The Queen and Concubine

The Queen and Concubine is a Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by Richard Brome and first published in 1659. It has sometimes been called Brome's best tragicomedy.

The play was first printed when it was included in the 1659 Brome collection Five New Plays, issued by the booksellers Andrew Crooke and Henry Brome (no relation to the dramatist). Its date of authorship and earliest stage production is uncertain; scholars have generally placed it c. 1635 or in the 1635–40 period.

Of Brome's sixteen surviving plays (including The Late Lancashire Witches, his collaboration with Thomas Heywood), the vast majority are comedies; only three are tragicomedies. (Along with The Queen and Concubine, the others are The Lovesick Court and The Queen's Exchange.) Brome may have chosen the tragicomic form for Queen and Concubine because it allowed him to make, in a limited form and degree, a political commentary. Critics have noted that Queen and Concubine is a critique of royal tyranny and courtly sycophancy, issues that were pertinent in the 1630s, when King Charles I was conducting his period of personal rule and Parliament was prorogued. Brome is directly critical of religious support for tyrannous rulers: "priests are but the apes to kings, / And prostitute religion to their ends."

The play's strong theme of royal sexual immorality clearly did not apply to Charles, and would have given Brome an obvious defence against anyone who argued for an application of his critical views to the English scene. Yet this cover may not have been adequate: The Queen and Concubine has been suggested as the play that inspired the only suppression of the theatres in the Caroline era, when William Beeston was imprisoned and lost control of his theatre company in 1640.

Brome has never had a reputation as a dramatic poet; his verse generally does not rise above the perfunctory and prosaic. The verse in Queen and Concubine is far more formal and self-conscious than what is typical of Brome, and shows a greater effort of artistic composition. The play features two of the final uses of dumbshow in English Renaissance drama.

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