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Droll
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For the type of humor see Droll humor. For video game, see Drol 
Frontispiece to
The Wits or Sport upon Sport (London,
1662). Attributed to
Francis Kirkman.
Drolls are short comical sketches that originated during the
Puritan Interregnum in
England. With the closure of the theatres, actors were left without any way of plying their art. Borrowing scenes from well-known plays of the
Elizabethan theatre, they added dancing and other entertainments and performed these, sometimes illegally, to make money.
Francis Kirkman's
The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport,
1662, is a collection of twenty-seven drolls. Three are adapted from
Shakespeare:
Bottom the Weaver from
A Midsummer Night's Dream, the gravedigger's scene from
Hamlet, and a collection of scenes involving
Falstaff called
The Bouncing Knight. Along with the popularity of the source play, material for drolls was generally chosen for physical humor or for wit. A typical droll presented a subplot from
John Marston's
The Dutch Courtesan; the piece runs together all the scenes in which a greedy vintner is gulled and robbed by a deranged gallant. Just under half of the drolls in Kirkman's book are adapted from the work of
Beaumont and
Fletcher. Among the drolls taken from those authors are
Forc'd Valour (the title plot from
The Humorous Lieutenant),
The Stallion (the scenes in the male
brothel from
The Custom of the Country), and the taunting of Pharamond from
Philaster. The prominence of Beaumont and Fletcher in this collection prefigures their dominance on the early Restoration stage.
The extract from their
Beggar's Bush known as
The Lame Commonwealth features additional dialogue strongly suggesting it was taken from a performance text. The character of Clause, the
King of the Beggars in that extract appears as a character in later works, such the memoirs of
Bampfylde Moore Carew, the self proclaimed King of the Beggars. A extract from
Diphilo and Granida a two handed droll from The Wits, was recorded in a play text from [Keynsham], Somerset in the early twentieth century.
Actor
Robert Cox was perhaps the most well-known of the Droll performers.
The term "droll" has also come to be applied as
puppet shows and a type of light, satiric verse.
[edit] References
- Kirkman, Francis. The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport. ed. John James Elson (Cornell University Press, 1932)
- Baskervill, C. R. "Mummers' Wooing Plays in England." Modern Philology, Vol. 21 No. 3 (February 1924),pp. 225-272; see pp. 268-272, [1]
This British theatre-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droll"
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