentially the most extreme form of judgement yet directed at Victoria, but one that is not implausible, given the earlier referencing of Borgio with the darkly malcontented Flamineo (Brome’s intertextuality is organic and ongoing within his dramatic structure and its strategies). Victoria too is fraught with a profound anxiety, but (surprisingly for the audience) it is occasioned by the arrival of “the English factor” (Swatzenburgh) and his production of the fee for possessing of her maidenhead. She faced down Piso, Horatio and Don Pedro, because they lacked both the necessary money and a preferred quality of masculinity, but this seemingly is one suitor whom she cannot elude. Instead she tells the disguised Swatzenburgh a long tale of how she comes to be in Venice and how she has set herself up as a courtesan as a form of protection while she seeks out her former lover. What she is asking him (and the theatre audience) is to view all her past appearances in the play as performance, the conscious assumption of a role to further an objective and to believe that the woman who now addresses him is speaking openly and honestly from her heart’s truth.23Brome has posed a major challenge for spectators here: within the context of what the audience know is a theatre event focused on performance and within the further context of a courtesan’s home (which has traditionally been viewed as a place for the enactment of scenes of feigned passion and pleasure), a woman, played by a boy actor, who has assumed for much of the drama one particular role, is asking that her performance to date be considered quite false to her true nature, while assuring her onstage and offstage appraisers that she will endeavour now scrupulously to present that true nature for our acceptance. This is a metatheatrical and metaphysical conundrum: layer after layer of role-play, each believable on its own terms, is peeled away as the boundaries between theatrical representation and lived social behaviour seem to collapse and merge into each other. In face of such complex evidence of performativity, where lies integrity and how may it be gauged? The fact that Victoria’s performance is here watched by multiple kinds of spectators adds to the complexity and also to the formidable demand on the actress to be convincing, to achieve a standard of realistic acting, which in a play that has exposed so many performances as false, can credibly be deemed an authentic confession. Significantly Victoria elects to kneel for its delivery. How her speech is delivered is a major issue of style that a director and actor must negotiate, but clearly it must be different from any mode of acting that performers in the production have adopted previously. What is surprising is the impact that her narrative and how she delivers it have on her onstage audience. Victoria wholly wins the approval and belief of the one man, Piso, who has been till now the most misogynistic of her appraisers, while his companion (Horatio) realises that she is their friend, Fabritio’s lover, since hers is recognisably in part his story too. Thankfully Borgio lowers his pistols and departs, convinced that Victoria will not give herself to the factor. (In a sense the disturbing Websterian presences in the drama have been expelled by her confession.) What wins assent that this is a woman masquerading as a courtesan who is speaking now not out of shame but in defence of a chastity and honour that she profoundly values as the expression of her complete self is the assured syntactical discipline of the speech, the meticulous attention to every explanatory detail and its remarkably succinct expression. There is no rhetorical artifice or emotional appeal, only a quiet statement of fact. At the end of the play Victoria comes forward to question everyone onstage and in the auditorium as to how finally they judge her character: all onstage pronounce her “noble” and the audience are invited to assent to that verdict by applauding. The seemingly transgressive woman in a world of transient values and false appearances stands revealed and vindicated absolutely for what she is. “Noble” in this context is an epithet that signifies far more than an assertion of aristocratic status: it is recognition of the empowerment that has enabled Victoria as a woman (she has not had to resort to dressing as a man to facilitate her schemes) to shape her life to her own structures and moral values and in the process to transcend limited and conventional criticism of her for so doing.Politics and The Novella24This would seem the opportune moment to discuss the issue of politics in relation to The Novella. As indicated above, Matthew Steggle in his short study of the play has read into it a commentary on the vexed relations between Catholics and Protestants at this time.n11051 To do this he chooses to focus on the character of Swatzenburgh, for whom he has found an exact historical source: Adolphus Swatzenburg, who led a “short but swashbuckling military career against the Turks”, and received due praise in Richard Knolles’ The Generall Historie of the Turkes, which had gone into a fourth edition in 1631. Steggle claims that by giving his Dutchman the name of a known fighter against the