A droll is a short comical sketch of a type that originated during the
Puritan Interregnum in
England. With the closure of the theatres, actors were left without any way of plying their art. Borrowing scenes from well-known plays of the
Elizabethan theatre
English Renaissance theatre, also known as Renaissance English theatre and Elizabethan theatre, refers to the theatre of England between 1558 and 1642.
This is the style of the plays of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. ...
, they added dancing and other entertainments and performed these, sometimes illegally, to make money. Along with the popularity of the source play, material for drolls was generally chosen for physical humor or for wit.
Francis Kirkman's ''The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport'',
1662
Events
January–March
* January 4 – Dziaddin Mukarram Shah becomes the new Sultan of Kedah, an independent kingdom on the Malay Peninsula, upon the death of his father, Sultan Muhyiddin Mansur.
* January 10 – At the ...
, is a collection of twenty-seven drolls. Three are adapted from
Shakespeare:
''Bottom the Weaver'' from ''
A Midsummer Night's Dream
''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' is a comedy written by William Shakespeare 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. One subplot involves a conflict amon ...
'', the gravedigger's scene from ''
Hamlet'', and a collection of scenes involving
Falstaff called ''The Bouncing Knight''. A typical droll presented a subplot from
John Marston's ''
The Dutch Courtesan''; the piece runs together all the scenes in which a greedy vintner is gulled and robbed by a deranged gallant.
Just under half of the drolls in Kirkman's book are adapted from the work of
Beaumont and
Fletcher
Fletcher may refer to:
People
* Fletcher (occupation), a person who fletches arrows, the origin of the surname
* Fletcher (singer) (born 1994), American actress and singer-songwriter
* Fletcher (surname)
* Fletcher (given name)
Places
Unite ...
. Among the drolls taken from those authors are ''Forc'd Valour'' (the title plot from ''
The Humorous Lieutenant''), ''The Stallion'' (the scenes in the male
brothel
A brothel, bordello, ranch, or whorehouse is a place where people engage in sexual activity with prostitutes. However, for legal or cultural reasons, establishments often describe themselves as massage parlors, bars, strip clubs, body rub par ...
from ''
The Custom of the Country''), and the taunting of Pharamond from ''
Philaster''. The prominence of Beaumont and Fletcher in this collection prefigures their dominance on the early Restoration stage. The extract from their ''
Beggar's Bush'', known as ''The Lame Commonwealth'', features additional dialogue, strongly suggesting it was taken from a performance text. The character of Clause, the
King of the Beggars in that extract, appears as a character in later works, such as the memoirs of
Bampfylde Moore Carew, the self-proclaimed King of the Beggars.
Actor
Robert Cox was perhaps the best-known of the droll performers.
References
* Kirkman, Francis. ''The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport''. ed. John James Elson (Cornell University Press, 1932)
* Baskervill, C. R. "Mummers' Wooing Plays in England." ''Modern Philology'', Vol. 21 No. 3 (February 1924),pp. 225–272; see pp. 268–272,
folkplay.info
History of theatre
Theatre in the United Kingdom
{{UK-theat-stub