The Sparagus Garden

The Sparagus Garden is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy by Richard Brome. It was the greatest success of Brome's career, and one of the major theatrical hits of its period.

The Sparagus Garden was acted by the King's Revels Men at the Salisbury Court Theatre in 1635. It was enormously popular, and reportedly earned the company £1000, a tremendous sum for a play in the 1630s. (The sheer magnitude of its success may have contributed to Brome's legal difficulties in the years immediately following: in attempting to reap greater profits from his future work, Brome would entangle himself in contract disputes and lawsuits with two theatre organizations, those of Richard Heton at the Salisbury Court and Christopher Beeston at the Cockpit Theatre.)

The play was revived early in the Restoration era, and was acted at the theatre at Lincoln's Inn Fields in the 1662–65 interval. It was first published in 1640, in a quarto printed by John Okes for the bookseller Francis Constable. In that volume, Brome dedicated the play to William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, one of the major literary patrons of his generation.

There was an actual London asparagus garden behind the play; it was located on two acres in Lambeth Marsh near Pimlico — a narrow piece of land running up from the River Thames, roughly opposite the Whitehall Stairs. It was something of a fashionable destination, "an expensive pleasure ground on the south bank of the river, where asparagus and fesh strawberries were served, with sugar and wine...." The Garden acquired a reputation as a place of romantic assignation. It was still in operation in the 1660s; Samuel Pepys visited in April 1668, hoping to meet Elizabeth Knepp, the actress who had once been his wife's maid. (He was disappointed.)

The Sparagus Garden belongs to a group of plays that reflect a trend of the 1630s, in which playwrights exploited "place realism," linking their dramas to actual locations and institutions of their contemporary world. James Shirley's Hyde Park (1632) is an obvious example, as are Thomas Nabbes's Covent Garden (1633) and Tottenham Court (1634); several of Brome's other plays, like The Weeding of Covent Garden (c. 1632–33) and The New Academy (1640), fall into this category. Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614) stood as a precedent, especially pertinent to Brome, Jonson's self-style acolyte — though other precedents, like The Fair Maid of the Exchange (c. 1602) and Lording Barry's Ram Alley (c. 1607), can also be noted. (Bartholomew Fair, however, was first printed in 1631, an event that may may have stimulated the trend in the 1630s.) And later plays, like William Wycherley's Love in a Wood, or St. James's Park (1671) and Thomas Shadwell's Epsom Wells (1672) and Bury Fair (1689) among other examples, continued the sub-genre of "topographical comedy."

Brome's plays are rich with allusions to contemporary conditions that offer miniature snapshots of London life at the time. Sparagus Garden contains references to the sedan chairs that were then coming into fashion, and to dromedary rides across the frozen River Thames in winter. (During the Little Ice Age, the Thames repeatedly froze over, so extremely that fairs were held on the surface of the frozen river.)

Brome's play involves the sexual themes and the confidence tricks that are typical of his drama. The play's clown character Tim Hoyden is physically abused and cheated of £400, by gallants who pretend to teach him the ways of fashionable society and groom him as "a finical City wit, and a superfinical Court wit." The charlatan Moneylack presents asparagus as an aphrodisiac; in actuality, the medical opinion of Brome's day regarded the vegetable as a mild diuretic. The play also features a romantic plot: young lovers overcome the opposition of angry fathers with a pretended pregnancy (a pillow under the young woman's dress) — a plot device that Brome's play shares with Thomas May's comedy The Heir (1622).