Thinking "We" in Brome's Antipodes

Abstract

This essay investigates the first-person plural perspective, “we,” in Richard Brome’s Antipodes (c.1636). The discovered intimacy, cooperative action, ingenious improvisation, and occasional chaos seen in the play generate acute representations of emergent common purpose and experience. Its treatments and attitudes are compared with those in other works, especially Francis Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607). They are also situated in their theatrical environment, challenged by modern scholarship contesting assumptions about mutuality, and illuminated with reference to philosophical and psychological attempts to pin down the place of “we”-experience in the individual.