The Queen's Exchange is a Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by Richard Brome.
Publication and performance
The Queen's Exchange was first published in 1657, in a quarto issued by the bookseller Henry Brome. (Henry Brome was reportedly no relation to the dramatist; he joined with Andrew Crooke to issue the Brome collection Five New Plays in 1659.) The play was reprinted in 1661 under the title The Royal Exchange.
The quarto's title page states that the play was acted by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre. The date of that first production is uncertain; but Brome is known to have written for the King's Men in the earliest phase of his career, in the late 1620s and early 1630s. The play is often conjecturally dated to 1629–31. The play's most recent editor, Marian O'Connor, offers persuasive reasons for doubting the attribution to the King's Men, and for dating the play to around 1634.
Genre
Brome was not a tragedian; of his sixteen extant plays, thirteen are contemporary comedies, usually set in London and assignable to the category of city comedy. Only three of Brome's plays are tragicomedies; in addition to The Queen's Exchange, they are The Queen and Concubine and The Lovesick Court. It can be argued that Brome lacked a natural gift for the tragicomic form – one critic referred to "Brome's three feeble tragicomedies." Two of his three works in the genre, The Queen's Exchange and The Queen and Concubine, share the plot element of the king betraying his queen with a social inferior.
Influences
Brome is universally recognised as more derivative than original in his plays (as is true of Caroline drama generally). His comedies rely heavily on the precedents of Ben Jonson and the city comedy of Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker and others. In tragicomedy, his influences are different: "The Queen's Exchange is much more reminiscent of Shakespeare than any other of Brome's plays," with links to King Lear and Macbeth. The play also shows apparent or possible borrowings from works by Philip Massinger and John Ford; it has been described as a "virtual pastiche" of earlier works in the tragicomic form.
Lesbianism
In Act II, scene i of The Queen's Exchange, the character Theodrick states that "I have known women oft marry one another." It is a surprising line in the context of the prevailing morality of the seventeenth century – though other Brome plays, notably A Mad Couple Well-Match'd and The Antipodes, contain similar allusions to lesbianism. Brome appears to have been more aware of the phenomenon, or more interested in it, than most playwrights of his era.
Synopsis
The play is set in the early Medieval period, when Britain was divided into a number of small kingdoms. The opening scene shows Bertha, queen of the West Saxons, with her council, discussing her impending marriage to Osrick, king of Northumbria. Her sycophantic courtiers are in favour of the match; but one old and highly principled nobleman, Segebert, opposes the arranged marriage. He fears that the local laws and customs of the Saxons will be supplanted by those of Northumbria. The imperious Bertha responds by banishing Segebert from her country.
The second scene shows Segebert at home with his children, as he prepares for exile. He has two sons, Anthynus and Offa, and a daughter, Mildred. Though Anthynus is the elder, Segebert has a partiality for Offa; and when he leaves for exile he assigns care of his estates to Offa. Anthynus wins his father's permission to accompany the old man into banishment. At the end of the scene, Offa says in an aside that "I cannot speak for laughing" over this outcome – indicating that he is not the figure of virtue he appears to be. (This subplot involving Segebert, Anthynus, and Offa resembles the Gloucester/Edgar/Edmund subplot in King Lear.)
Osrick is shown among his courtiers, discussing the impending marriage. His ambassador, Theodrick, has just returned from Bertha's court, where, in addition to promoting Osrick's match, he has been courting Mildred, Segebert's daughter. The king and his ambassador compare their miniature portraits of the two women; and Osrick is overwhelmed with a sudden infatuation for Mildred. His passion is so intense that it drives him into a mental state of melancholy and distraction.