Genre
A Jovial Crew partakes of a long-standing tradition of "green world comedy" in English Renaissance theatre, which employed a retreat from society into nature to reflect back upon the social world. Pastoral was a prior form of such drama, though as the seventeenth century wore on, pastoral came to seem an ever-more dated form; and the alternative of plays on gypsies and "merry beggars" began to fill its place. The Beaumont and Fletcher play Beggars' Bush (c. 1612–13?; revised by Massinger c. 1622) was a key development in this direction. Ben Jonson's 1621 masque The Gypsies Metamorphosed is also worth noting, since Brome was a self-styled follower of Jonson. Several works in the canon of Thomas Dekker and his collaborators, notably The Spanish Gypsy, belong in the same category. Indeed, Brome's play is only one item in a literature on beggars and their habits and music that grew throughout the century, from Samuel Rowlands' Slang Beggars' Songs (1610) to Daniel Defoe's The Complete Mendicant (1699).
Brome's contribution to this literature has attracted the attention of specialist scholars, for its songs and for its preservation of the particular linguistic forms of the Caroline underclass.
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