The Novella is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy written by Richard Brome. It was first published in the 1653 Brome collection Five New Plays, issued by the booksellers Humphrey Moseley, Richard Marriot, and Thomas Dring.
Date and Performance
In the 1653 Five New Plays (not to be confused with the 1659 Brome collection of the same name), each of the plays has its own title page. The title page of The Novella specifies that the drama was performed by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre in the year 1632.
One detail in the play-offers insight into the functioning of the King's Men in the relevant period. In the play's final scene (if its stage directions are taken at face value), all the actors in the cast, eighteen men and boys, are onstage at once. Earlier in its history, the company generally did not mount such large productions: cast lists survive from two King's Men productions of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, one c. 1614 and the other c. 1621, and both show that the company used doubling of minor roles to stage the play with eleven actors. Other cast data from the Jacobean era (like the casts lists for early King's Men's productions of Fletcherian plays, found in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio) indicate productions of the same general proportions. Yet if the whole cast of The Novella was onstage in the final scene, doubling could not have been employed. It was in the early Caroline era that the King's Men peaked in personnel: the company had fifteen sharers in the latter 1620s, more than at any time before or after. (The company's 1628 production of John Ford's The Lover's Melancholy, with its cast of seventeen players, was on the same scale as the 1632 Novella staging.)
Setting and sources
Over the full course of his playwriting career, Brome distinguished himself as a writer of city comedies that are strongly rooted in contemporary London. The early play The Novella provides a very rare instance in which Brome exploits a non-English location. For its setting in Venice, Brome drew material from Thomas Coryat's famous 1611 travelogue Coryat's Crudities, among other printed and manuscript sources of information.
Race and sex
The Novella, like Brome's later play The English Moor, exploits a version of the standard Elizabethan bed trick so common in English Renaissance drama, but with a racial twist: in each play a man goes to a sexual assignation expecting to encounter a white woman, only to find that his partner or potential partner is apparently an African woman. In both cases, the appearance is deceptive: in The English Moor the apparent black woman is a white woman in blackface makeup, while in The Novella the apparent black woman is an African boy eunuch. This plot twist in The Novella has attracted the attention of modern critics interested in race and gender issues.
In both cases, a white English boy player would have played across race and gender lines in the original productions: a white boy playing a white woman playing a black woman, and a white boy playing a (castrated) black youth playing a black woman.
Synopsis
The play opens on a night scene in a Venice street. Two young friends, Fabritio and Piso, discuss Fabritio's problematic personal situation. Two wealthy Venetian senators, Pantaloni and Guadagni, have arranged a socially advantageous marriage for their respective son and daughter, Fabritio and Flavia. Unfortunately, both young people are already in love with other choices: Fabritio loves Victoria, a young woman of Rome, while Flavia loves the poor but noble Francisco. Fabritio would like to escape Venice, and the looming arranged marriage, for Rome and Victoria — if he can figure out how to do so without sacrificing his inheritance.
As the two friends discuss the matter (and deliver the plot's backstory), "diverse gentlemen" pass over the stage. Many of these are going to view a young beauty who has recently arrived in the city; she is the "novella" of the title. (Brome employs the term "novella" to mean "novelty" or "innovation.") The young woman in question is the newest recruit among the twenty thousand courtesans of Venice; she has offered her virginity to any man who will pay the enormous sum of two thousand ducats. Piso thinks he sees Fabritio's father Pantaloni among the curiosity seekers going to meet the Novella (the "dogs" seeking to "unkennel the handsomest she fox / In Venice"), though Fabritio is doubtful. There is no doubt when the two young men meet Francisco and his friend Horatio; what is at first a tense encounter mellows when Fabritio and Francisco realise that they have the same goal – to frustrate the arranged marriage of Fabritio and Flavia.