Henry Brooke, Irish novelist and dramatist, dies in Dublin on October 10, 1783.
Brooke is born and raised at Rantavan House near Mullagh, a village in the far south of County Cavan. He later studies law at Trinity College Dublin, but embraces literature as a career.
Brooke is the son of The Reverend William Brooke, the well-off Church of Ireland Rector of Killinkere and Mullagh within the Church of Ireland Diocese of Kilmore. He first begins his career as a poet. His now forgotten philosophical poem Universal Beauty is published in 1735, and Alexander Pope thinks its sentiments and poetry fine. He then turns dramatist by adapting extant plays, such as The Earl of Essex. He writes from the Tory point of view and becomes one of the most important figures in Augustan drama, although not for his successes.
Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa (1739) has the distinction of being the first play banned by the Licensing Act 1737. The play concerns the liberation of Sweden from Denmark in 1521 by Riksföreståndare (Protector of the Realm or Regent) Gustav Vasa (who later becomes King Gustav I of Sweden). Sir Robert Walpole believes that the villain of the play resembles him. Further, a facetious “attack” on it is the first public writing of Samuel Johnson, whose A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the English Stage feigns support for Walpole while it drives the censor’s argument to reductio ad absurdum.
Brooke lives in Ireland most of his life, but he spends time in London when his plays are on the stage. In politics, he is somewhat radical in arguing publicly for loosening the laws persecuting Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom. His daughter, Charlotte Brooke, is herself an important figure in the history of Irish literature, publishing Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) and working to increase the profile of Irish language poetry.
Later, Brook’s Earl of Essex comes back to the boards in a revival. Again, Samuel Johnson offers his public support of Brooke, but when he hears the Earl saying at the end of Act II, “Who rules o’er free men must himself be free,” Johnson replies, “Who drives fat oxen must himself be fat.” Although Johnson is objecting to the misuse and overuse of “freedom” and is at that time in a vexatious debate over the American Revolutionary War (saying, “Why is it that we hear the loudest cries for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”), Brooke is mortified by Johnson’s parody and changes the line for his Collected Works.
Brooke has a difficult life and makes a very poor living. The Licensing Act 1737 robs him of his primary avenue to making a living, for, after the Act, he is the first man banned by it. Whatever fame this lends him is made up for by his inability to get new plays performed. His greatest commercial successes come from the Earl of Essex and his two novels, The Fool of Quality (1760-1772) and Juliet Grenville (1774), which are two of the finest sentimental novels. John Wesley is so fond of The Fool of Quality, in which Brooke declares his belief in universal salvation, that he seeks to have a copy of it given out to all new Methodist churches.
Brooke has twenty-two children. Of these, only Charlotte survives adolescence. She shepherds his Works through the press after his death.
The death of Brooke’s wife after a long illness and the loss of so many of his children, leaves Brooke’s physical and mental health increasingly unstable. His decline is evident in the last volume of The Fool of Quality and his final three-volume novel Juliet Grenville. He dies in Dublin on October 10, 1783, and is buried in his father’s churchyard in Mullagh.
