'RDLOGUE 
 
ia prologue and epilogue. The feflbd frctm 
 Siakspere to Dryden "&. C. B." has r€vy 
 fully studied, and at first-hand. Oiir early 
 literature appears less familiar to Mm. In 
 tracing the origin of the prologue, that of the 
 Mystery plays should have heen mentioned. 
 The "Emhoif' who delivers prologue and 
 epilogue in the comedies of Hans Sachs -13^ 
 adopted from the Herald of the Gernian reli- 
 gidus playa rather than from the prologising 
 Mercury of Plautus or the Greek K^pvi. In 
 treating the epilogue as a development partly 
 of the Eoman plauiite and partly of the 
 gnomic close of Greek tragedy, two other 
 varieties might have been touched -whiuh 
 can scarcely be so reduced — ^viz., (1) the 
 " jig" close of perfectly irrelevant song and ^ 
 music by the clown, as ill " Twelfth Night," '^ 
 to an Elizabethan audience as propitiatory as 
 the most sententious appeal; and (2) wbat 
 we may call the prospective epilogue, as in 
 *' The Tempest,'' where Prospero's speech is 
 in reality only a final scene of the play. We ^ 
 may perhaps distinguish four uses of pi-ologde v 
 and of epilogue : (1) They are a radical part ^J 
 of the drama, summarising what precedes its ^ 
 main action (irpoXoyos), or glancing forward 
 to what is to follow it ; (2) the prologue 
 supplies the argument (prologue of the 
 Mysteries, &c.), and the epilogue the moral 
 (choric yvMjiTi) ; (3) they are used to propitiate ^ 
 the audience (Beaumont and Fletcher, &c.) ; 
 (4) they become a vehicle for whoUy extrane- 
 ous criticism (Dryden). It is probable, by- 
 the-way, that Mrs. S&underson was not the 
 first lady who appeared upon the stage {ef. 
 Brome, quoted by Morley, First Sketch, 
 p. 636). "We would also remind " G. G. B." 
 that PeeVs Jests, -irom which he draws a-, 
 story about the dramatist/are apocryphal. 
 
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 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013292887 
 
A STUDY OF 
 
 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 FROM SHAKESPEARE TO DRYDEN 
 
-M^cL ^A^^a. <sjt^o^ <h^(ry^(^ OrxO-/C, 
 
 A STUDY 
 
 PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 FROM SHAKESPEARE TO DRY DEN 
 
 / 
 
 Oi^'-BP^^^ 
 
 LONDON 
 
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., i, PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 
 a 1884. 
 •. 
 
/H.tsn^b'l 
 
 iXhe rights of translation, and of reproduction are reserved.") 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 This little volume contains the substance (con- 
 siderably enlarged and carefully revised) of five 
 articles contributed to a monthly periodical. 
 Though the outcome of vacation moments, it 
 will, I hope, be found to represent a thorough 
 investigation of the subject, so far as it extends. 
 I shall be well pleased, if the facts collected and 
 opinions arrived at during my excursion through 
 a not uninteresting by-way of literature should 
 'hereafter prove useful to writers undertaking more 
 ambitious researches into the wider domains of 
 dramatic or social history, and still more if they 
 should succeed in affording occasional entertain- 
 ment to the general reader. 
 
 G. S. B. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The origin of, and the literary form assumed by, the English prologue 
 and epilogue — Their function in the earliest English plays — 
 Their relation to the Induction, the Chorus, and the Dumb Show — 
 The prologue-speaker — His properties — The first woman-prologue 
 ■ — The prodialogue and the epidialogtie — Sensational prologues 
 and epilogues — ^Joe Haines — Nell Gwynne — Prologue-writers — 
 The price of a prologue ... ... ... ... ... I 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The various matters with which the prologue and epilogue dealt — 
 Description of the play — Commendation of the author — Abuse 
 of rival authors — Prologues written by veterans for the first plays 
 of young poets — Prologues by or on behalf of actor-authors — 
 " Lacy's fiddle " — Ben Jonson's prologues attacking Shakespeare, 
 Dekker, etc. — Dekker's counterblasts — Dryden's prologues in justi- 
 fication of theories of dramatic composition — His abandonment 
 of the rhymed couplet — " Love and Honour " plays — Spanish 
 plots of domestic intrigue— References in prologues and epilogues 
 to excessive scenic embellishments ; to the opera ; to Jeremy 
 Collier ; to Sir Richard Blackmore — Dryden's recantation ... 34 
 
 CHAPTER HI. 
 
 Epilogues depart from their primitive intention — The Rehearsal on 
 the prologues and epilogues of " Poet Bayes " — Prologues acquire 
 an independent status — Prologues printed separately — Prologues 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PASS 
 
 reviling the actors — Ben Jonson and the actors of his plays — 
 Ravenscroft — Dryden's and Massinger's indulgence to the players, 
 as expressed in their prologues — Heywood's prologue on Marlowe 
 and "sweet Ned AUeyn"— The revival of The Jew of Malta— 
 Audiences as subjects of prologues — Massinger's deference to them 
 — Benjonson's contempt and vilificatory prologues — George Peek 
 — Dryden's view : " A civil prologue is approved by no man " — His 
 open abuse of his audience's ignorance and want of taste — 
 Various classes of playgoers ridiculed and denounced in prologues 
 of Ben Jonson, Jasper Mayne, and Dryden — The " Hectors of the 
 pit "—The " tavern-wits "—The " civet-wit"— " Tom Dove's 
 brotherhood " — Abuse of the censors and critics ; of the coldly 
 applauding gallants — Appeals to the " judging few '' — Profes- 
 sional damnation of plays — Denunciation of " prattlers" in the 
 audience — Critics compared by Dryden in various prologues to 
 thieves turned hangmen ; to butchers excluded from a jury ; 
 to scriveners ; to wolves ; to bankrupt gamesters ; to vultures ; to 
 fleas ; to locusts ; and to whips — Middleton and Heywood on 
 critics — "Court bespeaks" — Prologues at court: "to the King 
 and Queen " — Heywood, Jasper Mayne, and Massinger's prologues 
 and epilogues "at Whitehall "—The "town" and "the city" 
 contrasted in prologues ; also London and the Universities — 
 Dryden and Oxford audiences : ' ' Oxford to him a dearer name . 
 shall be, than his own mother-university" — The "Athenian 
 judges" ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 65 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Information as to stage-usages contained in prologues and epilogues — 
 The various parts of the theatre, and their respective tenants — 
 Allusions to the tariff of the playhouse — The "sinful sixpenny 
 mechanics" — The " twopenny gallery '' — The "scaffolders'' — The 
 stools on the stage — The "yard" — The " understanding gentle- 
 men of the ground " — The " private room " — The half-crown pit 
 of the Restoration — Allusions to the curtain — The "Naples silk "of 
 the " Red Bull " ; " Banding tile and pear " against it " to allure 
 the actors" — The curtain before the stage-balcony — The "three 
 blasts of the trumpet " summoning the " quaking Prologue " — The 
 incidental music — The duration of a play — The " two hours ' 
 traffic of our stage '' — Allusions in prologues and epilogues to the 
 
CONTENTS. xi 
 
 PAGE 
 
 scenery, the properties, the dresses, and superior embellishment of 
 masques — Benjonson and Inigo Jones — The " thunder machine" 
 — Shakespeare's "squibs" and " rolled bullet " in Ben Jonson's 
 prologues — References to theatrical customs ; to wagers on actors ; 
 to "table-books"; to the author's " second day " and "third 
 day " ; to the time of the commencement of the play ; to the 
 title of the play; "hanging up the title"; to the first women- 
 actors ; apologies for the innovation — The " nurseries of yotmg 
 Maximins" referred to in prologues — Allusions to the morals 
 of the contemporary stage and of contemporary society — Loyal 
 prologues — Party prologues — Political prologues ... ... 112 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Prologues and epilogues attacking Puritans — Those attacking Papists 
 and Jesuits — Those attacking the clerical profession generally 
 (Dryden) — " Occasional " prologues : on the retirement of Better- 
 ton from the stage ; on the production of Dryden's last play ; 
 on the union of the King's and the Duke's companies, in 
 1686 ; on the first programme of the new Theatre Royal, in 1674 
 — Mention and caricature in dramas of the current styles of pro- 
 logue and epilogue ; as, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, The 
 City Match, The Malcontent, etc. — Dryden's prologues and 
 epilogues, ridiculed in The Rehearsal — The "thunder and light- 
 ning" prodialogue of the Poet Bayes — Di-yden, the prince of pro- 
 logists ; in him the art culminates, and since his time has been 
 steadily declining — His death and the close of the seventeenth 
 century — Lines originally written for a prologue afterwards de- 
 veloped into a play [Albion and Albanius) — Modern French use of 
 the term "prologue" as a preliminary act of the drama — Plays 
 without prologues — George Peele's extraordinary prologue without 
 a play ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 156 
 
A STUDY OF THE 
 
 PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 FROM SHAKESPEARE TO DRY DEN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 The origin of, and the literary form assumed by, the English pro- 
 logue and epilogue — Their function in the earliest English 
 plays — Their relation to the Induction, the Chorus, and the 
 Dumb Show — The prologue-speaker — His properties — The 
 first woman-prologue — The prodialogue and the epidialogue 
 — Sensational prologues and epilogues — Joe Haines-r-Nell 
 Gwynne — Prologue-writers — The price of a prologue. 
 
 Of all the manifold shapes which the literature of our 
 country has at different times assumed, none has fur^ 
 nished a greater quantity of illustrative matter for the 
 use of the historian in so small a compass as the Pro- 
 logue, with its twin brother, the Epilogue. Political and 
 social information, records of our theatres, personal and 
 biographical details in the lives of our dramatists and 
 actors, the state of criticism at different periods, the 
 
 B 
 
2 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 tastes and humours of successive ages and audiences, 
 and the theories of literary workmanship advanced by- 
 different authors, are reflected in, or may be extracted 
 from, these precocious and loquacious infants of letters. 
 Thus M. de Grisy, in the Preface to his very pleasant 
 Histoire de la ComMie Anglaise au ij"*'- Steele, writes: 
 "Les prologues et les Epilogues qui ouvrent et ferment 
 presque toutes ces comedies nous ont, non moins que 
 les d^dicaces, fourni des precieux details sur les auteurs 
 et sur leur ^poque. t)e ces details nous avons releve 
 les plus expressifs, et demand^ au poete lui-meme les 
 secrets de son art, ou les confidences de sa pens^e.'' 
 (p. viii.) 
 
