The Antipodes - Synopsis

Synopsis

The play's plot is complex and intricate, even by the standards of Brome. The opening scene shows the herald painter Anthony Blaze welcoming Master Joyless to London from the country. Joyless is oppressed by a set of personal problems. He is an older man, a former widower who has married a second wife, a seventeen-year-old woman named Diana — toward whom he is deeply possessive and jealous, fearing her potential infidelity. His son Peregrine has from his youth been obsessed with the literature of travel and voyaging, an obsession that is now so strong that it dominates his life, even to the point of preventing him from consummating his three-year-old marriage to his wife Martha — a circumstance that has left her profoundly unhappy, and almost as psychologically disturbed as her husband.

Blaze has a potential solution for all of the Joyless family's problems, in the treatments of a physician called Doctor Hughball, and the sponsorship of a mysterious nobleman named Letoy. Hughball had treated many disturbed Londoners successfully — even curing Blaze himself of his own suspicions of his wife's fidelity. His wife, Barbara Blaze, becomes an active participant in the eventual cure of the Joylesses, helping to manage Martha Joyless in particular.

Letoy is a wealthy aristocrat who pursues an odd lifestyle: he dresses plainly, yet furnishes his servants in rich clothes — the opposite of what is standard for noblemen of Brome's era. He also keeps a troupe of players, who he and the Doctor employ in their treatment of psychologically distressed individuals. The Doctor administers a powerful sleeping potion to Peregrine Joyless, and together with Master Joyless and his wife Diana they go to Letoy's country estate. There, Peregrine is told upon waking that he has travelled to the Antipodes, the country directly opposite England on the other side of the globe. Letoy's players involve Peregrine in a pageant of life in "Anti-London," as a means of curing his obsession. In the process, Joyless and his wife are treated as well, unwittingly to them.

Most of the play's middle and later portions are taken up by a play within a play, in which the Doctor, Blaze, and the actors, all under Letoy's direction, fool Peregrine into believing that he is actually in the Antipodes. The play goes anything but smoothly, as Martha attempts to interrupt, as Joyless and Diana comment caustically from the vantage point of their own unhappy marriage, and as Peregrine turns to whole enterprise his own way; the actors have to improvise and extemporize, and sometimes lose their way. But Letoy manages to direct the whole show toward the outcome he envisions.

In the metatheatre of the play within the play, Brome presents the society of "Anti-London" as a distorted mirror-image of English society of his day. (Brome carefully specifies that the Antipodean kingdom is like England in political structure and religion, thereby avoiding the two fatal subjects for a Caroline dramatist; his Antipodeans only reverse English "manners.") In Brome's Anti-London, lawyers are poor and shabbily dressed, while poets are rich and gaudy; a lawyer refuses all fees, until a female client beats him into accepting her money. A gallant begs from a beggar, so that he can buy his grandmother ballads and "Love-pamphlets," and "Hobby-horses and rattles for my grandfather." A maiden tries to pick up a gallant in the street, and when he refuses her she kicks him. Old men are sent to school by their adult children, and play hooky when they can. Servants rule their masters. Gentlemen talk and behave as crudely as the lowest of common laborers, while watermen and carmen comport themselves with grace and gentility.

The play goes somewhat awry when Peregrine wanders into the players' "tiring house" and finds their properties. Thinking he's in "some enchanted castle," he slaughters their stage "Monsters, giants, furies, beasts, and bugbears,"

Kills monster after monster; takes the puppets

Prisoners, knocks down the cyclops, tumbles all

Our jigambobs and trinkets to the wall.

By right of conquest, Peregrine crowns himself king of the Antipodes, with the players' pasteboard crown and sword of lath. Letoy, however, turns this unforeseen event to his advantage: he has Byplay, the leader of the actors, set the new king the task of reforming his kingdom.

Then, the topsy-turvy aspects of the Antipodes become less humorous and more threatening. A statesman entertains several "projectors," who present him with wild speculative projects — like increasing wool production by flaying horses alive and affixing sheepskins to them. The Statesman accepts all their follies. Antipodean justice punishes the victims of disasters like fires and shipwrecks, with "Imprisonment, banishment, and sometimes death," to teach them to be more careful next time; and it rewards thieves, bawds, and even "The captain of the cut-purses" when they are old and can no longer practice their crimes. The shocked and chastened king Peregrine determines to reform and rectify his kingdom.

Peregrine is presented with his wife Martha, dressed as his queen; he is told that she is the daughter of the last king of the Antipodes, and he must mate with her to secure his crown. Under the guidance of Doctor Hughball and Barbara Blaze, the couple retire to bed and consummate their marriage. Afterwards, Peregrine is like a man come out of a dream; his sanity and mental balance are returning.

Letoy almost drives Joyless to desperation, by making the old man believe that he, Letoy, is trying to seduce Joyless's wife Diana. Instead, Joyless witnesses Diana reject the nobleman's advances. Letoy informs both of them that he is Diana's true father. Years before, he had put aside his infant daughter to be raised by his client Truelock. In his younger years, Letoy himself had suffered from the curse of irrational jealousy, and had suspected that his daughter was another man's child. Only a death-bed assurance from his wife convinced Letoy that he had been wrong. Having recovered from his own irrationality, he turned to helping others do the same.

The play concludes in a masque: Discord ushers in the personifications of Folly, Jealousy, Melancholy, and Madness, to "most untunable" music. They, however, are driven out by Harmony, who leads in Mercury, Cupid, Bacchus, and Apollo, who bring wit, love, wine, and health.