The Sparagus Garden
Critical Introduction1In 1642, Henry Peacham published a pamphlet entitled ‘The Art of Living in London, Or, A Caution how Gentlemen, Countrymen and Strangers, drawn by occasion of businesse, should dispose of themselves in the thriftiest way, not onely in the Citie, but in all other populous places’. Anyone who had seen Richard Brome’s play The Sparagus Garden some seven years earlier when it was first staged in London at the Salisbury Court Theatre might have been forgiven for imagining that Peacham’s pamphlet had served as a primer for the play’s various plotlines, not least when their eyes scanned down the titlepage to the declarations of what the pamphlet would additionally concern itself with: ‘Also, A direction to the poorer sort that come thither to seeke their Fortune’. One of Brome’s chief plotlines in the play concerns a country character from the Somerset village of Taunton Deane, one Timothy Hoyden (that surname would immediately indicate to audiences that he was a variation on the theme of the country fool about to be gulled by wiser city wits, a virtual standby for all city comedies in the period). He comes to London quite literally seeking (and spending) his fortune, having been informed by his mother on her deathbed that his father was in reality a London gentleman and that he should take the money she was leaving him and invest it in training to become a gentleman himself before going to meet with his uncle, a Justice of the Peace (hereafter J.P.) resident in London called William Striker. 2In the course of the play Tim will fall prey to exactly the kinds of city abuses that Peacham’s pamphlet engagingly and wittily outlines. His four hundred pound bequest will rapidly be consumed by the stratagems of the bankrupt knight Sir Hugh Moneylacks and his confederates in crime as they quite literally ‘fleece’ Tim of all his belongings, even the (newly purchased) clothes upon his back. That idiomatic phrase, which is still used in contemporary vernacular to describe someone being purloined of their belongings by others, clearly meant the same in Peacham’s time: in The Art of London he talks of the city being full of people ‘as ready to catch hold of your fleece as your selfe’ (A1v). ‘The Citie,’ he warns, ‘is like a quick-sand, the longer you stand upon it the deeper you sinke’ (A2r). He has earlier begun the watery comparisons by declaring: ‘the City . . . like a vast sea (full of gusts) . . .’ (A1v), In the context of The Sparagus Garden we might consider that Sir Hugh Moneylacks is one such gust, blowing poor Tim Hoyden in all directions. By the final act Tim will have been stripped of his money, his clothes, and his dignity (his obvious theatrical predecessor in this regard is Bartholomew Cokes from Jonson’s 1614 play Bartholomew Fair, another provincial outsider made a fool of by knowing Londoners). He appears onstage in a sedan chair (a great theatrical entrance) dressed in clothes belonging to Brittleware’s mother. His own half-brother reflects that he resembles ‘Master mayor’s wife of Taunton Dean’ [SG 5.3.speech1272].3Peacham could, then, literally be describing Timothy Hoyden in his pamphlet when he describes an imagined country innocent come to town, who is immediately persuaded by city types preying upon him to spend his personal fortune on ‘cloathes in this fashion, this or that new Play, . . . Ordinarie, Taverne feats or meeting; Horse and Coach hire: besides these britle commodities they carry . . .’ (A2r). Notwithstanding Peacham’s seeming aversion to playhouses as sites of widespread crime and consumption - there are several references throughout the pamphlet to the dangers inherent in attending plays, not least the pickpockets in the closely packed together audiences - his description here might be a précis of Brome’s various plotlines in The Sparagus Garden. For in this play we do see Timothy Hoyden being encouraged by Moneylacks and his ‘crew’ (the description is that given them by Tim’s rather more knowing servant from Somerset, Coulter, who is summarily dismissed on Moneylacks’s recommendation for just this reason) to buy expensive new clothing. The crew later steal these clothes after getting Tim, Tom and Coulter drunk, hence Tim’s cross-dressed entrance in his sedan chair in 5.2. Elsewhere in his pamphlet Peacham warns against drunkenness and the reduced states of consciousness it leaves people in. Tim is also encouraged by Moneylacks, Spring and Brittleware to become part of a culture of feasting at taverns and ordinaries, or at least at the newly opened pleasure garden and hotel, ‘The Asparagus Garden’ (of which more in a moment) and to spend money on the new city transportation of coaches and, in particular, sedan chairs. I will return to the specific details of this play’s interest in the phenomenon of domestic mobility and the voguish method of the sedan chair in particular, but suffice to say at this point that once again Brome seems almost to be working to Peacham’s outline in the design of his play. That view might appear to gain more credence when we note the resonance of a particular adjective in the passage quoted above. The scamming Londoners are said to sell to the unwitting country person their ‘britle commodities’. ‘Brit[t]le’ in this context could signify in multiple ways. Certainly there is the sense of items that are hard and therefore liable to break, but also the latent sense (now a very rare usage according to the OED) of unreliable or poorly made items, but there is also the very practical and material sense of the china and porcelain ware that was so popular in 1630s London and sold in various outlets, not least those at the Royal Exchange near the Strand, which is one of several explicitly named locations in this play. 4In fact, two of Brome’s central characters run just such an outlet: John and Rebecca Brittleware (their surname will, of course, also come to signify sexual impotency on the part of John in the early sections of this play) own a china-shop, an endeavour clearly run from the ground floor of their household, in which they also offer lodgings to Sir Hugh Moneylacks. Moneylacks, as a result, involves Brittleware in his scheme to fleece Tim Hoyden, although by Act 5 Brittleware will repent of his actions and turn informant. ‘Brittle’ wares then would be all too evident on the stage of this play. It is no coincidence that in helping to dress Annabel for her ill-fated wedding to Sir Arnold Cautious, Rebecca resorts to the metaphors and tropes derived from her china-shop trade. Cautious promises to bring his new wife to spend money in the Brittlewares’ shop as a thank-you, but Rebecca’s response is crudely literal in its commodification of the bride and her ‘saleable’ and consumable sexuality: ‘She is herself the purest piece of porcelain that e’er had liquid sweetmeats licked out of it’ [SG 5.3.speech1131]. 5The correlations between Henry Peacham’s 1642 text and Brome’s play are remarkable and they may strike readers even more when the fact is added in that The Sparagus Garden appears to engage extensively with yet another of Peacham’s texts, his very influential and popular text, The Complete Gentlemen. That text went through three editions between 1622 and 1634, the last emerging in print just a year prior to Brome’s play. It is surely this pamphlet that Timothy has read and which has fed his desire to be trained in the arts of being a gentlemen and why there appear to be several embedded yet knowing references to that text in the dialogue of the play: for example, in 2.2. Brittleware reflects on how Tim will have been trained in ‘all the compliments of an absolute gentleman’ [SG 2.2.speech312]; ‘absolute’ for ‘complete’ here feels like all too knowing a substitution and one that literate audiences would have recognized with pleasure. 6In the extended interest that the play demonstrates in new urban forms of transportation, Brome also displays at least cognate concerns with Peacham’s 1637 pamphlet Coach and Sedan which debates, in quasi-dramatic form, the relative merits of coaches, sedan chairs, and brewer’s carts. Peacham’s use of the playlet format for his pamphlet though might help us to reconfigure what has been described up until now in this introduction as his ‘influence’ upon Brome’s play. Certainly the publication dates would suggest this direction of traffic for The Complete Gentleman but in the case of Coach and Sedan and, indeed, The Art of Living in London, these texts appeared in print after The Sparagus Garden had been both performed and printed (the quarto appeared the same year as the first performances took place, that is in 1635). Peacham may on the surface appear to be of an antitheatrical mindset in his 1642 text, but the references are all, we should note, to the playhouse as a crowded, heavily populated and therefore dangerous site rather than to the dangers of playtexts themselves: ‘Keep out of throngs and publick places’ he will warn towards the end of the text (A4r). One might after all think that the kind of warning Peacham himself professed to be offering those thinking of coming to London was being offered by plays such as Brome’s on a nightly basis in the London commercial theatres. It is worthwhile recalling at this point that one of the cultural items of production that Peacham is perhaps most famous for today is a drawing executed sometime around 1595 which depicts a production of Titus Andronicus. We might assume from this that this was a man who freely attended plays himself. Intriguingly, in his 1637 play The Antipodes (edited in this collection by Richard Cave) Brome includes a sequence amid the rolling scene of Act 4 where a carman, a sedan man, and a waterman converse in a pastiche of courtly language. Carmen were those who managed the handcarts or larger carts that were commonplace in London throughout the period in focus, used not only to transport convicted criminals to their executions but also the ‘night soil’ — the human manure produced by the capital’s inhabitants, out of the city to its environs on a daily basis; this same ‘night soil’ was used to fertilize gardens in these outlying areas and would no doubt have fed the ‘dirty ‘sparagus’ [SG 3.1.speech414] grown by Martha and her husband at The Asparagus Garden itself. The joke in The Antipodes is that in the ‘world turned upside down’ that Peregrine is experiencing, presuming himself to be on the other side of the world when in fact he is really being performed to by a group of actors, these lowly street workers and functionaries speak in the most hyperbolic courtly discourse about their trades. In this fictional ‘anti-London’ these men live and work in harmony with each other, even dining together at taverns in the evenings and sharing their news from the continent and the court in equal terms; in reality such workers would have been in direct competition with each other and it is this rather more outspoken world of professional rivalry that Peacham’s 1636 pamphlet-playlet Coach and Sedan depicts as the different men vye for the superiority of the transportation scheme they represent. We are in a classic ‘chicken and egg’ situation here. Did Brome read Peacham or did Peacham see Brome’s play; or, were both men simply responding to the cultural zeitgeist of the day? The particular lines of chronology must of necessity remain speculative, but it is worthwhile noting what a deep interconnection of ideas, and therefore a series of analogous practices, there seems to be in the work of these two 1630s writers. Certainly there is as much case for seeing Peacham’s prose texts as being produced by the drama of the day rather than providing raw material for it. 7If we flip the model on its head, then, and consider the idea that Peacham’s texts might have been influenced by 1630s city comedies and their plotlines, contents, and characters, we begin I think to place ourselves in a more genuine framework for understanding the complex vortex of creative influence and agency that was early modern London and the role of playtexts within that. Brome’s city plays therefore become in this formulation not just documentary representations of what was going on in contemporary London but might also be considered as having a degree of agency within that space and place; that is to say we might begin to talk about the ways in which plays like The Sparagus Garden which have long been spoken about in terms of ‘place realism’ not only reflect or represent these spaces but actually produce them or at least produce ways of understanding and interpreting them and therefore also produce the ways in which those spaces are practised.n10333 Jean Howard’s recent work in Theater of a City has aided us in thinking in these terms — that is, not just of the ‘spatial stories’ city dramas tell but the ways in which the stories they tell actually impact on the ways in which people perceive and understand those spaces in actuality.n10334 Howard is, of course, working within the readily acknowledged paradigms of Michel de Certeau’s influential theories of urbanity and practice, expressed most eloquently and influentially perhaps in his ‘Walking in the City’ essay included in The Practices of Everyday Life, but what interests me in this opening account of the Peacham-Brome ‘vortex’ as I have chosen to term it is the ways in which drama, and Brome’s 1630s plays in particular, produced as they were in a decade when the city was going through a particular set of transitions and reconfigurations, become potent agents in the production and the practice of space.n10335 8Another of the spatial practices represented at several points in this play is, indeed, walking. Characters are, from the very opening moments, not only seen walking to and from each other’s residences, but also taking daily constitutionals in the form of walking designated routes. Karen Newman and Michelle Callaghan have both reflected recently, with considerable eloquence, on the emergence of leisure walking as a specific activity and aspect of display in the early seventeenth century (both focus on John Donne’s Satyre 1 in discussing this). The practice, which had been novel and emergent in Donne’s years, was more established by the 1630s when Brome was creating his ‘spatial stories’ about London. Nevertheless the images of walkers and references to walking in the play can offer interesting insight into character and practice for the audience. Walking for the sake of walking; for display; to experience the new streets and layouts and connected networks of the emerging and expanding city. Not just purposeful travel? Brome represents all manner of reasons and rationales for perambulation in the scenes in this play, including a lawyer, Trampler, rushing to deliver marriage contracts on time to Striker’s residence in 5.2, Brittleware running around the city trying to locate his wife in Act 4, and Striker’s daily constitutionals, presumably in the hope of meeting Touchwood for a restorative argument (best represented in their ‘staged’ encounter in 2.2).9The opening scene is a case in point. Onstage we see two young gallants, Gilbert Goldwire and Walter Chamlet, preparing themselves for a meeting with the Justice of the Peace, Samson Touchwood. Walking here has purpose but it also enables Brome to convey to the audience the sense of a city on the move, of people and issues circulating at considerable speed. The encounter with Touchwood enables not only useful exposition of a key back-story to the play - that Touchwood and his fellow JP Striker have been at loggerheads for over thirty years and this deep-seated enmity now threatens to block the course of true love between Touchwood’s son Samuel and Striker’s granddaughter Annabel - but also the sense of a group of people living in close proximity: this is a place where people can move from household to household with considerable ease and speed, where rumours will spread quickly, and where people will expect to run into one another on a regular basis. That latter idea is best served up to the audience in the form of the Striker-Touchwood encounter in 2.2. Touchwood, anxious to taunt his old enemy, not least with some juicy new scandal he thinks he has heard about Striker’s granddaughter, knows that he will ‘run into’ him, if he goes to a particular place. This is because this site is the scene of Striker’s daily perambulations. Not only do we begin to unpack from this Striker’s embedded behaviour within the urban London context but also the fact that Touchwood seems to know his quotidian movements all too well. Despite the surface antagonism between these two men, there is in fact a deep intimacy and understanding of each other. Indeed, the play goes so far as to psychologize their relationship and to suggest that their regular quarrels are a deep-seated need on the part of both men. Later in play Striker will describe Touchwood as his ‘dog-leech’ or ‘physician’, suggesting that their regular heated exchanges actually work like a kind of medicine or ‘physic’ for him, working dangerous humours out of his system. 2.2 physicalizes this idea when the phlegmatic Striker - his humour deliberately contrasted with the choleric Touchwood who, as his name suggests, catches fire at the slightest provocation, a description of his personality that Gilbert and Walter gave audiences in the opening moments of the play - endures a violent bout of coughing during the exchange with Touchwood (an exchange which is certainly verbal and potentially physical in performance) only to reflect in the brief soliloquy that follows afterwards how much good that release of bile has done him.102.2 was a scene which we workshopped in considerable detail as part of the research for this edition and that experience proved to us once again Brome’s skills in characterization, timing and tone. If on the surface this is simply a duologue where the two elderly JPs trade insults and invectives, the deeper structure of the scene, linguistic and performative, is revealed with closer attention. Shakespeare was fond of giving his quarreling lovers verse structures which would suggest to the audience an underlying chemistry despite the antagonism of the words being bandied around. Petruchio and Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew and Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing are both couples for whom the sharing of both iambic pentameter lines and the quick-fire rhythm of stichomythic exchange become clues for the audience of the way their relationship will pan out. One might argue therefore that in adopting and appropriating these easily identifiable dramatic conventions for his warring old men Brome casts them as ‘quasi-lovers’, as dependent on each other as an old married couple might be that nevertheless bitched and got at each other. The men will themselves confirm as much when Striker mentions later in the play that, since his wife died, the arguments with Touchwood have been his best consolation. This is an interesting variation on the theme of dependency that Peacham so acutely saw as fundamental to urban living in the pamphlet with which we began this introduction: ‘some natures are so caried and led away with variety of acquaintance and company, that it is a death unto them to live by themselves’ (A1v)11All of these facts play their part in the ensuing plotlines of Brome’s play and serve to question, then, the much repeated cliché about urban life’s essential anonymity. Almost all the characters who are Londoners in this play, locals as it were, know each other or come to know each other very quickly in the course of the action. The important point to note in reflecting on the cultural geography of Brome’s playtext is that it is not ‘London’ as whole that the play is striving to represent, at least not in any detail. The microcosm of the society of the play might be seen to stand or substitute for that bigger organism in some respect, but the key point is that what Brome is actually representing to the audience is less a city than a particular neighbourhood or community within that city.n10336 12There are several moments in the play which draw audience attention towards this fact. Some have already been mentioned: for example, the opening scene where the young gallants head to Touchwood’s residence and the Touchwood-Striker ‘staged’ quarrel. But there are many more. In 4.1, Touchwood comes to Striker’s home to gloat over his ailing enemy and in doing so finds himself confronted by the curate of the parish,n10337 who is appalled at the ferocity of Touchwood’s outbursts against a possibly dying man. At this point the curate espouses the language of neighbourhood and civic responsibility, secular as well as sacred: ‘Best look into yourself, sir. The world’s a stage on which you both are actors and neither to be his own judge’ [SG 4.1.speech745].n10338 As well as instructing the two querulous old men to speak lower ‘For neighbourhood and charity’ [SG 4.1.speech793] he also cautions them about the power of local rumour and gossip, which seems to rage around this play’s community like wildfire [SG 4.1.speech766]. As ever, though, Brome reveals another side to this curate a little later in the play when in a private exchange with an abject Brittleware he seems to reveal a rather dubious attitude to marriage, describing Annabel’s impending marriage to Cautious, at which he is to officiate, in these terms: ‘Besides your wife is your wife wheree’er she is, abroad as well as at home; yea, lost, perhaps, as well as found. I am now going to yoke a heifer to a husband that perhaps will say so shortly’ [SG 5.2.speech1091]. Once again attention to Brome’s naming of characters proves instructive: the curate is ‘Master Pancridge’, his name conjuring up a particular location and diocese, that is the area of St Pancras, in the 1630s on the edges of the city of London and the location of Ben Jonson’s A Tale of a Tub (1633). That diocese had become a by-word for illicit marriage ceremonies and dubious practices on the part of priests, not least the acceptance of bribes as made manifest in Jonson’s drama. That play then, with its various abuses of the law and church law in the name of marriage is undoubtedly a direct intertext here, but it also worth reflecting more widely on Jonson’s move towards a focus on neighbourhoods in his Caroline playworlds which again effects an important link and consonance with Brome: from the Tottenham Court, St Pancras events of Tub to the Blackfriars locality of The Magnetic Lady through to the North Midlands locations of his unfinished 1637 playtext The Sad Shepherd. The spatial referents of Brome’s play work at a level far deeper than just the locating of the audience in the ‘real world’; they offer information of moral, ethical and cultural significance.13Another way in which the play seems to attend to the issue of how people went about ‘making space’ both actual and social in early modern London is in its concern with people’s living arrangements in the neighbourhood that is the focus of the playworld. In the limning of the Brittleware-Moneylacks relationship earlier I mentioned that Sir Hugh has been lodging in John and Rebecca’s household for some years. The couple have only been married for five but seem to have had to share their life in close proximity with Sir Hugh for much of that time to the extent that he knows the intimate details of their sex life (or lack of it which is the cause of the quarrel that introduces us to the couple in 1.2 of the play). It is he, for example, who will suggest various fertility treatments to Rebecca, who is desperate to get pregnant and blames her husband’s sexual failures and assumes his impotency as a result. Of course, the suggestions that Sir Hugh makes are indications of his own desperation and craving for money. He married into money by marrying Striker’s late daughter but managed to fritter away her fortune much to his father-in-law’s disgust. He is even referred to by characters in the play as ‘the mourning knight’ presumably because he is still dressed in the threadbare black clothes he wore to mourn his wife’s death some seven years earlier [SG 1.2.speech82]. (Incidentally, there are numerous such instances in the text when Brome appears to give pointers as to the costumes characters would be wearing onstage; another salient example is when Friswood, Striker’s long suffering housekeeper, opens the door to the visitors from the provinces, Tom Hoyden (Timothy’s half-brother) and Coulter. She summarily dismisses them saying she has no need of cattle, suggesting that their country attire (possibly even linen smocks) would mean they resembled the drovers who regularly brought their livestock to the edges of the city for sale at markets such as Smithfield. Coulter is Tim’s Somerset servant, who has at this point joined forces with Tom having encountered him as he was leaving the city following his dismissal from service. This is a further example of the fact that we seem to be working within a clearly defined cultural geography where people will ‘bump into one another’ or be waylaid on the road as Tim was by Spring on his arrival into London (the reverse movement as it were to Coulter’s encounter with Tom) before the play began.14Now involved in various financial ‘projects’, scams, and schemes, not least for a monopoly on the London sedan chair business, Sir Hugh Moneylacks has also become the ‘gather guest’ for the new social phenomenon that is the Asparagus Garden of the play’s title [SG 1.2.speech90]. Working on commission he brings people to the hotel and gardens to consume of the newly introduced and highly fashionable asparagus during its short spring season. Not surprisingly, then, he suggests to Rebecca that the helpfully phallic asparagus will be a suitable aphrodisiac to boost her husband’s failing sexual powers: ‘All your best (especially your modern) herbalists conclude, that your asparagus is the only sweet stirrer that the earth sends forth, beyond your wild carrots, cornflag, or gladioli’ [SG 2.1.speech210].n10339 15The essential point though of this exchange with Rebecca on the matter of her fertility and that of her hapless husband is the very public nature of their private business, such as problems in the bedroom department of their marriage, due to the shared living arrangements that were common in London at this time. The ritual humiliation of John Brittleware by his wife in front of other characters can as a result play out with a certain cruelty as well as quickfire double entendres on the stage, as our workshopping of Act 3 indicated. In that exchange, Rebecca ostensibly beats him over the head with his own name and with variations on insults meaning impotent or failed. As Peacham instructed his readers in 1642: ‘It is a greater peece of skill to live in a populous place, where multitudes of people reside then in a solitary and private place among a few . . .’ (A1v).16The dependency of those in the city on others is made palpably clear in the tenanted living arrangements of Sir Hugh, keen to stay in his landlord and landlady’s ‘good books’ as it were. Rebecca and John in turn need to make money to keep the family business afloat and paid lodgings is a means to this end. Tim Hoyden will be lodged in the Brittleware residence as well to the fiscal benefit of the couple as Sir Hugh [SG 2.1.speech323]. The other tenanted household in the play that we are asked to think about is that of the managers of the Asparagus Garden itself: the unnamed gardener and his Dutch wife Martha whom we first encounter at the start of the third act; Martha, it is stressed at various points, is an immigrant incomer to the city, a fact that is not lost on some of her more resentful customers, who criticize her Dutch practices in not offering itemised bills but only an overall reckoning, invariably one made to her advantage rather than theirs. This, too, was a livewire contemporary concern that Brome raised in another play Covent Garden Weeded also known as The Weeding of Covent Garden (1632-3). Matthew Steggle has written of the poignancy of this couple’s situation. They need to make as much money as possible from the asparagus garden enterprise if they are to become landowners in their own right. The marshy quality of the land they work seems indicative of their vulnerable position, answerable to a seemingly absentee landlord and working on inherently unstable ground.n1034017Since asparagus, as already mentioned, has a limited season, the couple have clearly diversified their business. Artichokes, strawberries, and fresh carp are mentioned, the former clearly giving them a summer season, as well as tulips. The latter were a very particular 1630s commodity, probably well known to fashionable London audiences as one of the desirable items for aspirational purchasers. It was in this decade that tulip bulbs began to change hands for extravagant sums of money, creating a kind of credit bubble followed by the inevitable collapse of all such boom-and-bust financial situations. The buying frenzy came to be known as ‘Tulipomania’ and the best known gardening couple of the day in England, John and Harriet Tradescant were involved in the tulip trade. The couple would have been recognized at least partially in the portrait of the Asparagus Garden team. Although John Tradescant, the elder (c.1570-1638), was perhaps most renowned as gardener to key courtiers such as both Robert and William Cecil, the Duke of Buckingham and (after 1630) even to the King (at Oatlands Palace), he was also well known to Londoners because he ran a museum of sorts at their Lambeth property displaying ‘wonders’ brought back from his various plant hunting expeditions.18If the Tradescants link the location of the Asparagus Garden to Lambeth Marshes so too do the fenland references in several of the characters who describe its site and situation. The gardener himself describes it as a ‘manor of marshland’ [SG 3.1.speech415], saying he had hoped to buy the land himself and make his wife a ‘Bankside lady’. Seemingly unaware of the embedded negative implications of his statement — to London theatre audiences a ‘Bankside lady’ would have been a term signifying prostitution — the gardener’s reason for liking this site so well (apart from its fertile growing soil, presumably) is that it resembles the Dutch wetlands which his wife came from: ‘for the resemblance it has to the Low Country soil you came from’. Other characters confirm a fenland resemblance in the site: playing on colonial discourse, Gilbert and Walter gently mock the gardener and his wife as ‘master and mistress, or rather lord and lady of the new plantation here’ [SG 3.1.speech441] and as ‘prince and princess of the province of Asparagus’, but it is Samuel Touchwood’s extension of this idea which is most revealing. He notes: ‘The island of two acres here [is] more profitable than twice two thousand in the fens till the drainers have done there’ [SG 3.1.speech443]. Fen drainage had been a major news issue for the past two decades since James VI and I had inaugurated a policy of systematic drainage of the fens in Somerset and East Anglia to create arable farmland and therefore increased Treasury revenues from agriculture and the sale of land rights. There had been protests, sometimes violent, from local communities in these regions whose livelihoods and dependencies were based on common rights to the fens, and the fishstocks, meat and fowl, and thatching reeds and rushes, that these ecosystems produced. Some drainage efforts were deliberately sabotaged as part of these protests and there was widespread resentment of the Dutch engineers who had been brought to England to carry out the works on behalf of the crown. Chief figure among these was Cornelius Vermuyden who at the time of this play was rumoured to be looking into the possibility of draining marshland close to the centre of London itself, so the fenland analogies in 3.1 are not as fanciful or far-fetched as they might seem to a Londoner today. Martha’s Dutch accent on the stage would have carried all kinds of contemporary resonances and significations for theatre audiences as a result. Vermuyden’s chief patron in this aside from Charles I in the 1630s was the Earl of Bedford (indeed sections of the canals he funded in Cambridgeshire are still known as Bedford’s Canal today) and much of the profits he made from the lucrative fen drainage schemes was ploughed back into the very material and tangible product of building the area of London known as Covent Garden, subject of another Brome play, which opens in the vicinity of the building site of Inigo Jones’s new Italianate piazza. Beyond these very specific references, however, the fact remains that in early modern drama fen drainage schemes had become a theatrical by-word for ‘get rich quick schemes’, and many of them far from genuine. Brome’s Jonsonian inheritance is once more instructive: in Jonson’s 1616 play The Devil is an Ass the aptly named Merecraft had persuaded the foolish Fitzdotterel to invest in a scheme to become the ‘Duke of Drowned Land’. Yet again in The Sparagus Garden it ultimately comes down to money.n1034119One of the ways that concepts of neighbourhood function in this play as well as through issues of property and ownership is through the simple idea of proximity, of people living cheek by jowl alongside one another, sometimes within the same household as we have seen in the case of the Brittlewares and Moneylacks. Rebecca, in fact, also lives close to her aunt, Friswood, who is Striker’s housekeeper of over thirty years’ standing - though we only learn of the nature of this relationship in the fifth act of the play. It is the fact that people are moving within a fairly prescribed cartography that means everyone in this play seems to know everyone else’s business. When Rebecca appears to escape from the marital home down the Strand in a sedan chair marked out by the number 21, characters like Samuel are all too quick to relay this information to her distraught and jealous husband (who naturally assumes she is escaping for the purpose of pursuing one of the sexual assignations with a more sexualized man than himself, which she has been threatening) [SG 4.2.speech946] [SG 4.2.speech953]. In truth Rebecca travels down the Strand to spend the night with her aunt at Striker’s residence, preparing Annabel his granddaughter for her planned wedding to the lecherous old knight Sir Arnold Cautious. Friswood herself is