© University of Sheffield, 2010
The text of this essay is made freely available for non-commercial usage.
Copyright, of the design and content, remains with the Royal Holloway, University of London
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The Queen's Exchange
A Critical Introduction1The earliest text of The Queen’s Exchange was printed in 1657, five years after Richard Brome’s death. The titlepage announces the play to have been ’acted with generall applause at the Black-friers by His Majesties Servants’. This announcement, however, is contradicted on the next leaf, where the publisher informs readers of the play that ’when ’twas written, or where acted, I know not’. The publisher of the quarto was Henry Brome, who claims to have had access to ’other things of this nature written, and left by Mr. Rich. Broome’. (See Textual Introduction to this play - [ESSAY_QE_TEXT]). The fact that the publisher addressed his preface to ’Gentlemen and Ladies’ may suggest that he was seeking an upmarket readership, and there is other evidence that he was capable of sharp practice as a publisher. Pointing to the contradiction between titlepage and preface regarding theatrical provenance, G.E.Bentley gave strong hints as to which version he found more credible:Perhaps the title-page is right and Brome secured additional information after he wrote his preface, but one cannot escape the troublesome thought that ’acted by His Majesty’s Servants at the Blackfriars’ was probably the best advertising a play could have in 1657 or for several decades before. The tragi-comedy has a number of effective scenes, but in places it seems too naïve in its technique for a sophisticated Blackfriars audience. ...Henry Brome’s title of The Royal Exchange was only a fraudulent attempt to sell the remaining sheets of the 1657 edition [of The Queen’s Exchange]; it does not increase one’s confidence in his statement about the performance of the play on the 1657 title-page.n116142The question of ’when ’twas written’ has been variously answered. F.G.Fleay, who accepted the title page assignment of the play to the King’s Men at the Blackfriars as ’no doubt correct’, inferred a date from internal evidence: in Act 2, scene 2, a character says of Osric, King of Northumbria, ’We have prayed for him these seven years’ [QE 2.2.speech230]. From this duration Fleay, mapping Osric’s reign in the dramatic fiction onto that of Charles I in Great Britain, reached a date of 1631 or 1632.n11615 C.E.Andrews simply repeated Fleay’s date as ’unquestionably correct’.n11616 Bentley conceded, ’It is true that casual statements of this kind frequently refer to the current year in Jacobean and Caroline plays, regardless of their setting in time and place, and that the seventh year of Charles I was 1631-2, but one would like some confirmation’; and although he accepted Fleay’s date, Bentley bracketed it with question marks.n11617 R.J.Kaufmann, relying like Bentley on stylistic impressions, opted for an early date, qualified by only a single question mark, ’(1629-30 [?])’:The play is weakly constructed and since Brome in his mature plays excels in construction, this definitely suggests an early date. It is a virtual pastiche of borrowings from Shakespeare (Lear and Macbeth), Ford (Lover’s Melancholy), and Massinger (The Picture). Since the last two plays date from November, 1628, and June, 1629, respectively, and since they. . . treat the fashionable ’love melancholy’ in a way similar to that of the Northumbrian King in The Queen’s Exchange, the latter is probably a response to this theatrical fad and perhaps a ’literary’ contrivance to continue his own early success.n116183Cyndia Clegg Goodman’s 1976 Ph.D. thesis followed Kaufmann’s preference for an early datebecause of the emphasis in the opening scene on the inadvisability of a foreign marriage for Queen Bertha and the emphasis throughout the play on the hypocrisy of royal favourites. ...The play’s political implications, as well as its relatively immature construction, would tend to support a date somewhere around 1629.n116194At one point in his influential study of London drama and theatre in the political and cultural contexts of the decade 1632-1642, Martin Butler dated The Queen’s Exchange to ’1634-1636?’, but gave no reason for this range of dates.n11620 Elsewhere (p. 268) in this book Butler wrote, ’The Queen’s Exchange belonged to the King’s Men and so cannot be later than about 1634,’ while his ODNB entry on Brome says that the play is ’usually dated c.1631, though conceivably later’.n11621 Although the early date has been repeated in the twenty-first century,n11622 Butler’s ’conceivably’ has carried the day with critics who have followed him. Matthew Steggle, noting that ’the Prologue speaks of the author as experienced, successful and established,’ suggested a date ’perhaps as late as 1634’.n11623 Editing the play for an M.A. dissertation supervised by Steggle, Richard Wood preferred Butler’s guestimate of ’no later than 1634’, but questioned the assumption that The Queen’s Exchange belonged to the King’s Men;n11624 and in an article in which he published points from his dissertation, Wood wrote, ’The Queen’s Exchange was probably first performed around the time of Charles’s Scottish coronation in [June] 1633.’n116255As Steggle understates, The Queen’s Exchange is a ‘hard-to-date play’.n11626 The arguments over dating it have proceeded by either or both of: (i) identifying some datable event or theme within the reign of Charles I of which trace(s) can be seen in the text of the play; (ii) assessing, more or less impressionistically, the style and quality of the play and relating that assessment to an assumed model of Brome’s dramatic development. In the first category, the scholars who are cited above have adduced: regnal years (Fleay and Bentley); the marriage of Charles I to Henrietta Maria and his expulsion of her French household (Clegg); the assassination of Buckingham (Clegg); the coronation of Charles I in Edinburgh (Wood). In the second category, they have adduced: naïve technique (Bentley); weak construction and derivativeness (Kaufmann). 6The grounds on which this edition prefers a late date for The Queen’s Exchange are somewhat (but only somewhat) different. The question of where the play was acted bears sharply on ’when ’twas written’. Steggle has written that ’the identity of the company is unknown, beyond Bentley’s suspicion that play seems “too naïve” for the sophisticated Blackfriars’.n11626 There are less impressionistic arguments for eliminating venues among the five possibilities: the Cockpit/Phoenix in Drury Lane, Salisbury Court, Blackfriars, Globe 2 and Red Bull. The Fortune has been left out of account, ’given that there is no known association between Brome and this theatre’.n11627 Given the to-and-froing of companies between the Red Bull and the Fortune, however, that omission may have been misjudged.7One consideration is the size of the cast and consequently the dimensions of a stage able to accommodate them. The final scene of The Queen’s Exchange assembles at least twenty-two performers (not counting supernumeraries) onstage simultaneously. A throne or chair of state is also required, and one character must be carried on, raving mad, in a chair. The stage of the Globe, as rebuilt after the fire of 1613, would almost certainly have had a large enough stage. The Hollar drawing of 1647 shows a large building, and the audience in 1624 was reported to be more than 3,000 people.n11628 The dimensions of the stage at the Red Bull have not been determined. According to an account printed in the Restoration, however, ’the Red Bull playhouse... was a large one.’n11629 On the other hand, theatre historians’ best guesses suggest that the stages of both the Salisbury Court and the Cockpit/Phoenix playhouses would have been overcrowded by the dramatis personae, plus furniture, which are required for Act 5 Scene 4 of Brome’s tragicomedy.n11630 If the reminiscences of James Wright are to be believed, the same objection could also be raised for the Blackfriars: according to him, ’The Black-friers, Cockpit, and Salisbury-court, were called private Houses, and were very small to what we see now [1699]’; and see one, see all, ’for they were all three Built almost exactly alike, for Form and Bigness’.n11631 Doubt, then, surrounds the capacity of these private theatres to give playing space to The Queen’s Exchange.8A consideration which leads to firmer conclusions is the need for a trap in Act 5, Scene 2 of The Queen’s Exchange. Its dimensions must be generous: the trapdoor has to be big enough for two characters (one hanging onto the other, who is trying to protect himself) to be winched up through it in the course of the scene. Three actors are involved in a combination of descent and ascents, and the subterranean space needs to accommodate all three