 In respect of outward form, the Prologue has been a 
 very Proteus. In the early ages of the drama, it had no 
 independent existence. The Greek " TtpoXoyog " was 
 merely all that portion of the play preceding the first 
 entrance of the Chorus, which latter discharged then 
 most of the functions of the earliest English prologues, 
 in giving, from time to time, a sort of running explana- 
 tion of the development of the plot, accompanied by 
 such moral reflections and criticisms on the motives of 
 the dramatis personcB as an intelligent outsider might be' 
 supposed likely to deliver. The later sort of English 
 Prologue, in which the characteristic element was criti- 
 cism of anything and everything, anybody and every- 
 body, — and wherein the poet was commended, his 
 rivals abused, the critics threatened, and even the 
 audiences contemptuously addressed, — finds its nearest 
 Greek analogue in the -rrapa^aai^ spoken by the Chorus 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 3 
 
 of the Old Comedy, — not, however, at the commence- 
 ment, but in the middle of the play. By the time of 
 Euripides, the opening speech of the actor discovered at 
 the rise, or rather the fall, of the curtain (for the curtain 
 was not then, as now, rolled upward, but sank beneath 
 the stage), though ostensibly part of the drama itself, 
 was for all practical purposes a prologue in the Shake- 
 spearian sense. The stage Hecuba, Heracles, Aphro- 
 dite, or whoever it might be, explained, in an elaborate 
 speech, how he came to the scene of operations, what 
 was his mission, and how he was related to the other 
 characters in the play. But it was not till the time of 
 Plautus and Terence that the Prologue was formally 
 divorced from the body of the drama, and that an 
 independent address 'of the poet to the audience pre- 
 ceded the action of the play itself. 
 
 In the earliest period of our theatrical history, these 
 expository duties were shared between the Induction, 
 the Prologue, and the Chorus.* Both the one and the 
 
 * The use of the Induction is to be found in Marston and Webster's 
 Malcontent, and in Greene's Alphonsus, King of Arragon, the interlocutors 
 in which are Venus, Melpomene, Erato, and Calliope. The Induction very 
 often included a Dumb Show, or a species of Charade, in which the plot 
 of the play is described by action without words, apparently to stimulate 
 the wits of the audience, and excite their expectations, before the real 
 business of the drama begins. In these Dumb Shows were made those 
 "damnable faces," which Hamlet was so anxious to have done with 
 in the play-scene, and to proceed to the delivery of the words which 
 were to " catch the conscience of the King " more effectually. Some- 
 times a "Presenter'' is named in the stage directions and required in a 
 speech or speeches written for him to explain the Dumb Show to the 
 audience. Thus in George Peek's Battle of Alcazar, the first act opens 
 thus : "Act I. Enter the Presenter," — who is then bidden to introduce the 
 first Dumb Show in an address of some twenty lines. After this Dumb Show 
 
4 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 other of the two latter were brought in to supply or 
 assist the argument, when the Induction was falliilg into 
 disuse. Their double employment is best exemplified 
 in the well-known play-scene in Hamlet. When the 
 Prologue enters, " We shall know by this fellow," says 
 Hamlet, " the players cannot keep counsel : they'll tell 
 all ; '' but when the Prince explains to Ophelia the 
 relationship to the King of Lucianus (on his first 
 entrance), she replies, "You are as good as a chorus, 
 my lord." Here, then, we have the Chorus mentioned 
 as well as the Prologue, and we know that the former 
 was employed by Shakespeare himself in his Henry V., 
 Romeo and jfuliet, and other plays. A chorus is given 
 to each act of Henry V. Gower (curiously) takes upon 
 himself the office of a Chorus in Pericles in Acts i., 
 iii., v., besides concluding the play. So in The Knight 
 of the Burning Pestle, by Beaumont and Fletcher, a 
 citizen and his wife act as a quaint Chorus at the 
 end of each act, commending their boy Ralph for his 
 acting of his part in the play, which they are imagined 
 to have witnessed as spectators. In the old play of 
 David and Bathsheba (see Hawkins's Origin of the 
 
 and some more lines from the Presenter, we are provided with a second 
 Dumb Show, and another twenty-line speech from the Presenter, who 
 conchides by announcing the title of the play^" atid call this war the 
 Battle of Alcazar." Nor have we done with Mr. Presenter yet. This 
 somewhat obtrusive person is required to open the second act ; the stage 
 directions there being — " Alanim, and then the Presenter speaketh," but he 
 is this time contented with eight lines, and the introduction to the stage of 
 " three ghosts, crying, Vindicta" After the ghosts have cried Vindicta 
 long enough, the Presenter has one more chance, and makes the most of it 
 speaking some forty lines, and then making his final exit. 
 
JN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 5 
 
 English Drama, vol. ii,, pp. 148, 182) we have a chorus 
 eo nomine, while in The Spanish Tragedy (supposed to 
 be by Kyd), the Ghost of Andria, Revenge, and the 
 Chorus are on the stage together, and between them 
 discharge the duties both of Prologue and Chorus, besides 
 assisting and developing the action of the play. In 
 Ferrex and Porrex the procedure is very methodical. 
 There is a Dumb Show before, and a Chorus after each 
 act. It will be observed that at this period the name 
 of Prologue was given to the person who spoke the 
 introductory lines, not to the lines themselves, as now. 
 This was also the case in the Roman drama. From 
 Dryden's time both prologues and epilogues have been 
 usually written in heroic couplets, though exceptions are 
 to be met with, notably in the case of Dryden himself, 
 who occasionally affected ten-syllable triplets, which 
 could hardly have been an improvement, one would 
 imagine, for purposes of recitation. In more modern 
 days, prose has not been unknown ; and in the times 
 of, and preceding, Shakespeare, it was very common. 
 Thus the curious prologue (playing on the word " sup- 
 pose ") prefixed to George Gascoigne's play of Supposes 
 (a translation from Ariosto's Gli Siippositi, on which 
 Shakespeare is believed to have founded his Taming of 
 the Shrew), is written in plain prose ; so also is that to 
 Every Woman in her Humour (1609), to Heywood's 
 Four 'Prentices of London (161 5), and many others; 
 while the epilogue to As You Like It and Henry IV. 
 Part II., are also in prose. On the other hand, the 
 epilogue to Wily Beguiled (1606) is in blank verse ; 
 
6 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 and the prologue is a curious medley of prose dialogue 
 between one of the players, a juggler, and the Prologue 
 (in the old sense of the term), in which the last-named 
 is eventually left in possession of the stage, and delivers 
 an address beginning in prose, continuing in rhymed 
 couplets, and ending in a sort of ballad metre after this 
 fashion : 
 
 " Let Momus' mates judge how they list, 
 
 We fear not what they babble ; 
 Nor any paltry poet's pen. 
 
 Amongst that rascal rabble. 
 But time forbids me further speech, 
 
 My tongue must stop her race ; 
 My time is come, I must be dumb. 
 
 And give the actors place. " * 
 
 Similarly the epilogue to Eastward Hoe begins in prose, 
 and ends with four alternately rhyming lines. Ben 
 Jonson adopted some novel, but scarcely beautiful metres, 
 in some of his prologues. That prefixed to The Fox 
 begins : 
 
 " Now luck yet send us, and a little wit 
 Will serve to make our play hit : 
 (According to the palates of the season, ) 
 Here is rhyme not empty of reason." 
 
 While the epilogue to The Silent Woman ends with the 
 following quaint arrangement of rhymes : 
 
 " Nor is it, only, while you keep your seat 
 Here, that his feast will last ; but you shall eat 
 
 * This introduction of the actors, with which the prologue is concluded 
 was not uncommon. Cf. the end of the prologue to George Peele's Sir 
 Clyomon and Sir Clamydes : 
 
 " Well, what he hath done for your delight he gave not me in charge ; 
 The actors come who shall express the same to you at large." 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 7 
 
 A week at ordinaries, on his broken meat, 
 If his muse be true, 
 Who commends her to you.'' 
 
 In the epilogue to The Tempest we have seven-syllable 
 lines, eight-syllable lines in the prologue and epilogue to 
 Ram Alley or Merry Tricks, fourteen-syllable lines in 
 the prologue referred to in the note at the foot of the 
 page, while Bottom, in the Midsummer Nights Dream, 
 doubts between a prologue " in eight and six " and one 
 in " eight and eight" 
 
 The Epilogue was probably a development partly 
 of the old Greek yvcJ/*'?, or moral reflection, with which 
 the Chorus concluded the play, and partly of the 
 " vos plaudite " of the Roman comedians. The features 
 of these two parents can be traced in most English 
 epilogues. In those which refer back to the action of 
 the drama, and tend to justify its issue ; in those 
 "merry epilogues to tragedies" which, in the pages 
 of The Spectator found such vehement assailants and 
 champions ; whenever, in short, a character in the play 
 appears and speaks lines calculated to dismiss the 
 audience with unruffled temperament and assuaged 
 emotions ; we seem to discover a relic of the sententious 
 sapience of the Chorus of Greek tragedy. But in those 
 many others, which are divested of any reference to 
 the play, and in which the audience are directly 
 addressed with a view to obtain a favourable reception 
 for the players, we recognize a development of the 
 brief " plaudite " with which the actor in a play of 
 Plautus or Terence, advancing to the front of the 
 
8 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUES 
 
 stage, would appeal to the public* This latter kind 
 is of course almost peculiar to comedies, in the farcical 
 varieties of which the old custom still lingers in the 
 well-known speech, " and if our kind friends,'' etc., with 
 which a performance of this sort in modern theatres 
 is so often wound up. The gnomic summing - up 
 character, on the other hand, still survives in the well- 
 known rhyming " tag," as well as in the epilogue. 
 I The gradual steps by which the epilogue grew out of 
 the " plaudite," may be clearly distinguished in the old 
 English plays. In that famous old drama, founded on 
 the adventures of two poor University students in search 
 of a living, called The Return from Parnassus, the six 
 characters on the stage at the end of the last act, unite 
 in saying of the " refined sprights " among the audience, 
 " let them, and none but them, give us a plaudite!' So, 
 in a still earlier play, the above-mentioned Supposes, 
 Damon, after his last speech to Nevola, turns round to 
 the audience and says : " Nobles and gentlemen, if you 
 suppose that our supposes have given you sufficient 
 cause of delight, show some token whereby we may 
 suppose you are content ; " and the author adds at the 
 bottom of the page (by way oi finis) "Et plauserunt.'' 
 And in the epilogue to AlVs Well that Ends Well, 
 
 * In all the plays of Terence, and in eight of Plautus, this is the 
 case, and the concluding words of the actor are either simply " plaudite," 
 "valete et plaudite," " plausum date," or at most such a form as 
 " Spectatores, fabula haec est acta : vos plausum date " (as in the Moste/tar I'a 
 of Plautus). In four other Plautine comedies (the Casina, the Epidicus, 
 the Bacchides, and the Cistellarid), the Grex or Caterva give the final 
 "plaudite." 
 
iN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 9 
 
 the song (by way of epilogue) at the end of Twelfth 
 Night, the epilogue to the curious old play Lingua, in 
 which the audience is requested to awaken an Appetite 
 (one of the allegorical characters of the drama) with a 
 " plaudite," as well as in the epilogues to Massinger's 
 Parliament of Love, and to several of Ben Jonson's 
 plays, this mode of winding up is adopted : thus at the 
 end of The Fox we read (for stage direction), " Volpone 
 comes forward," and then : 
 
 " The seasoning of the play is the applause. 
 Now, though the Fox be punished by the laws, 
 He yet doth hope there is no suffering due, 
 For any fact which he hath done 'gainst you ; 
 If there be, censure him ; here he doubtful stands : 
 If not, fare jovially, and clap your hands." 
 
