The Antipodes
[4] The title page states that the play was acted in 1638 by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Salisbury Court Theatre, the regular troupe and venue for Brome's dramas from 1637 on.
In a note addressed to the Courteous Reader at the end of the printed text, however, Brome writes that the play was originally intended for William Beeston's company at the Cockpit Theatre.
[citation needed] Like others of Brome's plays, The Antipodes was revived during the Restoration era; Samuel Pepys saw it performed on 26 August 1661.
[6] In 2012, Dr. Joshua McEvilla discovered a cast list of a 1638 staging of The Antipodes as performed by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Salisbury Court theatre.
Many earlier writers stressed the sheer strangeness of far lands; Brome's self-styled "master," Ben Jonson, did so in a notable instance in his 1620 masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon, with children who are part bird and coaches that are blown by the wind – and some of Jonson's wonders date back as far as the Vera Historia of Lucian.
Strikingly, though, the idea of the Antipodes as a "topsy-turvy" place, where familiar relationships are directly reversed, seems to have been original with Brome; no clear precedents for it have been identified.
[9][10] No critic has ever claimed that Brome was a great dramatic poet or a truly distinctive literary stylist; his verse and prose are generally nothing more than functional, and certainly lack the vivid eloquence of Shakespeare and the intellectual knottiness of his idol Jonson.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Doctor Hughball asserts that in the Antipodes "the maids do woo / The bachelors," and that "The wives lie uppermost" – which Diana Joyless calls "a trim / Upside-down Antipodean trick indeed."
Martha Joyless is a child bride, a "poor piece of innocence" who has been kept ignorant of sexuality; she longs desperately for a baby, but doesn't quite know how to get one.
Martha says that "A wanton maid" once kissed and fondled her – a franker indication of lesbian activity than plays of English Renaissance theatre usually provide.
Before he consummates his marriage, Peregrine talks about the Gadlibriens, a people mentioned in Mandeville who have an odd sexual practice: a bridegroom always hires "Another man to couple with his bride, / To clear the dangerous passage of a maidenhead."
Brome doesn't have Letoy insist upon slavish adherence to the author's text; quite the opposite, he stresses the players' talent for improvisation when the play and its purpose demand it.