actors at once. (It is notionally possible that only two actors might be in the trap simultaneously, the third somehow crawling into it, unseen, between speeches [QE 5.2.speeches717-719] [QE 5.2.speeches737-738] in this edition; but in that case there would be insufficient time for that third actor to be secured to the rope which will haul him up.) The evidence for a trap at the Cockpit/Phoenix, deriving from only a single one of the plays thought to have been staged there, is slim.n11632 The evidence for a trap at the Salisbury Court is somewhat shaky, depending as it does upon the interpretation of a vignette on a 1640 titlepage. The vignette, on the engraved titlepage of Nathanial Richards’s Messalina, has to be accepted as a representation of the Salisbury Court, where this tragedy was probably first staged, by the King’s Revels, in 1634-6; and then broken markings on the surface of the stage in that image have to be construed as signifying a trap-door, situated somewhat off-centre.n11633 However, for the Red Bull Theatre, analysis of playtexts staged in that outdoor public theatre’s first twenty years provides strong and relatively extensive evidence of a capacious trap, one big (and fireproof !) enough to swallow ’three devils, each with a friar on his back’, into the flames of hell!n11634 Theatrical and supernatural underworlds are often, and unsurprisingly, associated, and The Queen’s Exchange gives good example of the association. Of the three actors who must use a trap in Act 5, Scene 2 of The Queen’s Exchange, one plays a character who, within the fiction of the play, is dressed up as a devil, while another plays a starving and dirt-blackened prisoner who thinks himself to have been ’drawn from one hell into another’ [QE 5.2.speech721].9The scene of The Queen’s Exchange in which three actors make simultaneous use of a trap also requires that they be winched up/down by means of ’a rope, with an engine fastened to a post’ (Stage Direction before [QE 5.2.speech708] in the Modernised Text of this edition, Original Text [QE 5.1.line3398]. This direction has problematic implications for stage business — particularly the carrying-on, setting-up, taking-down and removal of the device — which are discussed at some length in the notes to the initial scene direction in the Modernised Text of this edition [NOTE n11200] [NOTE n11122]. The direction also provides a third consideration, which may contribute to the identification of the theatre for which The Queen’s Exchange was written and/or in which it was performed. In an article on ’Descent Machinery in the Playhouses’, John Astington cites this scene as evidence ’that a man could be lowered and lifted by a fairly simple portable device’ and speculates that Brome ’perhaps took his idea from contemporary burglars’ techniques’. One device which Astington considers is a ’crane arm (the “Post” ) and attached windlass’: he rejects this as ’fairly awkward for two men to manage’. Astington thinks it ’more likely that the “Engine” and “Rope” are blocks and tackle, and that the “Post” is some kind of frame from which the tackle could be made to hang’.n11635 Either of the devices considered by Astington, however, would have to be capable of sustaining the weight of two men and would be cumbersome for the actors to carry as personal properties. The syntax of the stage direction invites, or at least admits, the hypothesis that the device awaits them onstage: ’Enter Carpenter, Mason, Smith in Divels habits; two Lanthorns, a Pickaxe and a rope, with an Engine fastned to a post, and a bunch of picklocks.’ On this hypothesis, the prepositional phrase ’with an Engine fastned to a post’ would function merely as an explanation of the rope which is part of the three actors’ portable equipment.10In their Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 1580-1642 Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson take this post to be ’one of the stage posts or pillars supporting the heavens’. If that is what it is, however, then it is a late instance: this phrase from The Queen’s Exchange is the next to latest example they give, William Rider’s The Twins being the only other play from the 1630s to be cited for this sense.n11636 The presence of posts as ’stage pillars’ can be taken for granted at Globe 2, but is less certain at any other of the theatres for which Brome is likely to have written The Queen’s Exchange. It may be that in the instance of this stage direction, the term designates some other architectural feature. The frontispiece to Francis Kirkman’s The Wits (1662) appears to show a performance underway on a stage which has been variously identified as that of Salisbury Court, of the Cockpit/Phoenix and, most plausibly, of the Red Bull Theatre [IMAGEEM_4_1].n11637 The gallery above the stage in this image is divided by what look like posts, two on either side. The use of one of these for winching actors up from a trap onstage would, however, seem impossibly clumsy. 11Yet a further possibility is suggested by yet another title-page image. This one, a woodcut, is on the title-page of the 1620 quarto imprint of Swetnam the Woman-hater Arraigned by Women, performed at the Red Bull: it shows the trial scene in Act 4 of the play. The foreground of the image is dominated by an elaborately turned post, six to six and a half feet high, which forms part of the improvised bar at which Swetnam is arraigned. (The post also sees service as a tree.)n11638 If the image records Swetnam the Woman-hater as performed rather than as imagined, then it is evidence that the Red Bull had a piece of stage furniture, known as a post, which was removable but capable of sustaining some weight.12The Red Bull was modified sometime between 1625 and 1633, later than some of the evidence which has been adduced above. What was done, and precisely when, has yet to be established, so there must be some uncertainty about assuming that inferences about its Jacobean features can be carried over into the Caroline period. That caveat conceded, the various considerations — size of stage, trap, and machine — together point to the Red Bull Theatre as one possible venue for The Queen’s Exchange. If it was acted at the Red Bull, then the play was written, for the Prince Charles’s Men (II), between January 1634 and July 1635. These dates, which are derived from the documentation of Brome’s legal battle with the management of Salisbury Court, bracket the period in which the playwright can certainly be said to have been linked to the Red Bull Theatre. According to Brome’s version of the affair, Salisbury Court ’did entice and inveigle this defendant to depart and leave the company of the Red Bull players, being the Prince’s Highness’s servants, and where this defendant was then very well entertained and truly paid without murmuring or wrangling’. Brome claims to have been subjected to these blandishments ’eighteen months or thereabouts before’ 20 July 1635, when he signed a contract with Salisbury Court. It seems highly unlikely that he might have written for a Red Bull performance after the date of that contract, but it is notionally possible that Brome might have written The Queen’s Exchange before January 1634 for performance by some company other than the Prince Charles’s Men (II) at the Red Bull, where turnover was rapid.n11639 The January 1634 terminus a quo for The Queen’s Exchange at the Red Bull is thus a little less secure than the July 1635 terminus ad quem for a performance there, but both seem highly plausible.13Certainly Globe 2 could also have given place to The Queen’s Exchange, but the range of dates for performance here is broader, and less securely grounded by theatrical historiography, than is the range for dates for performance at the Red Bull. Andrew Gurr lists The Queen’s Exchange among plays acquired by the King’s Men between 1631 and 1634.n11640 Brome’s intermittent association with the King’s Men is represented by four plays: The Lovesick Maid, also known as The Honour of Young Ladies (lost); The Northern Lass; The Novella; and The Late Lancashire Witches. The first-named, evidently his first work for the company, was written in the early months of 1629; and the last-named, was written, in collaboration with Thomas Heywood, during May/June 1634 and performed at the Globe in August of that year.n11641 So, if the titlepage of The Queen’s Exchange does not lie, and the play was indeed ’acted...by His Majesties Servants’ (albeit probably not at the Blackfriars), then the possible range of dates is from the wake of the company’s (and the playwright’s) success with The Lovesick Maid in 1629 to the playwright’s signing of the Salisbury Court contract in 1635. 