throughout the play a further marker of someone dependent on others for her lodgings and indeed her financial survival. It soon becomes clear that as well as being Striker’s housekeeper she has been his sexual partner for much of that time also. While these revelations are an obvious source of comedy and double entendre in the play — ‘Sir, I have been your creature this thirty years, down lying and uprising (as you know), and you should believe me. You had me in my old mistress’s days —’ [SG 1.2.speech125] - there is also a disturbing undertow to the power dynamics of this relationship; Friswood sleeps, we learn, in the truckle bed that was commonly assigned to the servant at the base of the master bed. This is a telling spatial figuration of a relationship where the master keeps secret his sexual desires for his servant and indeed conducts much of his conversation with her in an air of disparagement and insult. In turn Friswood describes herself for all her verbal assertiveness as having been ‘pliant as a twig about you’ [SG 1.2.speech131].20Brome is fascinated elsewhere in his corpus of plays in the figure of the servant, male and female, but he has a particular gift for empathy in the case of these long term housekeepers working for widowed men, who clearly became their wives in all but name. Indeed the playwright seems almost to attempt to right a social ill in some respects by giving these characters in particular the happy ending of marriage to their masters and therefore respectability and fiscal security. This is the fifth act solution he finds to the Trainwell-Squelch relationship in his earlier play The Northern Lass (1629) (Squelch is yet another Brome stage J.P. who is happy to chastise others for sexual depravities such as prostitution and yet who happily keeps mistresses himself) and again here for Friswood who is, in the closing moments of this play, taken as wife by Striker with the words: ‘Here’s one that, ere, the parson and we part, I’ll make an honest woman’ [SG 5.3.speech1291].n1034221The difficulties of social dependency, not least in the case of finding somewhere to live in London figures in Peacham’s 1642 pamphlet as well. There he warns that if one does not have friends in London to stay with they should try at least to find reputable lodgings as a means of self-protection: ‘be sure that you take your lodgings at least in some honest house of credit, whether it be Inne, Alehouse, or other private house’ (A2r). He stresses that the latter is by the far the safer choice of those three, at least reducing the likelihood of being tempted into the ways of gambling and drunkenness.22The tenanted conditions of Martha and her husband who manage the Asparagus Garden certainly adds a particular edge to their business dealings with the customers who arrive at their hostelry in Act 3 of the play. It is significant in dramaturgic terms not only that Brome withholds the promise of the site of the play’s title until the middle act but also the way in which this flowing third act, a series of vignettes rather than discrete scenes, occurring as the action flows in and around the Asparagus Garden, forms exactly the sort of ‘central plateau’ that Peter Holland has suggested is a key to understanding the architecture of early modern drama in performance.n10343 The act is orchestrated in a manner akin to dance; Brome seems to draw attention to this idea by including in the act a moment featuring three male and three female courtiers who propose a formal dance in the gardens of the property. There is a careful symmetry both to this particular moment and the flow of circulation of different characters and concerns in this staged space.23Before we focus in on the different characters who are witnessed taking part in the social dance at The Asparagus Garden, it is necessary to locate that particular site in a specific 1630s context. Matthew Steggle has explored at length Brome’s interest in drawing in real and familiar locales into his plays, including London taverns and buildings with both courtly and civic associations.n10344 References to asparagus gardens in Caroline plays indicate that these sites were a a reality in 1630s London: in 1632 Philip Massinger’s The City Madam the prostitute Shaveem lists places she uses in the course of business, mentioning with suitably loaded meaning ‘the Gardens / Where we traffic for Asparagus’ and in the same year Carol, the assertive heroine of Shirley’s Hyde Park insists on her right to frequent ‘spring garden, and the Sparagus’ (the Spring Garden being a known pleasure garden close to Hyde Park itself).n10345 A later reference occurs in Lady Alimony (dated to the late 1630s) where Lady Caveare and her friends are getting drunk in a tavern but imagine themselves to be in the ‘Sparagus Garden’.n10346 Certainly by the time of John Taylor’s pamphlet St Hillaries Teares, in which the eponymous state bewails the state of London as a city, Asparagus Gardens (and the plural implies that there were several competing with one another for business, again suggesting why Martha and her husband might need to employ Sir Hugh Moneylacks as their ‘gather-guest’) had become synonymous with high prices: the ‘wanton Ladies’ of Covent Garden, Long Acre and Drury Lane are described by the saint as hurrying in coaches to ‘the Tavernes, and Sparagus Gardens, where ten or twenty pounds suppers were but trifles with them’.n1034724Tracing back from a 1680s map of Lambeth which identifies an asparagus garden just off Narrow Wall in Lambeth Marsh, Steggle suggests that this might strengthen the case for a Lambeth setting to this play, building as it does on earlier allusions to fenlands and marshes and to the Tradescants gardening practice, but there was at least one other specific 1630s pleasure garden of this kind, where rooms were available for hire both on a daily and nightly basis and where food and drink could be consumed, and that was Cupid Garden (known by the late seventeenth century as Cuypers Garden but in existence prior to that), also located on the Thameside.n10348 Perhaps the site needn’t be singular; certainly, via these direct nods to actual locales and practices that his audience members could have been engaged in and even have visited, Brome obviously makes a play for the kind of realist connections earlier critics have tended to identify with his city comedies. But the careful dramatic orchestration of the third act takes us way beyond this simple correlation with known fact in the 1630s and effectively challenges Miles and Perkinson’s dismissal of the act as an add-on to please audiences with a taste for the topical.n10349 The scene is not only a remarkable piece of dramatic composition, it is central to the play in several respects, giving us as it does further insight into characters such as Rebecca Brittleware, or the group of young gallants that includes Samuel Touchwood, Gilbert Goldwire and Walter Chamlet, as well as offering various socially representative types to flesh out the idea of the city being offered in microcosm throughout this scene. 25The act begins, as already noted with the gardener and his wife, not only explaining their back-story and their aspirations for a better life (surely the driving force of much city comedy for all its focus on greed and the morally dubious), but establishing the fiscal undertow of all the transactions that take place at their establishment: Martha is much disgusted that from one customer that day they have had ‘Poor piddling doings’ [SG 3.1.speech416]. Custom soon arrives in the shape of Gilbert and his friends but she is disappointed that their purpose of being there is not sexual. It is clear that it is in the latter transactions that she is set to make most profit, not least because people are willing to pay through the nose to keep their morally dubious or adulterous behaviour under wraps and away from the public gaze to which so much else in this play is subject. The gentleman and the city wife who we see later in the scene bear this last point out. Although the gentleman threatens the small claims court against Martha’s overpriced bills, the city wife is anxious to preserve her dignity and so settles the bill without further ado. Money is often quite literally being exchanged on the stage of this play - here in act 3 in payments both to Martha and her employees, such as the boy who cheekily serves Gilbert and the others drink and food while mocking their tendency to check the price of things first, and in Martha’s payment in kind to Sir Hugh for bringing custom to her property. Later in the play we see money change hands in the form of the bribes Sir Hugh attempts to secure from Cautious and Striker to stay out of the marriage to Annabel; his willingness to trade his own daughter here is not lost on audiences, he has from the very beginning been willing to pawn her happiness for economic reward, hoping for a payment from Striker in return for betraying his daughter’s romance with Sam Touchwood. Earlier in the play money has also changed hands all too readily in the performance of Tim’s profligacy with his four hundred pounds in his anxiety to become a gentleman and in the final scene of the play we have the payment that Sir Arnold makes of a thousand pound (a huge sum in context of the times) to free himself from any contractual obligation to marry the ‘pregnant’ Annabel. 