 Similar appeals by actors " coming forward " on the 
 stage, instead of formally speaking an epilogue after 
 the fall of the curtain, are made by Truewit, Justice 
 Clement, and Macilente in Ben Jonson's plays of EpiccBJte, 
 Every Man in His Humour, and Every Man out of His 
 Humour, respectively. In The Devil is an Ass, the 
 conclusion of the drama partakes of both characters. 
 Manly is directed " to come forward for the epilogue," 
 and delivers six lines in blank verse, without, however, 
 the curtain falling, or the epilogue being cut off in any 
 way from the play itself. Similarly Wellborn, in A New 
 Way to Pay Old Debts (Massinger) is required to come 
 to the front and speak the epilogue : and in the Micro- 
 cosmos of T. Nabbes the stage directions at the close of 
 the play are for Love (after coming forward) to speak 
 
10 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 the epilogue, and then to be " recovered back into the 
 scene " (before the fall of the curtain on all the characters 
 together). And a great number of Massinger's and 
 Ford's epilogues are, like those of Ben Jonson, only 
 from six to nine lines long, thereby showing the transit 
 tion-stage from the " plaudite " speech to the epilogue 
 proper. Beaumont and Fletcher's length of epilogue 
 is almost invariably eight lines, as contrasted with an 
 average of twenty for the prologue. The epilogue to 
 Ford's Witch of Edmonton is six lines only ; but the 
 shortest professed epilogue which we have~been able to 
 find is a very curious one by Peele (see his Works edited 
 by Dyce, vol. i., p. dj), which consists of two Latin 
 verses. Of the Roman comedians, Plautus^ had "«o 
 professed epilogues (that is, as distinct from the play), 
 but only (as we have seen) the " plaudite " of an actor 
 advancing to the foot of the stage, or of the Grex or 
 Caterva ; while of the six professed epilogues to the 
 six plays of Terence, the shortest is two lines, and none 
 are longer than eight (as compared with an average of 
 forty lines in his prologues). 
 
 So much then as to the outward form of the Pro- 
 logue and Epilogue in a literary sense. Now as to the 
 persons to whom the delivery of these addresses has at 
 various times been entrusted. In the earliest English 
 plays the poet himself spoke his own prolo gug-^^ In 
 Childermas Day (i5T2)~" Poeta" Ts set down for this 
 office, and so too in- Jacob and Esau ; before the 
 epilogue of which latter play we further have (as Mr. 
 Collier informs us) the stage-direction : " then entereth 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. II 
 
 the poet, and the rest stand still till he have done." 
 A little later the poet gave way to his representative, 
 who was usually not an actor in the play, but a person 
 specially deputed to discharge this function, and not 
 known otherwise than by his style and title of "the 
 Prologue " (as we have seen), and by his attributes of a . 
 black velvet clqal<,_and, sometimes, a garland of bays 
 (the latter being clearly a reminiscence of the olden 
 times, when the poet spoke his own lines). The black 
 cloak is frequently referred to in the dramatic litera- 
 ture of the time. In the Induction to Ben Jonson's 
 Cynthia's Revels, for instance, some of the children of 
 the Queen's Revels, who were about to perform in it, 
 appear on the stage, quarrelling for the possession of 
 the black cloak, and as to who should speak the pro- 
 logue of which it was the symbol. The properties of 
 a prologue-speaker are described somewhat differently 
 in Richard Brome's Antipodes (acted in 1638), Act ii., 
 sc. 2. Quailpipe there says to Lord Letoy, whose 
 curate he is (on the occasion of the rehearsal on the 
 stage of a play within a play, as in Hamlet) : " I am 
 not to put on my shape " (or close-fitting dress of the 
 character in the piece) "before I have spoke the pro- 
 logue, and for that, my lord, I yet want something." Lord 
 Letoy: "What, I pray you, with your fond formality.?" 
 Quailpipe : " I want my beaver, shoes, and leather cap to 
 speak the prologue in, which were appointed by your 
 lordship's direction." 
 
 At a still later period, we find actors dressed in 
 character to speak the prologue, but not in any character 
 
12 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 of the play, while in others the ghost of a defunct 
 
 dramatist or other poet is in request. Thus in a very 
 
 I early drama, " Homer crowned with a bay garland," 
 
 delivers the prologue ; and in an epilogue written^ by 
 
 j the Earl of Dorset to Ben Jonson's Every Man in His 
 
 I Humour, as revived after the author's death, the ghost 
 
 of " Rare Ben " unburdens himself of some very smart 
 
 and malicious criticisms on the weaker race of dramatists 
 
 Avho succeeded him ; while to Dryden's adaptation of 
 
 Troilus and Cressida were prefixed some fine lines to 
 
 be delivered by Shakespeare's ghost. In one of Ben 
 
 Jonson's plays the figure of Envy arises to address the 
 
 audience, while " Ate Prologus " is set down to speak 
 
 the introductory lines to George Peele's A rraignment of 
 
 Paris (vol. i., p. 5, Dyce's edition). We have an epilogue 
 
 by "a dancer" in the second part of Henry TV., and in 
 
 the Induction to the same play " Rumour painted full 
 
 of tongues" is required to speak to the spectators. In 
 
 , the old Hindoo drama the normal prologue- speaker is 
 
 ' the carpenter, who was also the manager of the theatre, 
 
 ' and generally an actor in the piece. In all the plays of 
 
 the Roman comic writers the " Prologus " or prologue- 
 
 I speaker has no special character, except in the Aulularia 
 
 i and Rudens of Plautus, in which comedies the "Lars 
 
 Familiaris " and Arcturus (neither of them characters 
 
 in the play) respectively speak the prologue ; and in the 
 
 Amphitryo, wherein Mercury speaks a somewhat wordy 
 
 but amusing prologue of one hundred and fifty-two 
 
 lines (the longest extant probably) in his capacity as 
 
 prceco or herald. (This may have suggested the dele- 
 
m ENGLISH LITERATURE. 13 
 
 gation of the epilogue in Dryden's Indian Emperor 
 to " a Mercury.") Mercury's justification of his office 
 as a herald in the Plautine comedy reminds us that in 
 the comedies and histories of Hans Sachs of Nuremberg 
 the stock figure to speak both prologue and epilogue 
 is always the herald. One also calls to mind the im- 
 portant share in the development of the plot assigned 
 to the Kripv^ in Greek tragedy. 
 
 The dramatists of the early age of our drama did not 
 begin (habitually at least) to assign their prologues and 
 epilogues to the characters of the play so soon as we 
 should suppose from the instances of such a practice 
 which we find in As You Like It, The Tempest (Rosalind 
 and Prospero being the respective characters), and in 
 several other plays of Shakespeare. Some contempo- 
 raries of Shakespeare, no doubt, adopted the practice ; 
 but, though by the time of Congreve and Wycherley, 
 and even of Dryden,* it had become usual, it was 
 rather the exception than the rule in the sixteenth 
 century. Tucca, one of the characters in Dekker's 
 Satiromastix speaks a prose epilogue ; but the epilogue 
 would, more naturally than the prologue, be given to a 
 character in the play, if, as we have supposed, it was 
 
 * e.g. Thersites in his re-arrangement of Troilus and Cressida, and 
 Montezuma in The Indian Queeii (both epilogues). In the above-mentione d 
 Induction to Greene's Alphonsus, King of Arragon, we may notice the 
 point of departure from the old usage, to which a sort of apologetic 
 reference is made in the lines of the prologue : 
 
 "Poets are scarce, when goddesses then: selves 
 Are forced to leave their high and stately seats," — 
 
 i.e. to assist in the prologue. 
 
14 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 but a development of the old " plaudite " address.* 
 Thus a character in the play (Quicksilver) speaks the 
 epilogue to Eastward Hoe. We have divers references 
 to incidents in the play affecting the characters which 
 they had assumed therein made by the epilogue-speakers 
 in Fletcher's Fancies, Chaste and Noble, Beaumont and 
 Fletcher's Humourous Lieutenant, and also in the play 
 of The Witch of Edmonton, where the character assumed 
 in the drama and retained in the delivery of the 
 epilogue was " Winnifrede." Similarly Trincalo speaks 
 the epilogue in the old drama Albumazar (acted before 
 the King in the hall of Trinity College, Cambridge, the 
 author being one T. Tomkins of that college) ; and 
 Welcome, the host, speaks that to the London Chanti- 
 cleers (a very quaint play, in which all the characters 
 were street-criers). Mr. Collier has also collected some 
 instances of prologues similarly delivered at this time, 
 but they are not common. In the Roman comedy I 
 only find one instance of a prologue being recited by 
 a character in the play ; and then the speaker (in 
 Terence's Heautontimorumettos) considers it necessary 
 to apologize for the departure from usage. He is about 
 to begin the scene as Chremes immediately after his 
 delivery of the introductory address, without his retiring, 
 or any interposition of the curtain. What the usage was 
 appears from his expression : " Ne cui sit vestrum 
 mirum, cur partes seni Poeta dederit, quae sunt adoles- 
 
 " We find a reminiscence of the old "plaudite " in the last line of tlie 
 epilogue to The Heir (by Thomas May, acted 1620), where the speaker 
 punningly requests the audience to "clap hands and make a bargain." 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 15 
 
 centiiim." Young men, it would appear from these lines, 
 usually spoke the prologues, and were exclusively- 
 devoted to this task. 
 
 The QExt decided novelty after the above, as regards 
 the character of The person^deputed to speak the pro- 
 logue, was introduced in 1609, w hen a female character 
 (not a woman, of course^-as women had not begun to 
 act at this time, but a boy-actor personating a female), 
 spoke the prologue to Every Womaji in her Humour. 
 The stage-directions are : " Enter Flavia, as a Pro- 
 logue ; " and, having entered, she says, " Gentles of both 
 sexes, and of all sorts, I am sent to bid ye welcome. 
 I am but instead of a Prologue, for a she-Prologue is 
 as rareL-a,s a usurer's alms." So also Rosalind, as " the 
 lady-epilogue" in As You Like It, feels bound to 
 justify what was not yet an established usage : " It is 
 not the fashion," she says, " to see the lady the Epilogue : 
 yet it is no more unhandsome, than to see the lord the 
 Prologue." Not long after the introduction of Killi- 
 grew's and D'Avenant's actresses, at the Restoration, 
 we find women, instead of boys, in female characters, 
 speaking both prologues and epilogues. Nell Gwynne, 
 Mrs. Mountford, and Mrs. Bracegirdle became particu- 
 larly noted for their art in this respect, and one or other 
 of them was often selected for the purpose by Dr3.'den 
 and his fellow-dramatists. 
 
