The Trope of an Upside-Down World: Carnival and Menippean Satire in Richard Brome’s ＂The Antipodes＂

Richard Brome's ”The Antipodes” (1638), a Caroline comedy, contains several major characteristics of Menippean satire and, correlatively, of Bakhtinian carnival. Menippean satire typically employs a fantastic voyage in order to afford us an inverted (and thus perhaps clearer) perspective on reality, on the place we ”started out from.” In Bakhtin's closely-related theory of carnival the socio-political power hierarchy is temporarily reversed: slaves may be ”crowned” as kings, just as kings are ”decrowned” as slaves. Brome's play-within-the-play concerns a wild, fantastic journey to an unknown place, ”The Antipodes,” which looks like a ”utopia” insofar as the journey there has the power to cure many ills, including madness. On the other hand, we are now looking at the ”real” London upside-down; it has become ”Anti-London,” and this inverted lens exposes its dark spots, the genuinely irrational and perhaps ”insane” aspects of London in the days of Charles I. In the Bakhtinian carnival the abrupt and total overturning, reversal or inversion of social, political and gender roles allows a comic release, but it also leads us to deeply question the underlying, pre-established ground of such hierarchies. Here, then, some of the more serious implications of this dialogic, carnivalesque play are explored.