Richard Brome - Life

Life

Virtually nothing is known about Brome's private life. Repeated allusions in contemporary works, like Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, indicate that Brome started out as a servant of Jonson, in some capacity. Scholars have interpreted the allusions to mean that Brome may have begun as a menial servant but later became a sort of secretary and general assistant to the older playwright. A single brief mention of his family's need seems to show that he had a wife and children and struggled to support them.

He may have had some experience as a professional actor: a 1628 warrant lists him as a member of the Queen of Bohemia's Men. Yet he had already started writing for the stage by this date. An early collaboration, A Fault in Friendship (now lost) was licensed in 1623 for Prince Charles's Men; a 1629 solo Brome effort, The Lovesick Maid (also lost), was a success for the King's Men. The Northern Lass (1632) was another success, and made Brome's reputation.

Due to the survival of various legal documents, much more is known about Brome's professional activities than his personal life. Once established as a dramatist, Brome wrote for all the major acting companies and theaters of his era — for the Blackfriars Theatre ; for the Red Bull Theatre; and from 1635 onward, for the King's Revels Company and Queen Henrietta's Men at the Salisbury Court Theatre. Brome's Sparagus Garden was a huge success at the Salisbury Court in 1635, earning over £1000. As a result, Brome signed a three-year contract with Richard Heton, manager of the Salisbury Court, to write three plays annually at a salary of 15 shillings per week plus one day's profit per play. Brome, however, was unable to produce dramas at the promised pace; and the stipulated payments to Brome were not kept up. In need of money, Brome resorted to Christopher Beeston, actor, impresario, and owner of the Cockpit Theatre (also known as the Phoenix) as well as the Red Bull. In August 1635 Beeston loaned Brome £6, and in return Brome committed to write Beeston a play. Heton tried to lure Brome back with a £10 payment for a new play; but they fell behind in his payments again, and Brome turned again to Beeston. Heton appealed to Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, to settle the dispute; Herbert decreed that Brome be paid six shillings a week and £5 for each new play, the payments to continue even when the theaters were closed.

The dispute was complicated by the fact that the theatres endured one of their longest enforced closings due to plague in this period; they were closed almost continuously from 10 May 1636 to 2 October 1637. Beeston ejected Queen Henrietta's Men from the Cockpit Theatre in 1636, forcing that company to split up for a time. The King's Revels Men, formerly at the Salisbury Court, dissolved permanently in the crisis of the closure; but the Queen's company made a resurgence, with the help of Sir Henry Herbert, who had a financial stake in the Salisbury Court Theatre. When the plague diminished enough for performances to resume in October 1637, the re-organized Queen Henrietta's Men commenced the new season at the Salisbury Court with, it is thought, Brome's The English Moor.

When Brome's 1635 contract with Heton ended in 1638, new disputes arose among Brome, Beeston, and Heton; a bill of complaint was filed against Brome, though the outcome of the case is unknown.

It seems that once the Puritans closed the theaters in 1642, Brome struggled more severely. He may have authored an entertainment, Juno in Arcadia, which John P. Cutts has argued was performed for Queen Henrietta Maria's arrival at Oxford in 1643. He wrote commendatory verses for the Beaumont and Fletcher First Folio (1647). In 1649–50 he edited a volume of elegies, titled Lachrymae Musarum, on the death of Henry, Lord Hastings. In 1652, in a dedication to Thomas Stanley for a quarto edition of his A Jovial Crew, Brome described himself as "poor and proud."