A droll is a short comical sketch of a type that originated during the
Puritan Interregnum in
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...
. 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, is a collection of twenty-seven drolls. Three are adapted from
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
:
''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 a ...
'', the gravedigger's scene from ''
Hamlet
''The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark'', often shortened to ''Hamlet'' (), is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play, with 29,551 words. Set in Denmark, the play depicts ...
'', 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. Among the drolls taken from those authors are ''Forc'd Valour'' (the title plot from ''
The Humorous Lieutenant
''The Humorous Lieutenant'', also known as ''The Noble Enemies'', ''Demetrius and Enanthe'', or ''Alexander's Successors'', is a Jacobean era stage play, a tragicomedy written by John Fletcher. Highly praised by critics, it has been called "Fl ...
''), ''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 p ...
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
''Beggars' Bush'' is a Jacobean era stage play, a comedy in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators that is a focus of dispute among scholars and critics.
Authorship
The authorship and the date of the play have long been debated b ...
'', 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