26The third act brings into stark relief then the main themes and musical notes of this play: the money, sex, and power that rest at the heart of all the social transactions taking place in this particular London neighbourhood. The dancing courtiers mentioned earlier are in some sense an exception in the play, ushering in as they do another social and geographical site, proximate to the Town society of this play - the Strand references locate us in the newly emergent West End area of London connecting the older city sites like Cheapside, sites of earlier city comedies such as Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. They also usher onstage the superior attitudes of courtiers (expressed fittingly in the superior register of verse) — ‘May the example of our harmless mirth / And civil recreation purge the place / Of all foul purposes’ [SG 3.1.speech566] — although in context Brome subjects these to the judging eye of his spectators as well as the comparison with the characters in the play who come from the city and beyond and whom we come to know far better through the course of five acts. What makes them, after all, imagine they can somehow transcend the harsh realities and pragmatic transactions of the Garden? 27The court might seem to be a space and site of performance that is only tangentially present in this city comedy through glimpses of court etiquette such as this, but through the plotline of Tim Hoyden’s ‘education’ as a gentleman Brome is able to satirise courtly practice even further. In a scene that perhaps only fully comes alive on the stage rather than the page in 4.2, Moneylacks, Spring and Brittleware tutor Tim in the backstabbing ways of courtly discourse. In a verbal game meant to resemble the refined sport of fencing, which was a popular practice with aristocrats and noblemen of the day, with several fencing manuals coming into print in the 1620s and 1630s, they train him to deliver the ‘single rapier compliment’ that praises the opponent in hyperbolic terms, only to undo and indeed subvert the praise with the next statement a ‘backsword compliment’. On the stage the scene involves role-play (Spring and Brittleware presumably camping it up as courtiers) and a form of carefully choreographed dance as statement and counterstatement, or ‘compliment’ and ‘wipe’ to deploy the terminology of the scene, are handed out as characters swing past each other in an elaborate set of movements. Brome must have liked the stage impact of this ‘verbal fencing’ as he repeats it in the final act, when Tim, ever the poor judge of the occasion tries to impress his newfound father Touchwood by insulting Annabel (his daughter in law to be!). The biting nature of the social satire can be overplayed, however. While it is true that unlike several of his contemporaries Brome did not have a playwriting presence at court, either in terms of masques or regular stagings of his commercial dramas at the palaces of Charles and Henrietta Maria, it would be wrong to assume an antagonism towards the court as a necessary outcome of this. The dedicatee of The Sparagus Garden is William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, playwright-patron of Jonson and Shirley among others. Cavendish is memorialized in Jonson’s poems of praise to him as an expert horseman and fencer among other things (see, for example, ‘An Epigram to William, Earl of Newcastle’, which begins with the line ‘They talk of fencing’) so there may be rather more consensual humour involved in scenes such as these than the category of satire always allows for.28If we continue to think of this third act in specifically social terms, it is important to note the ways in which the audience’s response to what they see onstage is entirely dependent on their vivid imagination of the space just offstage and out of sight. This is obviously a centuries-old dramatic convention (Greek tragedy was highly dependent on the invocation of a resonant offstage space), but I have written in other contexts about the particular significances or usages of the offstage space or locale in Caroline drama.n10350 The imagining of the offstage where facts are being concealed and births are taking place in Jonson’s The Magnetic Lady in 1632 is one prime example of this idea in action, as is the horserace of James Shirley’s Hyde Park and, perhaps even more relevant to the offstage sexual assignations of the Asparagus Garden, the offstage bedroom encounters of Alexander Kickshaw and Aretina in that playwright’s The Lady of Pleasure performed and published the same year as Brome’s play. Here, then, Brome seems to share Jonson’s and Shirley’s approach. The audience is asked to imagine in all too vivid detail the rooms of the Asparagus Garden establishment just offstage or even behind the audience in one potential staging of the scene. In workshopping this act, we looked in some detail at the crucial exposition of the opening exchange between Martha and her husband and experimented with gestures to offstage and behind the audience’s heads in order to make this point explicit.29That Martha is the power behind the throne at the Asparagus Garden is all too clear, and Brome seems to indicate the power dynamic of this marriage not only in the gardener’s opening speech — ‘you are my wife . . . and I should have the command, yet I entreat and am content’ [SG 3.1.speech413] — but in the fact that his character remains unnamed in a play in which nomenclature is essential to identity. It has become a critical commonplace of criticism of Caroline drama that a new attention to women characters and their social situations is possible to register, not least in the plays of Shirley and Brome, and the late plays of Ben Jonson (that latter point giving the lie to previous critical assumptions about his misogyny as a dramatist and in turn helping us to re-read earlier plays in his canon, such as The Devil is an Ass and Bartholomew Fair as more empathetic to the female position than previously acknowledged). But the commonplace finds a secure reality in The Sparagus Garden, where as well as Martha’s professional autonomy, we have direct access to the situations of Rebecca Brittleware, a working woman anxious to make her marriage work on terms acceptable and comfortable to her by tutoring a jealous and possessive husband in the error of his ways, Friswood the servant who has provided ‘service’ to her master well beyond the call of duty for over three decades, and Annabel the put-upon young woman who is made a pawn in the advancement of both her father’s and her grandfather’s social and monetary ambitions. By giving Friswood in particular a direct relationship with the audience through asides and brief soliloquies (this is a dramatic strategy which again links her to the precursor character of Trainwell in The Northern Lass), Brome enables us to see yet another woman (like Martha) who is able to organize the world taking place around her, through careful planning, improvisation and quick wittedness. Even Annabel, who in some respects is the least fully drawn of these female parts and effectively the stereotypical ‘love interest’ of the play, is in the end with the help of her partner Samuel able to determine her own future through some impressive playacting of her own (the ‘pregnancy’ that causes the planned wedding to Cautious to collapse so spectacularly in Act 5 turns out to be a carefully placed cushion, the ultimate piece of stage trickery). There are other unnamed women who move in and out of or consciousness in the central act, but who nevertheless enable Brome to give as full an account as possible of the gendered life of people in this London neighbourhood. The aforementioned city wife who is willing to pay the bills at the Asparagus Garden, however steep, in order to protect her public reputation and the decorous dancing courtly women each give us a