The Sparagus Garden - Topical Matters

Topical Matters

Brome's plays are rich with allusions to contemporary conditions that offer miniature snapshots of London life at the time. The Sparagus Garden contains references to the sedan chairs that were then coming into fashion, and to dromedary rides across the frozen River Thames in winter. (During the Little Ice Age, the Thames repeatedly froze over, so extremely that "frost fairs" were held on the surface of the ice. The river was frozen over in the winter of 1634–35.)

Consistent with this topicality, Brome's play referred to an actual London asparagus garden; it was located on 2 acres (8,100 m2) in Lambeth Marsh near Waterloo — a narrow piece of land running up from the River Thames, roughly opposite the Whitehall Stairs. It was a fashionable destination in its day, "an expensive pleasure ground on the south bank of the river, where asparagus and fresh strawberries were served, with sugar and wine...." The Garden acquired a reputation as a place of romantic assignation. It was still in operation in the 1660s; Samuel Pepys visited in April 1668, hoping to meet Elizabeth Knepp, the actress who had once been his wife's maid. (He was disappointed.)

The Sparagus Garden belongs to a group of plays that reflect a trend of the 1630s, in which playwrights exploited "place realism," linking their dramas to actual locations and institutions of their contemporary world. James Shirley's Hyde Park (1632) is an obvious example, as are Shackerley Marmion's Holland's Leaguer (1631) and Thomas Nabbes's Covent Garden (1633) and Tottenham Court (1634). Several of Brome's other plays, like The Weeding of Covent Garden (c. 1632–33) and The New Academy (1636), fall into this category. Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614) stood as a precedent, especially pertinent to Brome, Jonson's self-style acolyte — though other precedents, like The Fair Maid of the Exchange (c. 1602) and Lording Barry's Ram Alley (c. 1607), can also be noted. (Bartholomew Fair, however, was first printed in 1631, an event that may may have stimulated the trend of the 1630s.) And later plays, like William Wycherley's Love in a Wood, or St. James's Park (1671) and Thomas Shadwell's Epsom Wells (1672) and Bury Fair (1689) among other examples, continued the sub-genre of "topographical comedy."

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