14To narrow that range, there remain what may be references to more or less precisely datable events. Some of these may be disregarded as anterior to the earliest possible date of the play: such, for example, is the obvious modelling of Jeffrey, the Clown, who is recruited to court from the Northumbrian countryside in Act 2, scene 2, upon Jeffrey Hudson, the dwarf in Queen Henrietta Maria’s household, to which he came as a boy from the Shires, probably before August 1628.n11642 That the play makes references to later events is less certain. One reference of temporally uncertain significance is the play’s apparent approval of traditional celebrations such as bonfires, bell-ringing, and boozing, which were decried in some quarters both as pagan — or (what amounted to the same thing in Puritan polemic) Roman Catholic — and as idle. The debate was decades old when in October 1633, King Charles I’s reissuing of his father’s so-called Book of Sports marked a renewed intensity of concern about the topic.n11643 The Caroline reissue, however, was mainly occasioned by debates about observance of the Sabbath; and unlike the bucolic dialogue in the play, the proclamation itself says nothing directly about bonfires, let alone their merits. The discussion of them in the play [QE 2.2.speeches212-233] clearly indicates real, if wry, sympathy for the burners of bonfires built from work tools and farm implements, but it is less clearly significant of a particular moment when such sympathy might have been aroused [QE 2.2.speeches212-233]. Another reference is less certain from the start. Steggle saw The Queen’s Exchange as being ’at one level at least open to a reading as an allegorical representation of the “union of the crowns” of England and Scotland thirty years before the play was written’.n11644 Being open to an allegorical reading is not equivalent to making a topical reference, and Steggle did not explain his specification of thirty years. Wood, following Steggle, fixed on King Charles I’s coronation at Edinburgh in June 1633. ’The themes of The Queen’s Exchange,’ wrote Wood ’resonate with the events surrounding King Charles’ Scottish coronation’, but he did not articulate the particular resonances.n11645 Finally, there is the possibility that the figure of Genius who enters to Anthynus in Act 4, Scene 2 (SD after [CB 4.2.speech650] of The Queen’s Exchange is modelled upon an identically named (and gloriously costumed) figure in The Triumph of Peace, a masque which was scripted by James Shirley, presented by members of the four Inns of Court in February 1634, and published that year (the point is elaborated on in the notes)[NOTE n11007]. Inasmuch as Brome appears to have drawn on other elements of that masque for The Court Beggar in 1640 or 1641 [NOTE n9575] [NOTE n10121], it seems more than reasonable to suggest that he may have done so for The Queen’s Exchange in 1634 . If so, then in a nicely tragicomic twist the quicksands of Caroline theatre historiography have thrown up a firm marker for dating.
n11614 the 1657 title-page.
n11615 1631 or 1632.
n11616 as ’unquestionably correct’.
n11617 with question marks.
n11618 own early success.
n11619 because of the emphasis in the opening scene on the inadvisability of a foreign marriage for Queen Bertha and the emphasis throughout the play on the hypocrisy of royal favourites. ...The play’s political implications, as well as its relatively immature construction, would tend to support a date somewhere around 1629.
n11620 range of dates.
n11621 c.1631, though conceivably later’.
n11622 the twenty-first century,
n11623 late as 1634’.
n11624 the King’s Men;
n11625 coronation in [June] 1633.’
n11626 a ‘hard-to-date play’.
n11626 the sophisticated Blackfriars’.
n11627 and this theatre’.
n11628 than 3,000 people.
n11629 a large one.’
n11630 of Brome’s tragicomedy.
n11631 Form and Bigness’.
n11632 staged there, is slim.
n11633 trap-door, situated somewhat off-centre.
n11634 flames of hell!
n11635 made to hang’.
n11636 for this sense.
n11637 Red Bull Theatre [IMAGEEM_4_1].
n11638 as a tree.)
n11639 turnover was rapid.
n11640 1631 and 1634.
n11641 of that year.
n11642 before August 1628.
n11643 about the topic.
n11644 play was written’.
n11645 the particular resonances.
© University of Sheffield, 2010
The text of this essay is made freely available for non-commercial usage.
Copyright, of the design and content, remains with the Royal Holloway, University of London
and the University of Sheffield. Commercial exploitation of this material is prohibited
without licence from the Royal Holloway, University of London and the University of Sheffield.