SOURCE: “Richard Brome,” in Contemporaries of Shakespeare, William Heinemann, 1919, pp. 261-74.

In the following essay, Swinburne favorably compares Brome's plays to those of his contemporaries and considers The Antipodes one of the “most fanciful and delightful farces in the world.”

If the futile and venerable custom of academic disputations on a given theme of debate were ever to revive in the world of scholarship and of letters, an amusing if not a profitable theme for discussion might be the question whether a minor artist of real and original merit is likelier to gain or to lose by the association of his name with that of a master in his art. And no better example could be taken than that afforded by the relation of Dick Brome to Ben Jonson. The well-known first line of the commendatory verses with which his master and patron condescended to play the part...