A Jovial Crew

Description

A Jovial Crew, or the Merry Beggars, is a comedy about four noble lovers who join the beggar community for a pastoral life of dance and song. Or is it? Whilst maintaining its unremitting good humour, A Jovial Crew shows that the literary depiction of beggar life, and real beggar life, are profoundly different. Daily aspects of life in the beggar world - poverty, dirt, licentiousness - come as a surprise to the well-born, who are ultimately led to question their own values. The last production mounted before theatres were closed for the English Civil War, A Jovial Crew's exploration of class, commonwealth, kinship and kingship shows an intense engagement with contemporary politics. This edition, with dedicated sections on music and language in the play, argues that A Jovial Crew also offers a nostalgic farewell to English theatre. It explores Brome's attitude to performance and print, and follows A Jovial Crew from its first, Caroline staging, to its later manifestations as a Restoration comedy, an eighteenth-century opera, and a twentieth-century proto-Marxist tragicomedy.

Richard Brome (c.1590-1653) was an English dramatist of the Caroline era who wrote for all the major acting companies and theatres. His career as a playwright was put on hold during one of the longest periods of theatre closure. When theatres reopened during the Restoration, a handful of Brome's plays were performed and republished, and the most successful of these was A Jovial Crew. Tiffany Stern is Professor of Early Modern Drama and Fellow of University College at the University of Oxford, UK.

The general sense one has from this Arden edition is that it finally refocuses and steadies a work that has been in flux from the moment it was written. Brome himself even included updates and rewrites to include more contemporary allusions when the play was published ten years later. Which isn't to say that Brome has fallen into complete obscurity ... [I]n producing this handsome edition, another punctuation mark in theatrical history is emphasised and how lucky we were that it was a comma rather than a full stop. -- Stuart Ian Burns * The Hamlet Weblog *