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:
“Hail, comly and clene,
Hail, yong child!
Hail, maker, as I meene,
Of a maden so milde!”
—Unknown. The Second Shepherd’s Play (l. 6–8)
“The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy, and all the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)