The Play
The play is much more than a simple satire on a contemporary subject; its cast includes "a Puritan named Gabriel, a scarlet woman supposedly from Venice, various irate fathers and disguised lovers, and a group of hooligans known as 'The Brothers of the Blade,' whose expulsion gives the play its title." In shaping this confection, Brome presents a closely observed slice of contemporaneous London life in a realistic setting. The play has attracted critical comment for directing its satire both at fashionable society and at Puritans, and for the unusual scene of two prostitutes fighting each other with swords (Act IV, scene i). Some critics have complained of the play's "looseness of structure," even asserting that it "has no main plot."
Read more about this topic: The Weeding Of Covent Garden
Famous quotes containing the word play:
“Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,
To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,
To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
To strike his living hi and ho....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)