Genre
Like most of Brome's comedies, A Mad Couple shows strong influences from the works of Ben Jonson and from earlier works in the genre of city comedy. The resemblance between Brome's complaisant cuckold Saleware in A Mad Couple and the character Candido in Thomas Dekker's The Honest Whore, Part 1 has drawn notice.
A special debt to Jonson's comedy has been noted in Brome's portrayal of the widow character, Mistress Crostill. She is a "humours" character of the type made famous by Jonson, most notably in his Every Man In and Every Man Out of His Humour; and her characterization as lustful and lubricious is typical of Jonson's comedy specifically, and more generally of city comedy as a whole.
Read more about this topic: A Mad Couple Well-Match'd
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