The Court Beggar

The Court Beggar is a Caroline era stage play written by Richard Brome. It was first performed by the acting company known as Beeston's Boys at the Cockpit Theatre. It has sometimes been identified as the seditious play, performed at the Cockpit in May 1640, which the Master of the Revels moved to have suppressed. However, the play's most recent editor, Marion O'Connor, dates it to "no earlier than the end of November 1640, and perhaps in the first months of 1641".

The play was first published during the Interregnum, in the 1653 Brome collection Five New Plays, issued by the stationers Humphrey Moseley, Richard Marriot, and Thomas Dring. The title page provides the incorrect date of 1632 for the play's first performance – perhaps an error, or perhaps a deliberate misdirection regarding a still-controversial subject. The title page also specifies that the play was "Acted at the Cock-pit, by his Majesties Servants," that is by The King and Queen's Young Company, colloquially known as Beeston's Boys after their founder Christopher Beeston. Beeston's Boys did not exist until 1637.

Brome's satire was directed at two primary targets, two aspects of Court affairs in the late 1630s:

The Court Beggar also mocks King Charles for failing to deal effectively with the Scottish Presbyterians, which only added to the official ire against the play.

The play is set against the speculative financial mania of the time. Britain was then enjoying, or enduring, a vigorous, perhaps an overheated financial expansion: the success of the British East India Company and the foundation of colonies in North America fed a fad for ever-wilder projects – a craze that Brome would mock in another play from the same era, The Antipodes. (As is sometimes the case in such expansions, the rich got richer while the poor got poorer – a subject Brome would address in his A Jovial Crew of 1641.) The Court fed this speculative craze by the granting of "monopolies" to various parties, for substantial fees.

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