glimpse of different sectors of society. In an intriguing printhouse slip, in one section of this act in some quarto versions of the play, the compositor moves from giving Rebecca the speech prefix of Reb. for the more anonymous Wif., but that deftly misses the point of Brome’s play in action, where Rebecca is individuated and significant in her impact and effect and anything but a stereotypical wife, subordinate to her husband, just as Friswood and Annabel refuse to be contained by their socially prescribed roles. Those characters who do reduce women to stereotypes such as Sir Arnold Cautious are swiftly condemned by the play. 30Offstages can suggest both very near space (such as those bedrooms in The Asparagus Garden) and geographical locales rather further afield . Recent immigrants to London such as Martha and the Dutch Thameside community she represents usher one set of European histories and locales into the audience mindset, an effect added to by the suggestion (albeit false) that the Low Countries is where Sam Touchwood has run away to after getting Annabel pregnant (the opportunity for some fairly crude puns on the meaning of ‘Low Countries’ should not be underestimated as a cause or prompt for all of this as well!); the other region evoked in the play is national rather than international, although like Martha’s identity it is achieved partly through the use of dialect and accent. Brome is well known as an expert writer and user of dialect and indeed modern languages in his plays (see, for example, the use of Yorkshire idiom and Cornish in The Northern Lass, the French of The Demoiselle, the Lancastrian terminology of the collaborative play The Late Lancashire Witches). Here Tim Hoyden has noticeably shed his rural dialect and accent in his anxiety to be accepted as a London gentleman, but his half-brother Tom and his servant Coulter are strong verbal presences in the play nevertheless. There is, undoubtedly, comedy in the deployment of their often full-frontal Somerset idiom: when Coulter is summarily dismissed at Moneylacks’s behest early in Act 3 his departing shot is priceless: ‘And so a vart vor a varewell to the proudest o’ye’ [SG 3.1.speech606], but this goes beyond easy stage humour. Tom and Coulter bring an outspoken honesty into the discourse that cuts through the carefully organized courtesies and flatteries that define exchanges in the city and the court. Tom is not afraid to call his brother a ‘vool’ [SG 4.1.speech683] nor is Coulter afraid to describe exactly what Moneylacks and the other ‘cony-catchers’ have done to him: ‘how they spurged his guts out . . . ‘twould ha’ made a dog zick to zee’t, how like a scalded pig he looked’ [SG 4.1.speech686] [SG 4.1.speech688]; Brome makes it simple for the actor to deliver these lines by recording the pronunciation phonetically and working with simple rules such as v = f and z = s. 31It would be wrong to over-romanticize these rural characters; Tom’s easy reference to his cross-dressed brother in Act 5 resembling the Taunton mayor’s wife suggest that easy cruelties are just as possible in the country as in the city, but it remains true I think that the verbal register of Tom and Coulter is meant to signify ‘difference’ at a deeper level in the play. Dialect in this play functions as a means of staging the cultural and intercultural encounters that for Brome defines the early modern city and in the impact of London on Tim, Tom, and Coulter (Tom tells us at the end, for example, that he will return home to Somerset to ring the bells to celebrate his brother’s new found identity but also presumably to share the news of their experiences in the capital) we can see the flow outwards from the city of influence and effect into the regions such as Somerset. But the flow of impact is not monodirectional; just as goods and commodities like the china from the Brittlewares’ shop (which itself told tales of further and even more exotic geographies) flowed out into the country estates of those who purchased these items on trips to London so the goods and products of the counties such as Somerset were vital to the success and sustainability of the metropolis. Brome gives us through these linguistic exchanges a model of flow that is instructive for understanding the operations of the city as a circulatory one, both within its own parameters and in its relationships with the regions of England and (through trade) with wider global geographies.n10351 This idea of circulation is one which I consider key to a fuller understanding of this play, not least in performance, and to which I will therefore return towards the end of this introductory essay.32One of the other ways in which people’s city or rural origins are revealed is through food. Food seems closely allied to identity in this play. It is through a change of diet that Moneylacks and his crew insist on inculcating Tim with the idea and practice of being a gentleman: It must be done by meats and drinks of costly price: muscadel, caudles, jellies, and cock-broths. You shall eat nothing but shrimp porridge for a fortnight, and now and then a pheasant’s egg souped with a peacock’s feather. Ay, that must be the diet.
[SG 2.1.speech293]33and, similarly, it is through food that Coulter describes the humiliations wrought on him to his half-brother: ‘And then how they did veeden him with a zort of zlip zlaps not all worth a’mess o’milk porridge to make him vine vorsooth’ [SG 4.1.speech690]. Porridge becomes a particular culinary signifier, in its city form metamorphosed into the ridiculous hyperbole of ‘shrimp porridge’ rather than the simple nourishing food it should be. The modern day penchant for snail porridge in restaurants charging over £130 a head for a meal might suggest to us that it would not be so difficult to stage a modernized version of the play today — substitute ‘The Fat Duck’ for ‘The Asparagus Garden’ and all manner of modern day parallels are mobilized. It is perhaps worth adding that when we next see Tim onstage after his extravagant and expensive dining he is absolutely famished [SG 3.1.speech578].34What is being consumed in the rooms just offstage in the central act of this play is, of course, the human body, male and female, in all manner of sexual liaisons, but also the foodstuff that is the catalyst, even the excuse: asparagus itself. Asparagus is seen as a literal hand property onstage in Act 3, served to Gilbert, Walter and Samuel, and also being consumed by various others when they enter into the gardens and arbours that the stage space signifies. The first recorded mentions of asparagus’s introduction to England is in 1538 but it became a particular delicacy only gradually. By the 1630s it was grown on the edges of London by market gardeners in surprisingly large quantities. Many contemporary references come from herbals (indeed, it is in this context that Moneylacks first refers to it in this play, as we saw earlier) suggesting that there was some debate as to whether it was a nutritious foodstuff or a medicine. Asparagus requires good fertilizer and one of the reasons the market gardens were located on the edges of the city, often in drained marshland areas, was so that they could benefit from the already mentioned night-soil carted or boated by carmen and watermen out of the crowded city-centre. This is perhaps why Martha refers to the asparagus as ‘durty’ — its associations with manure were much discussed — although as the play makes only too explicit because of sparagus gardens as concepts and sites it had also become associated with illicit behaviour of all kinds. Once again, though, through these evocations of the Thameside pleasure gardens to the human manure carts or ‘goldfarmers’ trucking their wares to the market gardens that supplied the city with its own particular nourishment, Brome provides us with a cultural geography of the working, living, and lived city of London.35When asparagus is first mentioned on the stage in detail it is in Moneylacks’s previously cited lengthy exposition of its aphrodisiacal qualities to Rebecca: All your best (especially your modern) herbalists conclude, that your asparagus is the only sweet stirrer that the earth sends forth, beyond your wild carrots, cornflag or gladioli. Your roots of standergrass, or of satyrion boiled in goat’s milk are held good; your clary or horminum in diverse ways good, and dill (especially boiled in oil) is also good; but none of these, nor saffron boiled in wine, your nuts of artichokes, rocket, or seeds of ash-tree (which we call kite-keys), nor thousand such, though all are good, may stand up for perfection with asparagus.
[SG 2.1.speech210]36Erection jokes aside, this passage actually exhibits a fairly detailed knowledge of herbal remedies and practices and when these are placed alongside another whole set of quasi-medical references in the play to bleeding, purging and the circulation of the blood we can begin to unpack Brome’s interventions into another contemporary set of debates. John Gerrard’s Herbal was perhaps the best known compendium of herbal remedies and ‘receipts’ (as medical recipes were referred to at this time) and it had been reprinted in an enlarged edition in 1633, so it is likely that this is the book-based provenance of Moneylacks’s knowledge here. But herbalism was a hotly contested practice in the 1620s and 1630s, coming under scrutiny and attack as it was by the official medical guild that was the College of Physicians. The College and its members effectively acted as the medical ‘censor’ in London and their powers were growing throughout the early seventeenth century as greater and greater attempts were made to professionalise medical practice and to control those who were licensed to perform it. Benjamin Woolley notes that the College was ‘entitled to control the practice of medicine in London or within a seven mile radius of its walls. Anyone reported to be practising without a licence faced a summons from the College beadle and the threat of a fine or imprisonment.’ n10352 This is the geographical range of Brome’s play but the allusions to the College and its scrutiny of medical practice goes further than a single reference. John Brittleware, who Moneylacks enlists in his scheme to defraud Tim Hoyden of his four hundred pounds, is a china-shop owner but in a former time he was, we learn, a barber-surgeon, and he claims still to be so for Hoyden’s benefit. The Company of Barber-Surgeons was the arch-enemy of the College of physicians, not least because its members claimed the right to practice a form of ad-hoc surgery whose provenance had been military battlefields. A war for business, though, was now being fought out very visibly in early modern London and Brome’s play seems to locate itself at the heart of these debates. Barber surgeons, like china-shop keepers (who were often regarded as brothel keepers or bawds), have become a kind of by-word for illegal and illicit practices, it seems; witness Trampler’s statement in 5.2 when Tim refers to Brittleware as ‘my surgeon’: ‘Asurgeon? I took you for a china shopkeeper, Master Brittleware; these by-trades are some by-purposes and I smell knavery’ [SG 5.2.speech1103]. 37Moneylacks seems to be the spokesperson for the ‘modern’ herbalists in 2.1, which might suggest that Brome’s sympathies lay on the side of officialdom but in other plays such as The Antipodes (see Richard Cave’s annotations to that play elsewhere in this edition) he seems openly critical of the College of Physicians so we must be wary of too hasty a judgement in the case of this play. And it is also Moneylacks and his crew who participate in the kind of bleeding and purging of veins (in particular those belonging to poor Tim Hoyden, who they persuade can have his ‘rural’ blood drained out of him and replaced with blood of a nobler vein) that was associated with one of the College’s most prominent members in the 1630s, William Harvey, who had in 1618 published his contested theories of circulation. By the 1630s Harvey was chief physican to the Caroline court and had even accompanied Charles I on his progress north for the belated Scottish coronation in 1633. Allusions to blood and circulation on the commercial stage in 1635 would surely have brought the figure of Harvey himself squarely into view for many audience members.38For all his suspicion of the power wielded by Harvey and his ilk — doctors and their moneymaking ways are the subject of fairly direct criticism in this play; Moneylacks’s claims his knowledge stems from ‘the opinion of most learned doctors, and rare physicians’ [SG 2.1.speech212] but he himself is a scammer and a charlatan and the audience is therefore invited to view his informant ‘Doctor Thou-Lord’ in the same light — in many respects, it is a working model of circulation that interests Brome both as a social and dramatic metaphor. An attention to the medical theories expounded and queried in the play can actually help to bring us back full circle to the architectonics of that remarkable central act. As well as thinking in terms of a dance perhaps we can think of this as a pumping heart around which the rest of the play circulates and takes its energies from. By having the magnetic site of the Asparagus Garden so firmly situated at the heart of the play, Brome is able to make manifest the seductive and attractive powers of the city of London as a whole for Tim Hoyden and thousands of others who fell sway to its charms and its persuasions, sometimes to their cost. It was that same seductive power that Peacham would try to warn his readership against just a few years later. The Art of Living in London, like The Sparagus Garden, understands the operations of the capital city through images of flow, circulation, and dependency. Peacham understands, as Brome does, how all members of an urban community depend on each other and, beyond that, how urban communities depend on the provinces for their survival: ‘so imagine a populous Citie could not live or subsist . . . except it have helpe and nourishment from the other parts and members’ (A1v). The idea of ‘nourishment’ also reminds us of the food and other forms of consumption that are the driving force of Brome’s play in performance. It is no coincidence that Annabel as a bride is presented as a kind of foodstuff to be devoured by her prospective husband in Act 5, albeit one unusually ‘dressed’ (‘And dressed, and dressed indeed; / Never was maid so dressed.’ 5.3. 1129) — the phrase is both literal and, surely, an echo of the ‘dressed’ food that Moneylacks insisted Tim Hoyden must consume to become a true and ‘complete’ gentleman or that Rebecca must taste of in her quest for sexual satisfaction — 2.1. 293, 2.1. 218). The magnetic site of The Asparagus Garden in Act 3 is where everything leads up to and from; the cultural geography of this play is being established not just through the name-checking of particular places and sites but via a very potent imagination and production of 1630s Londoners’ lived experience. Some seven years before Henry Peacham’s pamphlet, Brome presents to us in a play the skill and art involved in living and surviving in an urban context. The social circulation and consumption of money, food, sex, and power that for Brome lay at the heart of Caroline London provides the beating heart of this remarkable play.
n10333 but actually produce them or at least produce ways of understanding and interpreting them and therefore also produce the ways in which those spaces are practised.
n10334 understand those spaces in actuality.
n10335 potent agents in the production and the practice of space.
n10336 the key point is that what Brome is actually representing to the audience is less a city than a particular neighbourhood or community within that city.
n10337 In 4.1, Touchwood comes to Striker’s home to gloat over his ailing enemy and in doing so finds himself confronted by the curate of the parish,
n10338 The world’s a stage on which you both are actors and neither to be his own judge’ [SG 4.1.speech745].
n10339 ‘All your best (especially your modern) herbalists conclude, that your asparagus is the only sweet stirrer that the earth sends forth, beyond your wild carrots, cornflag, or gladioli’ [SG 2.1.speech210].
n10340 answerable to a seemingly absentee landlord and working on inherently unstable ground.
n10341 Yet again in The Sparagus Garden it ultimately comes down to money.
n10342 ‘Here’s one that, ere, the parson and we part, I’ll make an honest woman’ [SG 5.3.speech1291].
n10343 Peter Holland has suggested is a key to understanding the architecture of early modern drama in performance.
n10344 Matthew Steggle has explored at length Brome’s interest in drawing in real and familiar locales into his plays, including London taverns and buildings with both courtly and civic associations.
n10345 (the Spring Garden being a known pleasure garden close to Hyde Park itself).
n10346 imagine themselves to be in the ‘Sparagus Garden’.
n10347 ‘the Tavernes, and Sparagus Gardens, where ten or twenty pounds suppers were but trifles with them’.
n10348 also located on the Thameside.
n10349 an add-on to please audiences with a taste for the topical.
n10350 I have written in other contexts about the particular significances or usages of the offstage space or locale in Caroline drama.
n10351 both within its own parameters and in its relationships with the regions of England and (through trade) with wider global geographies.
n10352 Benjamin Woolley notes that the College was ‘entitled to control the practice of medicine in London or within a seven mile radius of its walls. Anyone reported to be practising without a licence faced a summons from the College beadle and the threat of a fine or imprisonment.’