James Shirley's earliest extant play, Love Tricks, centres on this phenomenon; it was first published in 1631 under its subtitle, The School of Compliment.
The most direct historical model for Brome's Academy was probably Francis Kynaston's Museum Minervae, a school for training members of the gentry and aristocracy "in arms and arts."
[2] Brome's play touches upon the nexus of social education with money, in associating his "new academy" with the "New Exchange," an actual business institution of the period.
[4] The New Academy is one of a group of plays from the 1630s that show strong tendencies toward what critics have called "place realism," the exploitation of actual contemporaneous locations and institutions in their settings and plots.
Such plays can be found scattered throughout the seventeenth century (to cite only the most pertinent historical period); yet a surprising number of them cluster in this single decade.
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), among other plays of the time.
The jealous husband is a staple of English Renaissance drama, and appears in Brome plays as in those of other writers (as with Brittleware in Sparagus Garden).
Rafe Camelion is a "uxorious citizen" who dismisses every temptation to jealousy and possessiveness; his wife Hannah complains that he leaves her exposed to the gossip of women and the solicitations of men.
The now-merry Matchill makes Sir Swithin laugh instead of weep; the old knight's merriment increases when the now-married Rachel reveals herself to be a vociferous and demanding wife, as shrewish as her predecessor.
True to his name, Matchill has "match'd ill." Meanwhile, Strigood, calling himself Lightfoot and presenting Joyce and Gabriella as his daughters, has started a school to teach "music, dancing, fashion, compliment" and the French language to London gentry.
News of the school, and its fair young women, spreads quickly, and the play's other characters come in groups to investigate its offerings.
Its effects are not wholly fraudulent: under its influence, Lady Nestlecock and Rachel abandon their previous nastiness and learn to behave cordially to each other.
Then Hannah reveals to both men that, far from being a potential target of seduction, she is Valentine's stepsister, and the money she dispenses to him is financial support from his stepfather.