 The Prologue, from the earliest times, was frequently 
 introduced by a preliminary dialogue. This, no doubt, 
 was a " survival " of the old " Induction." * Thus, in The 
 
 * Only one such preliminary dialogue is to be found in Roman comedy. 
 
i6 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 Return from Parnassus, a boy, a stage-keeper, Momus, 
 and Defensor (all characters unconnected with the plot 
 of the play) keep up a conversation in which they talk of 
 the previous fortunes of " the old musty show " that they 
 are about to perform, how " it hath lain this twelvemonth 
 in the bottom of a coal-house amongst brooms and old 
 shoes ; an invention that we are ashamed of, and, there- 
 fore, have promised the copies to chandlers to wrap their 
 candles in ; " and finally, after recommendations from 
 Momus " to provide beer ; for the show will be pitiful 
 dry,'' the stage-keeper, remarking that he hears the 
 spectators asking for a blank verse, delivers the prologue. 
 There is a similar artifice, as we have already remarked, 
 in the old play of Wily Beguiled, and in Ben Jonson's 
 Cynthia! s Revels. The preliminary conversation between 
 such characters as manager, author, players, prompter, 
 call-boy, etc., etc., is a device which has found favour 
 in all periods of dramatic literature, both of this and 
 other countries. We find it frequently employed by 
 Fielding, as in his Don Quixote, for example ; and by 
 Goethe in Faust, where in the stage-prologue we have 
 the manager, the poet, and Merryman on the stage 
 together. The above-mentioned "carpenter," in the 
 ancient Hindoo drama, ends his "prologue" by calling 
 in the actors, and with feigned impatience bullying them 
 for not being ready ; after which conversational prelude, 
 the actors are left in possession of the stage, and the 
 
 The Prologue to the Trinummus of Plautus consists of a conversation 
 between Luxuria and Inopia, the representatives of Cause and Effect 
 in the action of the play — the good and evil genii of the dramatis persona. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 17 
 
 action of the drama commences. In Beaumont and 
 Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle there is an 
 amusing preliminary dialogue wherein the " prologue " 
 proper complains of the intrusion of a certain " citizen " 
 and his wife, who insist in coming on to the stage with 
 their boy Ralph (one of the characters in the play), and 
 profess the greatest interest in the performance, more 
 especially as it affects the aforesaid Ralph, and tends 
 to bring out his talents. This interest, they continue 
 (as we have seen) to exhibit, as a sort of Chorus, before 
 each act throughout the play. This idea was certainly 
 a novel one. Ben Jonson, by way of introduction to 
 his Every Man Out of His Humour, gives us a conversa- 
 tion substantial enough to fit out a good sized act. 
 " After the second sounding " of the trumpet, Cordatus, 
 Asper, and Mitis, three characters in the play, are in- 
 structed to enter, and maintain on the stage a confabula- 
 tion the one aim and object of which is, as usual, to 
 glorify and vindicate the author. After some fifty lines 
 of this, Asper, in conformity with the stage directions, 
 turns round to the audience, and remarks : 
 
 " I not observed this thronged round till now, 
 Gracious ancl kind spectators, you ai-e welcome," etc. 
 
 Then follows more abuse of the malignant poet's 
 rivals, interspersed with a little contemptuous flattery of 
 the " spectators," whom Asper had so tardily noticed ; 
 but all this is spun out to such inordinate length, that 
 we are not surprised when Cordatus expresses a wish 
 that the real business would begin : " This protraction 
 is able to sour the best settled patience in the theatre." 
 
 c 
 
i8 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 Then the trumpet sounds for the third time, and in 
 proper form ushers in the Prologue who, on Cordatus 
 remonstrating with him for his late appearance, and 
 declaring that he was about to have spoken the prologue 
 Iiimself, takes the grumbler at his word, and leaves himi 
 to do it, protesting that he himself is " unperfect " irr 
 his words, and glad to be rid of a task in which he 
 '' must of necessity have been out." Then Carlo Buifon 
 enters, followed by a boy with wine and glasses ; and 
 fortified by a cup of canary which "sparkles like a 
 diamond," — " a good draught in place of a bad prologue," 
 — he delivers a kind of rambling gossiping prose effusion, 
 after which Macilente enters, and so begins Act i. 
 
 In The Magitetic Lady, Ben Jonson uses the old 
 name of " Induction, or Chorus," and we are introduced 
 to " Master Probee and Master Damplay," who are met 
 by a "prompt-boy." It' is needless to say that Master 
 Damplay represents an Aristarchus of the period, full 
 of sour denunciations of the "poets, poetasters, poetaccios, 
 and poetitos," as the boy calls them. All the questions 
 of these two critics, concerning the author and his play^. 
 having been smartly answered by the boy, two of the 
 characters appear, and Damplay inquires who they are, 
 to which the boy replies: "Because it is your first 
 question, and these be the prime persons, it would in 
 civility require an answer, but I have heard the poet 
 affirm that to be the most unlucky scene in the play, 
 which needs an interpreter, and especially when the 
 auditory are awake, and such are you he presumes ;, 
 ergo — " and so he breaks off, and the scene begins. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 19 
 
 In The Staple of News, Ben gives us first an Induc- 
 tion, and then the prologue proper. In the Induction, 
 " Gossip Mirth," " Gossip Tattle," " Gossip Expectation," 
 and " Gossip Censure," four gentlemen, " lady-like at- 
 tired," chatter with the Prologue about the title of the 
 play, while the latter vainly endeavours to discharge his 
 functions, till the " tiremen " enter to " mend the 
 lights," and the "book-holder" (or prompter) is heard 
 behind the scenes telling Master Prologue to begin, who 
 thereupon implores the ladies to allow him to act as 
 the " man-midwife " of the players who would fain be 
 delivered of their play, of which "they were like to 
 have a hard labour." Gossip Mirth, however, recom- 
 mences her babbling, till stopped by Gossip Censure, 
 and the Prologue is permitted to deliver his rhymed 
 address. 
 
 Dryden was very liberal in his use of what we may 
 call the Prodialogue. The play of Tlie Rival Ladies is 
 introduced to the spectators by two P rologues, who 
 converse together. Prologue No. i, after first bullying 
 the audience in the usual fashion, begins to cajole 
 them, and to call them " kind judges," etc., when enters 
 Prologue No. 2, who promptly brings his fellow back 
 to the strain of invective which the audiences of those 
 days seemed to enjoy more than the choicest flattery. 
 There are also two prologues to The Maiden Queen, but 
 only in the modern sense of the word ; the person who 
 speaks the two consecutive addresses is the same. After 
 half a dozen rhyming triplets, " the Prologue goes out, 
 and stays while a tune is played, after which he returns 
 
20 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 again," and then delivers another set of heroic lines 
 beginning : 
 
 " I had forgot one half, I do protest. 
 And now am sent again to speak the rest," — 
 
 which he accordingly does. This we may call a pro- 
 logue in two acts.* But coming back to the prodia- 
 logue, Dryden furnishes us with one of the most witty 
 examples of this form in The Wild Gallant, in which a 
 prevalent fashion of the day, and one to which Dryden 
 himself is said to have sometimes yielded, that of con- 
 sulting astrologers, is marked for ridicule. The pro- 
 logue is presented to two astrologers, who are discovered 
 when a curtain is drawn aside, and foretell the fortunes 
 of the play in a very humorous colloquy. This habit 
 of using the prodialogue, which distinguished several of 
 Dryden's plays, is severely ridiculed and parodied by 
 the poet Bayes's famous Thunder and Lightning Pro- 
 logue in The Rehearsal, Act i., sc. i. 
 
 The Epidialogue is not nearly so common in the 
 period under consideration as the corresponding form of 
 the prologue. One of the earliest instances is that in 
 
 * There were two prologues to the Hecyra of Terence, which were com- 
 posed to meet peculiar circumstances. This play was unfortunate on two 
 successive occasions. Having failed to gain a hearing on the first day, 
 owing to the competition of the "funambuli," or rope-dancers performing 
 in the same open space, a prologue of eight lines was written for the second 
 day, briefly alluding to the author's adverse fate, and begging favourable 
 attention to the second trial. Another failure, however, succeeded to the 
 first ; consequently on the 'third day a longer prologue (forty-nine lines) was 
 composed for, and spoken by the people's favourite actor, Ambivius Turpio, 
 who, pleading eloquently for the poet as "orator ornatu prologi" (vide 
 sup.), alludes to several previous initial failures of authors which, in his 
 experience, he had yet seen result in brilliant successes. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 21 
 
 Richard Broome's Antipodes \{\&'}fi), which is divided 
 between the Doctor and Peregrine, two characters in 
 the play. The epilogue to Dryden's Doit Sebastian, 
 " spoken between " Antonio and Morayma, is one of the 
 latest. Besides these, we may refer to the epilogue to ^ 
 Fl etch er's Fancies, Chaste and Noble, consisting of eight 
 lines, of which two apiece are given to Morosa, Claretta, 
 Castamela, and Flavia. And in The Knight of the 
 Biirning Pestle we have an epidialogue of the same 
 character, equally amusing as, and in all respects 
 answering to, the above-mentioned prodialogue to the 
 same play. 
 
 Some of the players of the seventeenth century 
 achieved a special reputation for their manner of de- 
 livering prologues and epilogues. Nell Gwynne at the 
 King's House, and afterwards Mrs. Bracegirdle and 
 Mrs. Mountfort were, as we have remarked, particularly 
 celebrated among the women ; and Hart, followed 
 by Gibber, among the men.* In the graver kind of 
 address, Betterton was considered admirable at the 
 Lincoln's Inn Fields playhouse. 
 
 It is not surprising therefore that poets soon learnt 
 to write their addresses to the audiences, as well as 
 the parts of their plays, " up to " particular actors and 
 actresses. In the epilogue to The Maiden Queen, pur- 
 porting to have been " written by a person of honour," 
 
 * Also Verbruggen, Betterton, and "Colonel Codringlon " in John 
 Dennis's prologues and epilogues, won distinction in this line. Later still 
 King was considered particularly happy in his delivery of a prologue. In 
 the Roman comedy, Terence's favourite prologue-speaker was (as we have 
 already said) Ambivius Turpio. 
 
 -H 
 
22 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 the language is evidently framed for the mouth of 
 Pepys' "pretty Nelly." After a recital of the merits 
 of the play we are told that the author had been left 
 indulging "in a rant, against the envious, and the 
 ignorant ; " and so on : 
 
 " And twenty other things he bid me tell ye ; 
 But I cried, e'en go do't yourself for Nelly." 
 
 But the most famous address of this character written 
 for Nell Gwynne was the epilogue to Dryden's Tyrannic 
 Love. In this play she acted a tragic part, that of 
 the Princess Valeria, and one to which, as it appears 
 from the lines put into her mouth afterwards, she felt 
 herself to be, as indeed she was, but little suited. When 
 at the end of the last act, the bearer comes to take off 
 the lifeless body of Valeria, the dead piincess jumps 
 up and becomes with alarming suddenness the living 
 actress, whose propria persona is distinguishable, if no 
 otherwise, by that vigour of language, to put it mildly, 
 which even Mr. Pepys disapprovingly remarked behind 
 the scenes. She exclaims to the bearer : 
 
 " Hold ; are you mad ? You damn'd confounded dog ! 
 I am to rise, and speak the Epilogue." 
 
 And then to the audience : 
 
 "I have, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye, 
 I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly," etc. 
 
