A Jovial Crew  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Puritans shut down English theaters

A Jovial Crew, or the Merry Beggars is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy written by Richard Brome. First staged in 1641 or 1642 and first published in 1652, it is generally ranked as one of Brome's best plays, and one of the best comedies of the Caroline period; in one critic's view, Brome's The Antipodes and A Jovial Crew "outrank all but the best of Jonson."

Performance

The title page of the first edition states that the play debuted at the Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane in 1641. That theatre had recently returned to the management of Brome's friend and colleague William Beeston, after a period under the control of their rival Sir William Davenant. In his dedication to Stanley in the 1652 quarto, Brome states that A Jovial Crew "had the luck to tumble last of all in the epidemical ruin of the scene" — which has been interpreted to mean that the play was the last work acted before the Puritan authorities closed the London theatres on September 2, 1642, at the start of the English Civil War.

The play was revived early in the Restoration era, and proved an enduring favourite with its audience. Samuel Pepys recorded seeing multiple performances of the play in his Diary — twice in 1661, and again in 1662 and in 1669. The play remained in the active repertory when the King's Company and the Duke's Company joined to form the United Company in 1695. The publication of the play's fourth edition in 1708 was motivated by a revival at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane that year.

In what may be a case of mutual influence, John Gay might have drawn upon A Jovial Crew when he created his Beggar's Opera in 1728. In turn, the great success of Gay's work may have inspired the adaptation of A Jovial Crew into a similar ballad opera (comparable to a modern musical): in 1731, Matthew Concanen, Edward Roome, and Sir William Yonge produced their adaptation, The Jovial Crew. In this musical form, the work remained a staple of the English stage for the next half-century, and was performed as late as 1791.

The play was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Swan Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1992, in a modern adaptation by playwright Stephen Jeffries.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "A Jovial Crew" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools