The New Academy, or the New Exchange is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy written by Richard Brome. It was first printed in 1659.
Performance and publication
The New Academy was premiered onstage in 1636. The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 4 August 1640 by the bookseller Andrew Crooke, along with five other Brome plays. Yet the work did not see print until it was included in the 1659 Brome collection Five New Plays, issued by Crooke and Henry Brome (a bookseller who was not related to the dramatist). In the 1659 collection, each drama has its own title page; and three of the five, including The New Academy, are dated 1658 instead of 1659 on those pages. Some of the plays also have separate pagination; this may indicate that the plays were originally intended for individual publication – though scholarly opinion varies on this question.
Background
The seventeenth century saw an explosion of new social institutions and organisations, as the late-Renaissance societies of Western Europe moved decisively away from Medieval social organisation toward modern forms. The first scientific and philosophical organisations were founded in many places, along with new educational institutions. France saw the founding of the Académie Française (1635) and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1663); In England, the formation of the Royal Society (1660), the earliest known Masonic lodges, and the earliest schools for girls were varying expressions of this same trend.
Simultaneously, many more modest and more transitory institutions were coming into (and passing out of) existence. Schools to teach manners and social customs for the nouveau riche of expanding economies were a phenomenon of the era. James Shirley's earliest extant play, Love Tricks, centres on this phenomenon; it was first published in 1631 under its subtitle, The School of Compliment. Other Caroline dramatists and non-dramatic writers also commented on the trend. Brome includes views of this phenomenon in his plays The Sparagus Garden and The Damoiselle.
The most direct historical model for Brome's Academy was probably Francis Kynaston's Museum Minervae, a school for training members of the gentry and aristocracy "in arms and arts." King Charles I granted Kynaston a patent for his academy in June 1635, and in 1636 Kynaston published the school's constitution, which compared his intended school with similar academies in Paris, Rome, and elsewhere. The Minervae was located on Bedford Street, just west of the new development at Covent Garden (which Brome had treated in his earlier play The Weeding of Covent Garden). Yet the bubonic plague epidemic of 1636–37 was fatal to Kynaston's enterprise, which was defunct by 1639.
Brome's play touches upon the nexus of social education with money, in associating his "new academy" with the "New Exchange," an actual business institution of the period. The New Exchange was a mall of shops built on the Strand in 1609, to complement and compete with the original Royal Exchange, founded by Sir Thomas Gresham in 1571. Brome does not exploit the New Exchange directly in his play; instead, he employs a more general concept of a "new exchange" of social and marital choices among the economically and socially mobile denizens of London.
Place realism
The New Academy is one of a group of plays from the 1630s that show strong tendencies toward what critics have called "place realism," the exploitation of actual contemporaneous locations and institutions in their settings and plots. Such plays can be found scattered throughout the seventeenth century (to cite only the most pertinent historical period); yet a surprising number of them cluster in this single decade. Shirley's Hyde Park (1632) is an obvious example, as are Shackerley Marmion's Holland's Leaguer (1631) and Thomas Nabbes's Covent Garden (1633) and Tottenham Court (1634), among other plays of the time. The first publication of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair in 1631 may have acted as a spur to this type of drama. Several of Brome's plays fall naturally into the same category – in addition to The New Academy, The Weeding of Covent Garden (c. 1632–33) and The Sparagus Garden (1635) are good examples of "topographical comedy."