 She explains that "she dies out of her calling in a 
 tragedy ; " calls a poet a 
 
 "Damned dull poet, who could prove 
 So senseless to make Nelly die for love," 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 33 
 
 and concludes thus -: 
 
 " As for my epitaph, when I am gone 
 I'll trust no poet, but will write my own : 
 Here Nelly lies, who, though she lived a slattern. 
 Yet died a princess, acting in St. Catharine." 
 
 Her manner of delivering this epilogue so enchanted 
 Charles II. (or, as the wits of the time called him, Charles 
 III., as the successor to Charles Hart and Charles Sack- 
 ville, the two first lovers of this fascinating actress), that 
 he is said to have gone behind the scenes, and to have 
 installed her at Whitehall without further delay. And 
 this story Genest, a very precise inquirer into such 
 matters, deems to have been well-founded, after an 
 examination of the date at which the Duke of St. 
 Albans was born. 
 
 Nell Gwynne's " Charles the First," to wit, Hart, was 
 almost as famous as the lady herself in the delivery of 
 prologues, and we often find him told off by the poets 
 of the day for the exercise of this function, then con- 
 sidered very honourable, and only to be entrusted to 
 the best artists. Thus it was considered a special 
 honour, when Sir John Vanbrugh, pleased with Colley 
 Gibber's modesty in choosing two very minor parts in 
 The Pilgrim, assigned to the young actor the task of 
 delivering the epilogue ; and still more when, on the 
 revival of this play, Dryden gave him in addition to 
 this, the prologue which he had composed for the 
 occasion : thereby mightily incensing Wilkes and the 
 other actors of the company, who thought this double 
 compliment to Gibber a slight on themselves, Mrs. 
 
24 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 Marshall, Goodman, and above all, Mrs. Bracegifdle, were, 
 after Nell Gwynne, Dryden's favourites for the office of 
 speaking his addresses to the noisy and noise-loving 
 audiences of London ; but when he set himself to 
 fascinate with refined and Attic humour the choicer 
 spirits of Oxford University, to which he was so devoted, 
 the poet usually chose the elegant Hart. 
 
 In some few of Dryden's plays, where two or more 
 actors appear " as themselves " to speak the prologue or 
 epilogue, allowances are freely made for their individual 
 peculiarities. Thus in the epilogue to Mithridates, King 
 of Pontus, Goodman appears, and after beginning in the 
 usual strain, 
 
 " Pox on this play-house ! 'tis an old tired jade, 
 'Twill do no longer, we must force a trade," etc., 
 
 and then humorously suggesting several " trades " 
 likely to revive the declining drama and reinstate the 
 fortunes of the house, finally announces that he will 
 
 ' ' Go, scour the scene-room, and engage 
 Some toy within, to save the falling stage," 
 
 and after an exit, returns with Mrs. Cox, also in propria 
 persona, with whom he holds a little conversation, and 
 then allows her to " take the stage " and finish the 
 epilogue. In the Induction to The Malcontent, the 
 three famous actors, Burbage, Sly, and Condell, are intro- 
 duced in the same way, and to serve the same purpose. 
 
 The prologue written by Dryden to Joseph Harris's 
 play. The Mistakes, is opened by a conversation in prose 
 between Mr. Bright and Mr. Bowen, who soon announces 
 that "honest Mr. Williams is just come in, half mellow. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 25 
 
 from the Rose Tavern "—the hostelry which Mr. Pepys 
 loved so well. It was rather cruel in Dryden to expose 
 the infirmities of "honest Mr. Williams" so publicly, 
 for it was certainly true, as we are told in Gibber's 
 Apology, that this actor loved his bottle better than 
 ' his business. " He swears he is inspired with claret," 
 observes Mr. Bowen, "and will come on, and that 
 extempore, too, either with a prologue of his own, or 
 something like one." Then Bowen and Bright leave 
 Williams in possession of the stage ; and this " titu- 
 bating" gentleman delivers a jerky address, more or 
 less significant of his condition, which ends with the 
 pious ejaculation, " the devil take small beer." * 
 
 From very early times playwrights seem to have 
 been in the habit of casting about for novel methods of 
 introducing their prologues to the audience. The plain 
 address, with the orthodox accompaniments of black 
 cloak and bays, was soon found to pall. It was not 
 enough that the Prologue should come forward, say his 
 say, make his bow, and depart ; it was thought that he 
 ought to do something striking or eccentric. As early 
 as 1600, the date of SiLinmer's Last Will and Testament, 
 by Nash, we have a prologue delivered by a small boy, 
 sitting on the knee of Will Summer. No less a per- 
 sonage than " Envy arising in the midst of the stage " 
 was required to usher in Ben Jonson's bitter drama. The 
 Poetaster. After a good deal of talk, however, she 
 
 * In the prologue to Wily Beguiled the words " humorous George " 
 are supposed to refer to Peele, the dramatist and actor, who, perhaps, 
 delivered the prologue and performed a part in the play. - 
 
26 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 "descends slowly," and another novelty is brought 
 forward to attract the spectators in the shape of a 
 " Prologue in armour," * who " enters hastily as Envy 
 disappears," and thus salutes her, and apologizes for 
 himself: 
 
 " Stay, monster, 'ere thou sink — thus on thy head 
 Set we our bolder foot, with which we tread 
 Thy malice into earth : so Spite should die, 
 Despised and scorned by noble Industry. 
 If any muse, why I salute the stage 
 As armed Prologue ; know, 'tis a dangerous age : 
 Wherein who writes had need present his scenes 
 Forty-fold proof against the conjuring means 
 Of base detractors, and illiterate apes, 
 That fill up rooms in fair and formal shapes." 
 
 It is to be hoped that Ben's prologue derived no 
 small portion of its pith and point from the inspiration 
 of that unhappy spirit whom he thus unfairly conjured 
 up to trample upon. The devil, we know, when once 
 summoned, will not easly be shown the door, and Envy 
 must surely have been behind the scenes during that 
 venomous " Apologetic Dialogue " which the poet fur- 
 nished by way of epilogue to this same play. This 
 epidialogue, as we call it, which is very lengthy, is 
 furnished with a scene — " the author's lodgings " — out- 
 side which stand Nasutus and Polyposus, anxious to 
 •" see him how he looks after those libels." Accordingly 
 '' they come forward ; the scene opens, and discovers the 
 
 * With which we may compare the "anned prologue " who speaks the 
 preliminary address to the audience in Troilus and Cressida (" Hither am 
 I come, a prologue armed "). The motive of the dress is explained after- 
 >vards, viz. to suggest and be in character with the subject-matter of the 
 julay : ("Suited in like condition as our argument "). 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 27 
 
 author in his study ; " and then the said author, in long 
 speeches and short epigrams, with Latin quotations and 
 English rhymes, with "wise saws and modern instances," 
 unbosoms himself to his interlocutors, and enjoys his 
 customary growl. All this, however, Jonson tells the 
 reader, was merely by way of " answer ... to sundry 
 impotent libels then cast out — and some yet remaining 
 — against me and this play." 
 
 In Ben Jonson's Sad Shepherd we have another 
 novelty. While the prologue is being spoken, at the 
 words "the sad young shepherd, whom we here present," 
 the Sad Shepherd himself " passeth silently over the 
 stage " to give the additional point, and whet the 
 curiosity of the audience. So also in the course of the 
 prologue to The Merry Devil of Edmonton, the curtain 
 is drawn, and Fabel is discovered. 
 
 The very clever actor, Lacy, whom Charles IL 
 admired to the extent of having his portrait taken 
 in three characters, once showed some ingenuity in 
 adapting his epilogue to the alterations made in the 
 body of a tragedy, by Howard, called The Vestal Virgin. 
 Originally, it was his cue to come in — while the con- 
 cluding lines were being spoken, and after all the cha- 
 racters, except two, in the play had been killed — with 
 the words : 
 
 " By your leave, gentlemen — 
 After a sad and dismal tragedy, 
 I do suppose that few expected me!' 
 
 But when Howard afterwards thought fit to entirely 
 reconstruct the latter part of the play, and kill only 
 
2S THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 one of the characters Lacy used to come forward, and 
 seeing that most of the dramatis personm were alive, 
 tell the spectators that there was no need of him, and 
 that the poet had spoilt his epilogue. It was Lacy 
 also who was so carefully trained to imitate Dryden's 
 manner in . the part of Bayes in The Rehearsal, and 
 who spoke the prologue to that amusing burlesque, 
 ending with the line, " 'Tis I, John Lacy, who reformed 
 the stage." 
 
 The facetious but always impecunious Joe HaineSy 
 whose adventures were so many and wide-known, the 
 self-dubbed "count," great both in the penning and 
 speaking of prologues and epilogues, was the inventor 
 of a new mode of delivering them — on the back of an 
 ass.* Whether this was a reminiscence of Hamlet's 
 " each actor on his ass," or what other point there was 
 in the practice, cannot be discovered ; but the practice 
 always raised infinite mirth among the groundlings, and 
 was so widely imitated, notably by Listen and Pinketh- 
 man afterwards, that the ass was in danger of becoming 
 as much a "property" of the Prologue as the black 
 cloak had been previously. By the time of Davies, " the 
 jest" was, in the opinion of that amiable actor, book- 
 seller, and gossip, "so worn out, that a new one might 
 be formed at no great expense of brains." But the 
 most celebrated prologue ever delivered by Joe Haines 
 was his recantation-prologue on his return to the ortho- 
 dox Church and the stage, after he had temporarily 
 
 * See Tom Brown's Works, vol. iv., p. 311, and Genest's Account of 
 the English Stage, vol. ii., p. 106, on this asinine delivery. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 29 
 
 deserted both for the Church of Rome.* This address 
 the " count " spoke in a white sheet, holding a lighted 
 taper in his hand, after the manner of a I'ecanting peni- 
 tent, and in it he expressed regret for having forsaken 
 the true English religion, and more particularly, the, 
 true English stage, dolefully promising not to offend in 
 •either particular again. The words, we may imagine, 
 were droned out in the measured whine considered 
 proper to such occasions. To the above we may add 
 another sensational prologue spoken by Haines in a 
 mourning suit. (See Genest, vol. ii., p. 157.) 
 
 The epilogue to one of the plays of this period, by 
 way of still further innovation, was sung, in alternate 
 strains, by those eminent players, Harris and Sandford 
 (the most notable stage-villain of the period), dressed in 
 the character of two itinerant street ballad-singers, who 
 yelled their nasal strophes and antistrophes to one 
 another across the stage. Pepys was particularly struck 
 by this performance, and indeed pronounced it the only 
 thing worth seeing or hearing in the play.f 
 
 It was not an uncommon thing, indeed, for a play in 
 those times to be saved from damnation by a sensa- 
 tional prologue. Nokes, the famous broad comedian, 
 so highly praised by Gibber, and for whom Dryden 
 wrote the character of Sir Martin Mar-all, is said to 
 
 * This prologue was written by Tom Brown "for his friend Jo. 
 Haines," and is published in the satirist's collected works, vol. iv., p. 212. 
 
 t At a much later date we find a peculiar epilogue to The Ragged 
 Uproar (1754) to be spoken by "Mary Squires flying on broomsticks," 
 requiring, we would think, no ordinary acrobatic skill on the part oT 
 "Mary Squires." 
 
