The Antipodes
play written by Richard Brome
The Antipodes is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy written by Richard Brome c. 1636. Many critics have ranked The Antipodes as "his best play...Brome's masterpiece," and one of the best Caroline comedies – "gay, imaginative, and spirited...;" "the most sophisticated and ingenious of Brome's satires." Brome's play is "a funhouse mirror" in which the audience members could "view the nature of their society."
Date, performance, and publication
The Antipodes was entered into the Stationers' Register on 19 March 1640 and published later that year in a quarto printed by John Okes, the son and successor of printer Nicholas Okes, for the bookseller Francis Constable. The title page states that the play was acted in 1638 by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Salisbury Court Theatre, the regular troupe and venue for Brome's dramas from 1637 on. In a note addressed to the Courteous Reader at the end of the printed text, however, Brome writes that the play was originally intended for William Beeston's company at the Cockpit Theatre. The London theatres were closed from May 1636 to October 1637 due to a bubonic plague epidemic, and during that time Brome was involved in a contentious dispute with the Salisbury Court company, which because of the closure of the theatres had ceased to pay him his usual weekly salary. Legal documents from 1640 record that Brome agreed to write a play for Beeston in return for a loan in August of 1636, although he was subsequently released from that agreement and returned to Salisbury Court.
In the first edition, Brome dedicated the play to his patron, William Seymour, 2nd Duke of Somerset. At around the same time, Brome sent a manuscript of his recent play The English Moor to the Duke, likewise dedicated to Somerset.
Like others of Brome's plays, The Antipodes was revived during the Restoration era; Samuel Pepys saw it performed on 26 August 1661.
“The Antipodes” enters the record as play written by Richard Brome. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Antipodes, play and written can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“The Antipodes” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Antipodes, play and written provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7713946. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1636, 1640, 1638 and 1637.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Antipodes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.