Turks Brome is “obscurely scoring points against Catholic Venice” and that the deliberately hazy nationality that invests the character (it is never clear in the text whether he is Dutch or “Almain “ or German and he also impersonates an Englishman) turns him into “a representative of Northern European Protestantism in general” (p.34). Steggle builds on this to promote the idea that Swatzenburg (his spelling) is morally superior to Victoria’s other suitors and inconsequence “on one level [...] the play seems to be straightforward praise of northern European Protestantism contrasted with a wicked Catholic southern Europe” (p.34). He does then admit that Brome clouds the issue somewhat by having Swatzenburgh ridiculed by the rest of the characters in the last two acts and that this leads to ambiguity in the play: Venice he describes as “contradictory” (p.35); the ending is “muted and uncertain”, a criticism which he amplifies as deriving “from the political and religious implications of Brome’s use of a distinctly continental, Catholic setting” (p.35); and “the lurid possibilities of using an Italian setting for comedy” is not a success, because Brome fails to resolve “the religious difficulties this throws up” (p.37). 25This whole line of argument turns on reading major implications into a distinctly minor character. Swatzenburgh appears as an honest Dutchman who earns Victoria’s gratitude by rapidly forcing Don Pedro out of her presence; in return she graces him with an invitation to dine with her; he reappears but in disguise as an Englishman, proffers the fee and demands sexual satisfaction; Victoria throws herself on his mercy by telling him the true reason for her being in Venice; he respects her frankness and admits in his turn that he is not an Englishman and that he has been imposing on her in disguise in order to test her honesty; he suffers her disdain for this want of trust and allows her to depart; he then is involved in confusion over his identity when Fabritio enters wearing clothes identical to those worn by his Dutch persona and he is in turn forced from the room as an impostor; he returns with the group accompanying Guadagni and Pantaloni, who are set on exposing Victoria; his, however, is a rather muted presence in the final act, significant only for the way he graciously gives up any claim to Victoria’s affections when he realises that his impersonator was Victoria’s long-time lover, Fabritio. A summary of his action in the play shows that he is far from an ideal character, that he, like most of the male characters, distrusts Victoria, and supposes that he has the right to test her veracity (yet ironically chooses to do so by himself feigning an alternative identity to fox her). At the time of his conflict with Don Pedro, Borgio comments that the battle is emblematic of the struggle of the Netherlands against the might of Spain. He warns Don Pedro:And this may be an ominous portent
Against your title to the Netherlands,
It may hold in the great work, sir, as well
As in this small assay.[NV 3.1.speech374]26But this seems a local joke (Spain had at the time of the play’s composition suffered considerable loss of advantage in renewed strife against Holland) rather than a cue directing how one should read the play overall. Steggle argues that this bout of fisticuffs which ends with the displacement of the Spanish gentleman and Borgio’s triumphant observation - “Methinks, /I have seen one in your shape so well presented” [NV 3.1.speech365] — is a direct allusion to Middleton’s “hugely successful A Game a Chess (1624), which set a gold standard of anti-Spanish rhetoric” (p.33). This is possible, but a more likely allusion is to Jonson’s The Alchemist and the incident where Face fetches Ananias to get rid of Surly, who is posing as a Spanish gentleman, out of Lovewit’s house. There are more exact similarities here in terms of comic plotting between the two sequences (there is no such precise parallel to be found in Middleton’s play) and, though Jonson’s comedy was the older play in being first staged in 1610, there is evidence that its popularity ensured its continuing presence in the King’s Men’s repertory and that it was played as recently as December 1631.n1105227Steggle’s more serious criticism extending from this is directed at Brome’s dramaturgy, when he deploys epithets like “muted”, “uncertain”, “lurid” and “contradictory” and particularly relates these to Brome’s treatment of the ending. Noticeably, he loads his argument by continually denigrating Victoria, when he refers to her as “embarking on a career as a high-class prostitute” (p.32). This is to ignore the distinctions that the play carefully makes between whores, prostitutes and courtesans (which historically, as has been shown in this introduction and the annotations to the text, were meticulously drawn and maintained in Venice). Further, he reads Victoria’s presentation of herself on a balcony while singing to a lute as “emblematic confirmation that she is a whore”. This is to ignore the degree to which Brome’s dramaturgical strategies problematise such a judgement. Significantly Steggle makes no comment on Victoria’s role in the play’s resolution or its last lines, which require the audience to affirm by their applause that their initial appraisal of her has undergone a complete reversal, if not transformation (while he notes that “in the whole play no sexual impropriety actually takes place” (p.35), he does not choose to explore the ramifications of this). This is all part of his reading The Novella as imbued with anti-Catholic, anti-Italian rhetoric to a degree that undermines the play’s consistency.28I would agree strongly with Steggle that The Novella is political, but would argue in summarising my foregoing analysis of the play that its politics relate more to sexuality and gender relations than to religious or nationalistic issues. The focus of both strands of plot in the play is courtship and particularly male attitudes to wooing and to the women whose favour they seek. The men are mostly duplicitous in such relations: they disguise themselves to assume roles that enable them either to pursue an intent to debauch a woman (Pantaloni, Horatio, Swatzenburgh), to interrogate her integrity (Francisco, Swatzenburgh again, and to some extent Fabritio) or to protect her from her likely feminine waywardness, to protect her in fact from her own self (Borgio and to some degree Jacomo). There is much play with costuming, false beards, cloaks and dark lanthorns. In such contexts, it is hardly surprising that Flavia is rendered powerless to act on her own behalf. She is the archetypal product of patriarchal shaping: a will-less, spineless passive creature, torn between duty and desire. Presented in this way by Brome, she frequently becomes an object not of spectators’ pity but of their laughter at her tantrums and emotional extremism. She is easily placed and readily patronised (even her maid, Astutta, sees her as fit game for teasing) and dramaturgically Flavia is presented as a precise foil or antithesis to Victoria, who continually eludes definition. That Victoria is in disguise is not revealed till close to the end of the play (though, as has been argued, the referencing implies this may be her case); and in this she is unlike the disguised male characters, whose role-play is seen being adopted, is quickly detected by the audience, or is eventually exposed to their criticism. Their disguise deliberately invites ridicule: Piso derides Pantaloni’s attempts to hide his identity in one of the earliest sequences of spectacle in the play; Horatio’s attempt at playing the cultured Frenchman earns Victoria’s politely phrased but caustic sarcasm; Swatzenburgh’s becoming an Englishman turns into farce when a man disguised as his Dutch persona comes into view; Francisco’s descending the social scale to become a pedlar and a woman takes disguise to an extreme where, far from winning his Flavia’s rapture, he causes her to faint with shock when he discards his false attire. In the closing moments of the play when seemingly every last twist of the plot has been sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction, Brome reveals that the blackamoor, Jacconetta, is not a girl but the page-boy Fabritio left in Victoria’s charge, whom she supposes is a eunuch. What the text does not make clear is whether Jacomo really is emasculated or whether his blackness is genuine or a product of clever make-up. Disguise here is rendered totally absurd: the boundaries between black and white, male and female, theatrical conventions and social expectation have become so elided and confused as to expose the mechanisms of fabrication within role-play and within theatre and performance. It is the ultimate metatheatrical strategy in the play; and it comes directly before Victoria’s plea that her identity be confirmed by everyone onstage and off:Here you see all, and all that came i’th’ house
(Since it was made mine). In this convention
I dare them not, but give them freest leave
To speak the worst they found in The Novella.[NV 5.1.speech880]29That moment of surreal unveiling of Jacomo’s “nature” is immediately juxtaposed against the high seriousness of Victoria’s appeal. Victoria is also a boy actor presenting (as a female persona) a woman who is not the whore of Puritan imaginings in their invective against the abominations of theatrical performance nor the courtesan that most of the male characters onstage and perhaps most of the audience have supposed her to be. Disguise for Victoria is her means of protection, while searching for the lover who has been taken from her by his father’s cruelty. She is a woman who does not fear to go in quest of her man, and that hidden motive is what has given her the strength to act in a world where duplicity is the norm. Disguise to varying degrees empowers Shakespeare’s heroines but only because through their disguise they adopt a male persona. Brome has inventively examined the terms on which a woman might survive in disguise, if that disguise were a distinctive female persona. (The referencing of Portia, discussed earlier, points the contrast; and Webster’s Vittoria at one point in the play to avoid detection disguises herself as a boy.) Victoria chooses to play the woman that men assume empowered, independent women necessarily to be: at best courtesans, at worst whores. She enters the duplicitous world of Venice on its own terms and plays out its