30 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 have obtained some sort of success for a very bad play 
 at the Duke's playhouse by dint of an extraordinary 
 prologue which he recited, and in which he appeared 
 in a hat of portentous brim. The King's company were 
 always alert to detect, imitate, and, if possible, outdo 
 the devices by which the rival house attained its popu- 
 larity. Accordingly, not long after this performance, 
 \ Dryden wrote a prologue to the first part of The Con- 
 quest of Granada expressly for Nell Gwynne, in which she 
 was required to come forward arrayed in a large waist- 
 'belt and a hat of the circumference of a coach-wheel ! 
 Such simple devices secured the applause of the Merry 
 Monarch — "the King," says Downes, "wanted little of 
 being suffocated with laughter.'' In the opening lines 
 of this address the poet, as was his wont, derided the 
 popular taste, which he was yet not strong enough to 
 resist : 
 
 " This jest was first of the other house making, 
 And, five times tried, has never failed of taking ; 
 For 'twere a shame a poet should be killed 
 Under the shelter of so broad a shield. 
 This is that hat, whose very sight did win ye 
 To laugh and clap, as though the devil were in ye. 
 As then for Nokes, so now I hope you'll be 
 So dull, to laugh once more for love of me. 
 I'll write a play, says one, for I have got 
 A broad-brimmed hat, and waist-belt, towards a plot. 
 Says the other, I have one more large than that ; 
 Thus they outwit each otlier — with a hat ! 
 The brims still grew with every play they writ, 
 And grew so large they cover'd all the wit. " 
 
 He concluded by wittily recommending that in future 
 all poets should be searched, like duellists before they 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 3? 
 
 fight, to see whether they have about them any unlawful 
 arms in the shape of " wheel-broad hats." 
 
 The prologue to The Indian Queen was another of 
 Dryden's attempts to secure public favour by novelty. 
 " As the music plays a soft air," say the stage directions, 
 " the curtain rises slowly, and discovers an Indian boy 
 and girl sleeping under two plantation trees, and when 
 the curtain is almost up, the music turns into a tune 
 expressing an alarm, at which the boy awakes and 
 speaks." The dialogue which succeeds between the boy 
 and Queveda is elegant, and unusually complimentary 
 to the audience, who are described as " deities," arrived 
 " not to conquer, but forgive." 
 
 In the earliest period of our drama, it was of course- 
 ordinarily intended that the prologue should be spoken 
 only on the opening night, but' on some occasions it was- 
 so popular, and formed such an important feature in the 
 entire entertainment, that it was repeated in subsequent 
 performances. Thus the prologue to Woman made a 
 Justice, a play written by the famous tragedian Better- 
 ton, was spoken every day of the fourteen during which 
 it " ran,'' and we may perhaps infer from a line in 
 Dryden's above-mentioned " wheel-broad hat " effusion^ 
 that Nokes's prologue at the Duke's house had been 
 repeated five times.* 
 
 So much importance, in fact, was attached to the 
 prologue of a play, even in comparison with the play 
 itself, that writers in those days often devoted them- 
 
 * At d later period, the prologue to Garrick's Bon Ton had to be- 
 repeated nightly, in consequence of King's fine delivery of the lines. 
 
32 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 selves to its composition exclusively, and even great 
 poets did not disdain to write several prologues for 
 plays in which they had had no hand, — witness the mass 
 of these compositions for other playwrights, which are 
 collected in Sir W. Scott's edition of Dryden, — who thus 
 rendered services, which such noted dramatists as Lee, 
 Etheredge, and Shadwell, conscious on their side of 
 a deficiency in this respect, were only too glad to 
 accept ; often, indeed, when unable to procure the assist- 
 ance of the best prologue-writer of the day, rather than 
 damage a performance by a bad address of their own, 
 enlisting some " person of honour," or " quality," or 
 " an unknown hand," or " a friend of the author," to 
 write a good one for them.* The playwright was 
 then almost as mortified by the rejection of a pro- 
 logue, as by that of a play, and we know that " glorious 
 John " himself took a long time before he so far 
 recovered from his annoyance at the rejection of the 
 prologue which he had composed for the Masque of 
 Calisto, as to send in an epilogue, which, to his further 
 vexation, was also rejected, through the machinations of 
 his rivals at the court. The most moving and sympa- 
 thetic of this poet's prologues for others were those 
 which he wrote in his old age for the rising generation, 
 and the less known or fortunate poets ; those, for 
 instance, composed for dramas written by his own son, 
 or such men as Dr. D'Avenant, son of the former patentee 
 
 * It is curious that Apulus, the comic actor, is alleged to have written 
 the prologue to the Casina of Plautus — the only instance, so far as I can 
 find, of any of the prologues of the Roman comedy having been attributed 
 to any other person than the author of the play. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 33 
 
 and manager of the Duke's house. But of those writers 
 who turned out their prologues by dozens, and did 
 nothing else, Dryden, in the epilogue to Troilus and 
 Cressida (as amended), speaks very contemptuously, as 
 
 "... those to whom the stage does not belong, 
 Such, whose vocation only is — to song ; 
 At most, to prologue, when, for want of time, 
 Poets take in for journey-work in rhyme." 
 
 The oldest price of a prologue and epilogue together, 
 of which we have any record, is five shillings. This 
 sum used to be paid by Henslowe to the playwrights 
 who worked for him ; and, when we consider that often 
 tiot more than two pounds was given for an entire play, 
 the importance then attached to these brief addresses 
 will be apparent. By the time of Dryden, the usual 
 price of a prologue alone had risen to five guineas ; and 
 in his later and more prosperous days, the poet turned up 
 his nose even at this sum, when sent to him by Thomas 
 Southerne, for whom he had written the prologue to 
 The Loyal Brother — " Not that I do so out of disrespect 
 to you, young man," the veteran playwright explained, 
 " but the players have had my goods too cheap. In 
 future, I must have ten guineas." Southerne, himself, 
 afterwards helped still further to raise the pecuniary 
 remuneration for these productions, and figures in Pope's 
 verses as — 
 
 "Tom, whom Heaven sent down to raise 
 The price of prologues and of plays. " 
 
34 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The various matters with which the prologue and epilogue dealt — 
 Description of the play — Commendation of the author — Abuse 
 of rival authors — Prologues written by veterans for the first 
 plays of young poets — Prologues by or on behalf of actor- 
 authors — "Lacy's fiddle" — Ben Jonson's prologues attacking 
 Shakespeare, Dekker, etc. — Dekker's counterblasts — Dryden's 
 prologues in justification of theories of dramatic composition 
 — His abandonment of the rhymed couplet — " Love and 
 Honour" plays — Spanish plots of domestic intrigue — Refer- 
 ences in prologues and epilogues to excessive scenic embel- 
 lishments ; to the opera ; to Jeremy Collier ; to Sir Richard 
 Blackmore — Dryden's recantation. 
 
 Having already touched on the speakers, writers, forms, 
 and accessories of our old Prologues and Epilogues, it 
 remains to consider the various liinds of matter with 
 which they dealt. Naturally, one would suppose that a 
 prologue ex vi termini ought to discourse lightly of the 
 subject of the plaj^, and give some glimpse or foretaste of 
 the more substantial delights which are to follow ; be, in 
 fact, to the drama itself, what prefaces or introductions 
 are to books, in which — 
 
 "... although small pricks 
 To their subsequent volumes, there is seen 
 The baby figure of the giant mass 
 Of things to come at large. "_ 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 35 
 
 And after this fashion were the earliest prologues 
 made, when author's minds were more guileless and 
 simple than they afterwards learnt to be. In such 
 primitive dramas as the already mentioned Supposes 
 (1566), The Return from Parnassus (1606), or David 
 and Bathsheba (1599), attributed to George Peele, the 
 audiences are told without circumlocution, and in plain 
 words, what it is they are going to see, and what it is 
 all about* The author does not attempt to bring 
 himself into any personal relation with the spectators. 
 Indeed, in the prologue to the last-named of these three 
 plays, he keeps so aloof from them, that its tone not a 
 little resembles that of the exordium to an epical poem, 
 or of a Miltonic invocation to the Muse ; the stately and 
 musical motion of its verse seems far more suitable to 
 the closet than the playhouse, and suggests that " emo- 
 tional language overhead " which has been described as 
 being of the essence of poetry, as distinct from rhetoric, ot 
 which the later prologues soon came to partake so freely. 
 It begins : 
 
 " Of Israel's sweetest singer now I sing, 
 His holy style and happy victories ; 
 
 * So also in most of Shakespeare's plays, e.g. in Romeo and Juliet, 
 which we select for mention here out of several other dramas in which the 
 same practice is observable, because in this the prologue is peculiarly essential 
 to the play which follows, and of which it, so to speak, strikes the key- 
 note. So impressed was Lady Martin with its importance in this regard, 
 that, as she has lately told us, when playing Juliet at Drury Lane, she was 
 accustomed to sj^eak it herself, with a domino thrown over her dress, in front 
 of a scene representing the tomb of the Scaligers at Verona. Shakespeare 
 also seems to have attached some such significance to it, since the last lines 
 of the play recall in a striking manner and repeat this refrain and dominant 
 motive. 
 
36 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 Of this sweet poet, Jove's musician, 
 And of his beauteous son, I please to sing. 
 Then help, divine Adonai, to conduct 
 Upon the wings of my well-tempered verse 
 The hearers' minds above the towers of heaven, 
 And guide them so in this thrice haughty flight, 
 Their mounting feathers scorch not with the fire, 
 That none can temper but thy holy hand : 
 To thee for succour flies my feeble muse. 
 And at thy feet her iron pen doth use. " * 
 
 Here the spectators are completely ignored.f But 
 we soon find the playwright coming out of this shy 
 seclusion, and making coy, and then bolder, advances to 
 his patrons ; at first modestly hoping for success and 
 applause at their hands, then proclaiming to them his 
 own position, difficulties, or claims to admiration ; and 
 finally, hectoring it over them, bullying them, de- 
 nouncing them, and deriding their taste, or the rival 
 aspirants to their good opinion. These classes of pro- 
 logues become similarly distinguishable from one 
 another at an early stage of the Roman comedy. 
 Evanthius, the grammarian, has classified them as : (i) 
 vTToOcTiKog, or argumentativus, describing the plot of the 
 
 * Cf the prologue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Rule a Wife and Have 
 a lyijc, which, in like manner, touches only on the matter of the play. 
 
 t In Plautus we frequently, but not always, find this simple intiro- 
 ductoiy element, as for instance, in the prologues to the Amphitryo (but as to 
 part only), the Asinaria, the Captivi, the Rudens (latter half), and the Aulu- 
 laria, which last begins in a very ingenuous and artless manner — "ne 
 quis miretur qui sim, paucis eloquar." In the Pseudolus, the Prologue 
 deliberately shirks his customary duty, and expresses his intention to hand 
 it over to Pseudolus himself. Terence's prologues, on the other hand are, 
 with one exception, completely occupied with other matters, more personal 
 to the poet, or to the principal actor. The Phormic alone has its plot ex- 
 panded in a portion of the prologue, the rest of it being similar to the others 
 in style and allusion. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 37 
 
 play ; (2) cruar-arfKoc, or commendatitius, praising and 
 justifying the author; (3) s-n-iTifxriTiKOQ, or relativus, attack- 
 ing the author's rivals. To these he adds (4) the most 
 common of all, the yUdcroe, dealing with all the above 
 matters. 
 
