[Rarebooks] fa: RICHARD BROME - A JOVIAL CREW or THE MERRY BEGGARS: A COMEDY - 1684

[ArCh]

Listed now, auctions ending Sunday, March 31. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/y44v3eru

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Richard Brome: A Jovial Crew: or, The Merry Beggars· A Comedy, As it is Acted at the Theatre Royal. London: Printed Joseph Hindmarsh, Bookseller to His Royal Highness, at the Black Bull in Cornhill, 1684. Quarto (22 cm) bound in modern forest green cloth, new endpapers; [4], 59, [1] pp. ESTC R29134; Wing B4875.

Browning and occasional spotting to the leaves, first and last leaves with bumping and wear to the corners and a few small chips from the edges, last leaf with a burn hole at the center, not affecting any text; text block trimmed a bit close, occasionally touching the page numbers at the top or the catch-words at the bottom of the pages.

Brome's pastoral or "green world" comedy, written partly in verse, was the last play performed in London before the Puritan Parliament closed the theaters at the onset of the English Civil War. Revived at the Restoration, the play remained popular through much of the eighteenth century, the "Beggars' Song" by itself going through numerous reprintings. It is considered one of the finest comedies of the Caroline period. Richard Brome (d. 1642?) was first the servant, then the close friend and "son," of Ben Jonson, whose dramatic style his plays closely followed — and occasionally surpassed, in the view of at least one scholar, who wrote that Brome's The Antipodes and A Jovial Crew "outrank all but the best of Jonson" (Logan and Smith, eds., The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists).