Idyll Retreats: Pastoral Enclosure in Brome’s The Jovial Crew

• In Event: Rethinking Form in Early Modern English Drama

Abstract

When drawing attention to country enclosures in early modern England, writers often turned to the pastoral genre. In celebrating and emphasizing the inherent value of open spaces, the pastoral countered an increasingly axiomatic enclosure logic that deemed such spaces (and their occupants) to be wasteful and unproductive. Despite its potential for critiquing enclosure, the pastoral’s romantic re-visioning of country life traded the idle for the idyll, a move that could obscure or diminish the harms that enclosures perpetuated. One early seventeenth-century pastoral play, Richard Brome’s The Jovial Crew, dramatizes the [in]capability of the pastoral to effectively address enclosure. I argue that the play explores the genre’s limitations through its metacognitive engagements with pastoral convention; these moments of generic awareness cut through the play’s persistent optimism, exposing both the pastoral’s reliance on oversimplified bucolic representations and its propensity to reproduce country spaces and people for the purposes of entertainment.

Author

• Christopher J. Wallis, University of California, Davis