 Meanwhile, of course, the Epilogue made similar ad- 
 vances in confidence, and moved iorv/a.r6i pari passu with 
 its brother, the Prologue. The earliest epilogues of the 
 English drama, sum up and justify, or, at all events, 
 mainly allude to the plot of the play ; then, as the 
 prologues take to begging for applause, the epilogues 
 begin to congratulate themselves on a success achieved 
 — (though this, as Fielding pointed out at a much later 
 date, was necessarily a task requiring some delicacy of 
 handling, with a view to the possible necessity of altered 
 allusions to suit altered circumstances ; *) from justifying 
 the plot, they are next employed in justifying the 
 author ; then in vindicating his theories of composition 
 at the expense of others, and his honour at the expense 
 of that of his competitors ; till we arrive at the final 
 stage, represented by Dryden, when, if not entirely 
 occupied with indecencies, they bristle with personalities, 
 recriminations, and scurrility. Thus it soon came about, 
 when once the playwrights perceived the uses to which 
 
 * " A poet should, unless his fate be gueased, 
 Write for each play two epilogues at least ; 
 For how to empty benches can he eay-^ 
 ' What means this mighty crowding here to-day ? ' 
 Or should the pit with flattery be crammed, 
 How can he speak it, when the play is damned ? " 
 
 Epilogue to The Intriguing Chamkrinaid. 
 
38 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 prologues and epilogues, like prefaces, might be put, 
 that the play was the last thing in the world that these 
 productions were concerned with. So disconnected had 
 the epilogues become by the end of the seventeenth 
 century from the matter of the play, that the Spectator 
 felt bound, in an essay on " Merry Epilogues to Tragic 
 Plays," to enter a protest against the then universal 
 custom. Whether strictly artistic or not, however, there 
 can be no doubt that this custom, originating in the 
 combined ingenuity and self- consciousness, or malice of 
 rival authors, is to be credited with having illustrated in 
 no small degree contemporary morals, politics, and art. 
 Let us consider in order the various kinds of material 
 with which these addresses to the audience, so rapidly 
 diverted from their original meaning and purpose, dealt 
 in the hands of different authors.* 
 
 Before coming to the turbulent region of recri- 
 mination, rivalry and jealousy, let us coast along the 
 calmer waters where dispassionate, harmless, and even 
 generous language prevails. Where, for instance, an 
 author modestly introduces himself, and his first pro- 
 duction, to the public : as in the prologue to the 
 
 * The prologue of the old Hindoo drama demands some mention here, 
 because it appears to have embraced almost all the subjects generally dealt 
 ■with separately (or not more than two at a time, we will say) by the various 
 classes of modern prologues about to be considered. First, the prologue- 
 reciter (who was carpenter of the house, and manager of the company) de- 
 scribed the festival, which gave occasion to the performance, then the plot 
 of the play, then the merits of the author, and then the skill of the 
 actors, winding up with a glowing inventory of the properties. The 
 irapd^affis of the old Greek comedy can alone be compared with it in com- 
 prehensiveness. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 39 
 
 Cutter of Coleman Street, in which Abraham Cowley 
 meekly implores the " gentlemen critics " 
 
 ' To let this forlorn hope go by- 
 Safe and untouched. ' That must not be,' you'll cry. 
 If ye be wise, it must : I'll tell ye why, 
 There are seven, eight, nine — stay, there are behind 
 Ten plays at least, which wait but for a wind 
 And the glad news that we the evening miss ; 
 And those are all your own, if you spare this. 
 Some are but new-trimmed up, others quite new. 
 Some by known shipwrights built, and others too 
 By that great author made, whoe'er he be. 
 That styles himself ' Person of Quality. ' " 
 
 Others th>re are, in which the special circumstances 
 and position of the author are matter of apology, or 
 turned intca plea for indulgence. Sometimes it is his 
 youth, or irsxperience in literature, sometimes the fact 
 of his beinga player as well as a writer, sometimes his 
 staleness fron overwork and exhaustion. Thus Dryden, 
 to his honoL-, would often compose his best prologues 
 to introduce young and unfledged dramatists to the 
 " understandig gentlemen of the ground," as Ben 
 Jonson calledthe pittites of the day. Charles D'Ave- 
 nant, for instince (the son of his old collaborateur), 
 Dryden cordally recommended to the playhouse 
 audience, whic he had alternately flattered, besought, 
 expostulated vth, and reviled for so many years. The 
 play was caWecCiree, and the author was only nineteen 
 years of age \hen he wrote it. Though successful, it 
 was his only prduction. 
 
 * ' Were hi but half so wise, as you're severe, 
 Our ydhful poet should not need to fear ; 
 To hisreen years your censures you would suit. 
 Nor bit the blossom, but expect the fruit." 
 
4° 
 
 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 Dryden concludes by an appeal to those who had pre- 
 viously read and approved of the play to support their 
 judgment in public : 
 
 "You, who in private have this play allowed, 
 Ought to maintain your suffrage to the crowd, 
 The captive, once submitted to your bands. 
 You should protect from death by vulgar hands. " 
 
 Charles Saunders was another " boy-poet," f(/r whose 
 Tamerlane (1681) Dryden wrote an epilogue, as graceful 
 as the above prologue to the first effort of Copey, with 
 whom he is compared : 
 
 " Ladies, the beardless author of this day 
 Commends to you the fortune of his play. 
 A woman-wit [Aphra-Behn ?] has often graced tf: stage, 
 But he's the first boy-poet of our age. 
 Early as is the year his fancies blow, 
 Like young Narcissus, peeping through the snd 
 Thus Cowley blossomed soon, yet flourished la 
 This is as forward, and may prove as strong. '| 
 
 Powell's appeal, on the production ofjhis tragedy, 
 The Treacherous Brothers, at the Theatre |oyal in 1691 
 was much simpler and blunter : 
 
 " New plays is still the cry of all the town, 
 Therefore to-day, young Powell gives you 
 The fellow never writ before this time." 
 
 And the epilogue entreats the audience \i be " kind to 
 his first-born." 
 
 Powell was an actor in the companjjbut he makes 
 no allusion to the circumstance, by wa| of a plea for 
 indulgent consideration, as Mountfort tljught it neces- 
 sary to do in the prologue (spoken by IV s. Bracegirdle) 
 to his Successful Strangers (1690). 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 41 
 
 " Some are resolved (he hears) it shall be damned, 
 Only because 'tis from a player's hand. 
 Could but the females see, how very sad 
 He looks, they'd pity such a likely lad. " * 
 
 Poor Mountfort seems to have felt that every 
 apology in advance was essential. " I know I have 
 many enemies," he says, in his preface, — he was 
 eventually killed in a tavern-brawl, — " but why they 
 are so is more than they know ; I cannot remember any 
 person whom I ever injured willingly." 
 
 An apology is made on a different ground for the 
 posthumous play, produced at Dorset Gardens in 1684, 
 by the celebrated actor Lacy, and called Sir Hercules 
 Buffoon, or the Poetical Squire. The actor, if he had 
 been living, would have taken a principal part in it, and, 
 as D'Urfey implies in the prologue which he wrote for 
 the occasion, could have achieved a success for that or 
 any other play ; whereas, under the circumstances — 
 
 " If it takes not, all that we can say on't 
 Is, we have his fiddle, riot his hands, to play on't. " 
 
 On which Genest severely remarks that the King's 
 company should have buried Lacy's fiddle with him. 
 
 Dryden not unfrequently appeals to his audiences 
 for consideration on the ground that he is overworked. 
 He was bound by the terms of his contract with the 
 king's players to write so many dramas a year for them ; 
 
 * There is, at a later date, an amusing prologue by .Sheridan Knowles 
 to The Wife, in which the actor-author humorously complains of being 
 "scouted" by "either crew" (of poets and actors) on the principle of 
 "Twy-natured is no nature." Therefore, he says to the public, "dear 
 patrons of both arts, he turns to you." 
 
42 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 and it appears that the jaded Muse did not always 
 respond to the fresh calls upon her powers. There 
 was even a quarrel between the parties after a time, 
 and the players complained to the king, in a formal 
 document, of the poet's non-fulfilment of his engage- 
 ments. To the irksomeness of the demands thus made 
 upon him, Dryden somewhat unfairly (since he had 
 received, and was receiving, valuable consideration for 
 his work from the players, besides which the critics had 
 nothing to do with his overworking himself) makes 
 pitiful and not obscure references, with the view of 
 averting the disapprobation of the audience. Thus the 
 Prologue to The Mock Astrologer, in some very witty but 
 indecent lines, contrasts the poet's energy in wooing the 
 dramatic Muse on his first engagement, with his flagging 
 spirits now that he has been in harness for some years. 
 He concludes by telling the audience that, in future, 
 
 " He, like a seaman, seldom will appear. 
 
 And means to trouble home but thrice a year ; 
 That only time from your gallants he'll borrow ; 
 Be kind to-day and cuckold him to-morrow. " 
 
 Whence we must conclude that, previously to this date 
 (1668), he had been bound, or had chosen, to write more 
 than three plays a year for the company.* Again, in 
 
 * Four would appear to have been the number from a note, in the 
 Key appended to an old edition of The Rehearsal, to a passage in Act. i. , 
 sc. I, where Bayes (Dryden) says, in answer to a suggestion that he should 
 revenge himself on his audience by writing for the " other house," — " No, 
 sir, there are certainties upon me, that I cannot be disengaged from." The 
 note is to the effect that Dryden, in 1668, contracted with the King's 
 company, for one whole share, to write them four plays a year. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 43 
 
 the epilogue to this play, he dolefully says of himself: 
 
 " He still must write ; and banquier-like, each day 
 Accept new bills, and he must break or pay," — 
 
 and advances his position in this respect as an excuse 
 for borrowing his plots from others ; for, he adds (ex- 
 tending the metaphor) — 
 
 " When through his hands such sums must yearly run, 
 You cannot think the stock is all his own." 
 
 The habit of gossiping about one's self leads, before 
 long, to the less innocent tendency to gossip about one's 
 self as contrasted with others ; and we soon find the 
 prologues and epilogues, in which this combative and 
 vindictive spirit is uppermost, largely exceeding the 
 apologetic and explanatory.* Notwithstanding the 
 vehement special pleading of Gifford, there can be Httle 
 doubt that Ben Jonson, in his prologues, often girded 
 at Master Will Shakespeare, albeit in decently veiled 
 allusions. It requires much faith to suppose that the 
 " wit-combats " at the Mermaid between the heavy 
 galleon and the light skiff, recalled by Fuller, were not 
 reproduced on paper, in such lines as these, from the 
 prologue to Every Man in His Humour, where Ben says, 
 referring, doubtless, to his fellow-poet's Henry V. and 
 other plays o'erleaping time and space, that he will not 
 " serve the ill customs of the age " so far as 
 
 * So in the Roman comedy, as we have seen, we find the latter type of 
 prologue largely predominating over the former, when we come to Terence, 
 with his attacks (in self-justification, it must be admitted) on Luscius Lavi- 
 nius, his rival-dramatist, and on other detractors from his merits. 
 