expectations of her successfully, except that she avoids always the one action that would collapse role and self together to her own and the world’s scorn: the losing of her chastity. Truth to her commitment to Fabritio is what enables her daringly to challenge the world’s opinion of her, confident that she will achieve her ambition. This, transferred to the field of sexual politics, is akin to the decision Wittipol makes in Jonson’s The Devil Is An Ass (1616): to protect Frances Fitzdotterel’s financial security from her reckless husband, he disguises himself as a woman to enable him to match the duplicity of the sharks who are preying on Fitzdotterel and outdo them at their own scams; he enters their world and indeed is a brilliant exponent of its corrupt practices in order to keep Frances free of their evil, while commitment to guarding her enables him to be in their world without becoming of it. Exactly the same moral exercise lies behind Victoria’s assumption of a disguise. That she has Brome’s support is perhaps best detected from his refusal in devising his plot and its dramaturgical enactment to subject Victoria herself at any point to comedy: continually she exposes others (always men) to an audience’s critical laughter. Like Wittipol, she has to play if she is to survive. The final criticism offered by The Novella is social and political in condemning a world where masculinist and patriarchal value-systems in relation to gender-expectation require Victoria to risk compromising her social identity and her inner, moral and emotional integrity the moment she elects to become proactive in determining her future. The whole movement of the play is towards an affirmation of that final description of Victoria’s identity as “noble”.The Novella and the stage30One cannot be certain how many plays Brome had completed or had staged before The Novella but its command of the playing space does not suggest the work of an apprentice. Every act deploys the provisions of the Caroline stage with considerable inventive power, from the moment that the opening tense dialogue bordering on outright antagonism between Piso and Fabritio is suddenly disrupted by an explosion of activity onto the stage about them. In mime, probably supported by music in some form (either from the theatre orchestra above or from the songs of the various men serenading Victoria) a host of men of varying ages crosses and re-crosses the stage, trying to glimpse her or gain admission to her house. The image is that of carnival but an audience’s delight is punctured by the appearance of Pantaloni, an aged lecher, struggling to hide his identity as a respected merchant from the crowd circling about him. They are clearly enamoured with the woman they are celebrating in song; he is enraged and struggling to regain his self-importance. The full significance of the commedia-like interlude (obviously more is involved here than scene-setting) will not be imparted to audiences till the start of Act Two, though the object of the men’s entertainment and the identity of the old man are partly established.31In the second act the various levels of the stage are enlivened by the action. For much of the second scene the intimate and anxious dialogue between Victoria, Borgio and Jacconetta is situated with the characters occupying the upper level or gallery, the confined, intimate playing space adding to the tensions between the three. When amity is restored between them, they agree to proceed with Victoria’s debut as a courtesan; Victoria seats herself with her lute at the front of the gallery, as if alone on a balcony; Borgio descends to the main stage level, which begins to fill with a succession of men who again cross and re-cross the space while intently gazing up at Victoria as she now provides the musical accompaniment to their movement. When the song ends, the stage empties, Borgio returns to the gallery and to Victoria where they joke over the quantity of men obsessed with possessing her.n11053 The episode is a kind of dumbshow illustrative of the vagaries of lust, which Borgio and Victoria have watched, each with an appraising, shrewdly critical eye.32The third act comprises a series of wooing sequences where the scenic interest is provided by the display of national costumes (Italian, French, Spanish, German) on view. The invention here is focused on the doorways to the space: how individual characters enter is indicative of their personal ways of approaching a woman either for amatory discourse or lust-driven attack. The initial scene of the fourth act opens up the entire stage provision, as the play shifts from comedy to farce: again the gallery is deployed for Francisco’s disguised entrance to Flavia and the scene of her discovering who is actually with her. Guadagni’s return from the lawyers’ in quest of legal papers he has forgotten brings him on to the lower stage, which sets everyone “above” into a flutter; the old man rampages around the house (the audience hear his voice “within” as, supposedly, he mounts the stairs, getting nearer and nearer to the terrified Flavia). To save a tense situation, the ever-resourceful Astutta hides Francisco in the nick of time and then engineers matters such that a valuable box falls from the gallery balustrade to the main stage floor below. Again Guadagni is heard “within” as he now tears down the stairs to retrieve his property, while two identically dressed law-officers rush onto the stage and begin to fight for sole possession of the box. Scenes above and below alternate in quick succession, preventing Guadagni from realising that his involvement with people in the “piazza” below has enabled Flavia, Astutta and Francisco to escape from the back door of the house. The geography of the palazzo is beautifully evoked in all this activity. Brome has long been praised for his place-realism but usually in terms of his verbal referencing and evocation of precise locations (such as Whitehall Palace in The City Wit or the environs of Covent Garden, the various taverns around the city and the Inns of Court in The Weeding of Covent Garden or the Nottinghamshire settings of A Jovial Crew) but here it is the ability to deploy every aspect of the stage provision (onstage and offstage) to realise a particular locality and give it spatial verisimilitude for spectators that impresses. It is a veritable tour de force to equal Jonson’s exploration of the possibilities of stage space in The Alchemist in giving spectators an exact sense of the geography of Lovewit’s house.33The second scene of that act is a quieter affair, but not without its scenic focus on the issue of disguise, as a disgruntled Horatio is presumably discarding his, while Fabritio is putting his on. The audience watch disguise being enacted as a process: it is as if the business of the tiring house (normally offstage “behind”) has come to the forefront of the playing space and of spectators’ attention, even to the extent of observing a flourishing false beard being set in position. This offers a visual emblem of Brome’s investigation of the psychological effects of inhabiting a disguise, while demonstrating the need in pursuing such a tactic of necessarily achieving a credible verisimilitude. True and false disguise and the self that lies within is the thematic focus of the final act. Once again the action starts on the main stage but opens out to deploy the gallery where Piso and Horatio are “concealed” to spy on Victoria and Swatzenburgh, who must be situated on the forestage to allow Borgio to lurk dangerously around the perimeter with his pistols at the ready. The play was staged originally in the Blackfriars Theatre and this may have been a sequence staged, as Martin White has demonstrated in regard to “dark” scenes such as the fourth and fifth acts of The Duchess of Malfi, with the candelabra (or some of them) raised aloft to bring areas of shadow and darkness to the outer edges of the playing space.n11054 The “darkness” would give poignancy to Fabritio’s later recognition of Victoria and dread that, finding her in the home of a courtesan, he is being visited by a ghost or magically created phantom. The whole question of the integrity of Victoria’s “performance” on which this act centres is thrown into sharp relief by the ensuing scene where a disguised Swatzenburgh confronts what he believes is a ghost or mirror-image of himself (Fabritio in disguise). Is this a house of illusions? The weird play of light and shadow would certainly make such a supposition credible. Clarity comes with the onrush of Guadagni, Pantaloni and their retinue as the stage fills to enable the sorting out of the complications of the plot. Were more lights lowered or brought into the space at this point? Everything leads to the final calling centre-stage of the emblematic image of Jacconetta and the laughter-provoking presentation of this black-white boy-girl as a virtual personification of disguise in all its absurdity; and then the placing beside him/her of Victoria, still in her fabulous garb as a courtesan, as the personification of truth to self. 34Brome’s use of space and costuming to further his thematic and dramaturgical strategies in The Novella shows a playwright confidently in command of the theatre as a medium of communication. That the play was popular in its day, given the brilliance of its conceived mise-en-scène, is not surprising. It offers a central role that demands a virtuoso performance of great vocal sensitivity from a boy actor, while the whole piece affords marvellous opportunities for varying styles of comic and caricatured personification from a company. Above all it requires an ensemble capable of the meticulous contrapuntal timing of the farcical episodes (especially in 4.1.) and the technique required to change the tenor and tone of their acting styles, especially in Act Five, as the juxtaposing of serious and hilarious sequences requires. The Novella is assuredly a magnificent celebration of the arts of the theatre and of actors and that alone should recommend its virtuosity to modern companies, while its concern with gender relations makes it pertinent to any society. It merits revival, since its artistry anticipates so much that is currently honoured in the twenty-first century theatre. The lack of a theatre-conscious edited text has militated against its presence in the modern repertory. This edition has been conceived and developed in the hope of remedying that situation.
n11018 political satire.
n11019 does not sit comfortably under that label either.
n11020 its continuing success.
n11021 Thomas Coryat’s Crudities (1611) and, to a lesser extent, Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (1617).
n11022 (presumably Jonson himself possessed a copy).
n11023 died in 1630 before it had gone to press.
n11024 explanation or defence of his suppositions.
n11025 dismissed as a coincidence.
n11026 The like thing happened about that time in Vicenza a Citty vnder the Venetians; where a yong Cortisan arriuing, and setting a very high price vppon herselfe, such as the gentlemen of the Citty, howsoeuer desirous of new game, would not giue, after they had in vayne tried all meanes to make her fall in the price, they called the hangman, and one gaue him a dublett, an other a hatt, and so for all gentleman like attire, and all ioyntly furnishing him with the mony she demaunded, they sent him to her that night, and the next morning all coming to her Chamber, the one cast his dublett, the other his hatt, and so the rest of the attire into the fyer, and then the hangmans man bringing him his apparel, after their departure, the miserable Cortisan perceiuing how she was scorned, fled secretly out of the citty, and was neuer more seene there.
n11027 the courtesan of Latin drama.
n11028 undertake the test with the caskets.
n11029 (why the second author in the relationship wishes to open up a dialogue with the first).
n11030 her private personality.
n11031 phenomenal price on her virginity (“Mark but the price she’s cried at: two thousand ducats /For her maidenhead, and one month’s society”).
n11032 (he is referring to the conversation between mistress and maid in the second scene of Act One).
n11033 (with its packs of hounds, birds of prey and beasts on heat).
n11034 “Received of Mr. Benfielde, in the name of the kings company, for a gratuity for ther liberty gaind unto them of playinge, upon the cessation of the plague, this 10 of June, 1631 — 3l.10s. 0d. This was taken upon Pericles at the Globe.”
n11035 she must remain civil, equable, a model of politeness.
n11036 E.K.R.Faust seems to have been the first to note that there are elements of Flavia’s elopement with Francisco that resemble the flight of Jessica and Lorenzo in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
n11037 Brome takes care to show how quickly she can rouse Guadagni’s rage, if she so much as crosses his word
n11038 his voice is enough to bring her close to fainting.
n11039 “a halter [noose], a knife [and] a vial [of poison]”.
n11040 “by degrees to mortification”.
n11041 teach her proper Christian morals.
n11042 The research of such writers as Margaret Rosenthal, Guido Ruggiero, Edward Muir and Mary Lavin has done much to bring the tradition to larger understanding.
n11044 In his play, Every Man In His Humour, Jonson interrogates the concept of gentlemanliness to question what exactly constitutes such a quality and what kind of man merits the title of gentleman.
n11046 get the point of the satire by having the poem both read aloud and then sung.
n11047 “by stirring up /The embers of affection, rather lust”.
n11048 a textbook in the art of self-fashioning that had a continuing popularity into the Caroline period.
n11049 bogus heroics.
n11050 “with pistols”.
n11051 vexed relations between Catholics and Protestants at this time.
n11052 and that it was played as recently as December 1631.
n11053 obsessed with possessing her.
n11054 the outer edges of the playing space.