Dramatist. England’s last important comic playwright of the Jacobean period, he was one of the “Sons of Ben”, a group of followers of Ben Jonson. His finest plays are broad satires of middle-class life in London. They include “The City Wit” (1628), “The Northern Lass” (1629), “The Weeding of Covent Garden” (1632), “The Sparagus Garden” (1635), and most popular of all, “A Jovial Crew” (1641). Little is known of Brome’s personal life, apart from a statement that “poor he came into the world and poor went out”. By 1614 he was employed as Jonson’s servant and possible secretary, afterwards developing a warm friendship that lasted until Jonson’s death. He began his theatrical career in 1623. In 1635 he signed an exclusive contract to write three plays a year for the Salisbury Court Theatre, but he could not meet the demand and farmed out some of the work to other writers. Brome was left destitute after the Puritans shut down London’s theatres in 1642. He died in a home for indigents, the Charterhouse in Smithfield, and was buried on its grounds. The old Charterhouse Graveyard was demolished in the late 1820s. Of Brome’s estimated 30 plays 16 survive, one of them a collaboration with Thomas Heywood, “The Late Lancashire Witches” (1633). He may have collaborated with Jonson on a lost early piece, “A Fault in Friendship” (1623). “A Jovial Crew”, about the adventures of philosophical beggars, was successfully revived during the Restoration era. It influenced John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” (1728), which in turn led to the adaptation of “A Jovial Crew” as a similar ballad opera (1731) that stayed in the English repertory until the 1790s. (bio by: Bobb Edwards)