44 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 " To make a child, new swaddled, to proceed 
 Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed. 
 Past three-score years ; or with three rusty swords, 
 And help of some new foot-and-half-foot words, 
 Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars. 
 And in the tyring house bring wounds to scars, " — 
 
 or when, after comparing the aptness of his own 
 humours, and of his own language (language "such as 
 men do use "), with the chorus, creaking thrones, light- 
 ning-squibs, and drum-thunder of his unnamed rival, he 
 expresses to the audience a hope, rather than an expecta- 
 tion, that " you, that have so graced monsters, may like 
 men." So too, when, in the prologue to Every Man out 
 of His Humour, Mitis asks Cordatus, " How comes it 
 that in some one play we see so many seas, countries, 
 and kingdoms passed over with such admirable dex- 
 terity ? " and Cordatus sarcastically answers, " O, that 
 but shows how well the authors can travel in their 
 vocation, and outrun the apprehension of the auditory." 
 Here the allusion is, no doubt, to a large class of drama- 
 tists, but the shaft was principally directed, we cannot 
 help supposing, at the one man who towered above the 
 herd. There is a similar side-thought in the prologue 
 to The Staple of News, where he says of himself to the 
 audience, " He'd have you wise, much rather by your 
 ears than by your eyes." The monsters, fairies, sprites, 
 demons, witches, and ghosts of the spectacular drama of 
 the day, in which Shakespeare was especially prolific, 
 come in here for condemnation. Nor do we think that 
 these references to his rival were at all at variance with 
 " the love which he ever bore the man when living," and 
 
m. ENGLISH LITERATURE. 45 
 
 the admiration " on this side idolatry," which he pro- 
 fessed for him when dead.* 
 
 The lower mob of playwrights are dealt with in other 
 prologues by Ben Jonson in a far more contemptuous 
 fashion. No one ever possessed a more copious voca- 
 bulary of invective, or drove a more biting quill, than 
 hot-tempered old Ben. And in the prologues and 
 epilogues, which are mostly very lengthy, he contrived 
 to concentrate his venom, whether against rival play- 
 wrights, refractory players, or unsympathetic audiences. 
 These denunciations are always mingled with a liberal 
 measure of self-praise — in according which our dramatist 
 was by no means nice or hesitating. Of the lesser play- 
 writers, whom he should never have noticed, and who, 
 no doubt, loved to sting their great competitor into 
 furious onslaughts which for a moment levelled him 
 down to their own rank, he speaks thus, in the person 
 and savage language of Asper (prologue to Every Man 
 out of His Humour) : 
 
 " O, how I hate the monstrousness of time, 
 Where every servile imitating spirit, 
 Plagued with an itching leprosy of wit, 
 
 * So the prologue to Ford's Perkin Warbeck seems to hint, with 
 disapproval, at Shakespeare's free introduction of the clown (the ' ' misshapen 
 lout " attacked so bitterly in Hall's satires), though, on the other hand, 
 Ford adopts the sentiment of the Chorus of Henry V., in begging the 
 spectators to help the poet to annihilate time and space : 
 
 " We cannot limit. scenes, for the whole land 
 Itself appear'd too narrow to withstand 
 Competitors for kingdoms ; nor is here 
 Unnecessary mirth forced, to endear 
 A multitude," etc. 
 
46 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 In a mere halting fury, strives to fling 
 His ulcerous body in the Thespian spring, 
 And straight leaps forth a poet ! but as lame 
 As Vulcan, or the founder of Cripplegate." 
 
 But it is in The Poetaster, — a play specially levelled 
 at Thomas Dekker, by no means a bad poet, — that we 
 find the severest of Jonson's prologues, and the most 
 vehement censure of "the conjuring means of base 
 detractors, and illiterate apes," and of " that common 
 spawn of ignorance, our fry of writers,'' whose sole 
 endeavour, he alleged, was to " beslime his fame." 
 Though at the end of the prologue the poet stoutly 
 avows that "his mind it is above their injuries," it is 
 only too evident from the tone of this and other re- 
 criminatory productions of the kind, that it was no such 
 thing. Ben perversely determined to run a tilt against 
 every class of person who might otherwise be disposed 
 to favour him : fellow-wits, fellow- writers, and — worst of 
 all — the players who performed his plays, together with 
 the spectators, on whose applause, as long as he chose 
 to write for the " loathed stage," which he afterwards 
 so petulantly abandoned, he was of necessity depen- 
 dent for his reputation. When he did not revile others, 
 he so belauded himself as to disgust many a friend ; 
 and his famous " by God, 'tis good, and if you like 
 it, you may " (prologue to Cynthia s Revels) was re- 
 membered against him for a long time after the 
 original utterance of the line. Conscious, indeed, of 
 having provoked bitter criticism by these words, he half 
 apologizes for them in this very prologue, but neverthe- 
 less shows his disposition to apply them once more to 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 47 
 
 The Poetaster ; for after urging that this seeming pride 
 is but " a well-erected confidence " on his part, he con- 
 tinues :* 
 
 " Here now, put 'case our author should once more 
 Swear that his play were good : he doth hnplore 
 You would not argue him of arrogance," etc. 
 
 That which chiefly excited Jonson's wrath was the 
 thought that the hasty offsprings of miniature writers 
 should be compared for a moment with his un- 
 doubtedly laborious and conscientious work. Unfortu- 
 nately, audiences do not take into account the time 
 and labour spent upon a play ; but consider what it 
 is when produced ; and, if dull, with most serene com- 
 posure they damn it. Now Ben was always a slow 
 writer, a careful blotter, and an elaborator ad unguem. 
 He continually alludes to this, notably in some fine lines 
 in the epilogue to The Poetaster, succeeding those in 
 which he declares that comedy having been so unkind 
 to him, he will attempt the Tragic Muse — (a promise 
 which resulted in Sejanits) 
 
 "... once I'll essay 
 To strike the ear of time in those fresh strains, 
 
 As shall, besides the cunning of their ground, 
 Give cause to some of wonder, some despite. 
 
 And more despair, to imitate their sound. 
 I, that spend half my nights, and all my days. 
 
 Here in a cell to get a dark pale face, 
 To come forth with the ivy or the bays. 
 
 And in this age can hope no other grace — 
 Leave me ! There's something come into my thought. 
 
 That must and shall be sung high and aloof, 
 Safe from the wolfs black jaw, and the dull ass's hoof. " 
 
 None the less is the poet careful to tell his audience 
 
48 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 with some pride in the prologue to The Fox that that 
 play " was two months since no feature," and that 
 
 " Five weeks fully penned it, 
 From his own hand, without a coadjutor, 
 Novice, journeyman, or tutor." 
 
 And even so he confidently offers his critics " five lives 
 to mend it," if they can. 
 
 But what about Thomas Dekker? Did he take 
 these attacks in good part? By no means. Thomas 
 Dekker had a lively wit no less than Ben Jonson, and 
 no less store of pens, paper, and ink. He set to work, 
 therefore, to indite that very caustic play, Satiromastix, 
 or, the Unirussing of the Humorous Poet, a sustained 
 onslaught, in which his acrid competitor is lashed under 
 the name of Horace, and his ill-temper, his habit of 
 satirizing and epigrammatizing friends who had enter- 
 tained him in their houses, his envy, his failure as an 
 actor, his quarrels with players, captains, cavaliers, and 
 lawyers,* and his laborious and over-learned method 
 of composition, are all made subjects of the keenest 
 ridicule. All that Jonson had inflicted on Crispinus, 
 Dekker repaid to Horace with interest in this play of 
 Satiromastix. The last faint echoes of Dekker's re- 
 vengeful outcry against his rival are discernible in the 
 
 * It was necessary to conciliate if possible all, but at all events some 
 one or more of these various classes or "factions," as Richard Flecknoe calls 
 them in the Introduction (or Induction) to his Damoiselles h-la-Mode{\(i(>'l'), 
 one of the interlocutors in which asks: "But has he" (sc. the author) 
 " any faction for him? Has he any to cry him up in court or town? else 
 he'll be sure to be cryed down." Cf. Dryden {Works by Sir W. Scott), 
 vol. vii., p. 143. 
 
IN ENGLISH- LITERATURE. 
 
 49 
 
 " epilogue spoken by Tucca," a swaggering captain, and 
 a burlesque of a character of the same name which had 
 first found a place in The Poetaster. " I recant," says 
 Tucca, "bear witness all you gentlefolks that walk in 
 the galleries — I recant the opinions which I held of 
 courtiers, ladies, and citizens, when once in an assembly 
 of friars " (that is, at the Blackfriars' Theatre, in Ben 
 Jonson's Poetaster), " I railed upon them : tkat heretical 
 libertine Horace taught me so to mouth it" In conclusion 
 he begs " his twopenny tenants " (the " scaffolders," 
 or occupants of the gallery), " not to hiss the play, 
 because in that case you blow away Horace's revenge, 
 but if you set your hands and seals to this, Horace 
 will write against it, and you may have more sport ; he 
 shall not lose his labour, he shall not turn his blank 
 verses into waste paper. No, my poetasters will not 
 laugh at him, but will untruss him again, and again, and 
 again." 
 
 Ben Jonson was always the poet militant ; he 
 always had a grievance, — a rival to overcome, or a 
 theory of play-writing to upset, — but far more often 
 the former than the latter. In his prologues and 
 epilogues we find a much stronger personal element 
 than in those of Dryden, for instance (as we shall see 
 , presently), who, though always belligerent, usually 
 carried on his offensive and defensive warfare in re- 
 lation to theories and modes of literary workmanship, 
 rather than for purposes of denouncing individuals and 
 glorifying himself. Otway's prologues, on the other 
 hand, were almost as full of spleen and personal spite 
 
 E 
 
so THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 as those of Ben Jpnson himself. Either would have 
 done well to have imitated the reticence and modesty of ■ 
 Beaumont and Fletcher's- addresses to the spectators, or 
 of the graceful little epilogues of Ford, who scorned to 
 rear "trophies to himself by other men's dispraise." 
 Thus the epilogue to the latter's Lover's Melancholy 
 {pi the eight-line length usual with that author), 
 speaks thus for the actors and the poet : 
 
 " To be too confident is as unjust, 
 In any work as too much to distrust ; 
 AVlio from the laws of study have not swerved, 
 Know begged applauses never were deserved. 
 We must submit to censure, so doth he. 
 Whose hours begot this issue, yet, being free 
 For his part, if he have not pleased you, then 
 In this kind he'll not trouble you again." 
 
 So in the epilogue to The False One of Beaumont 
 and Fletcher, who were also singularly free from bitter 
 or, indeed, any references to rival authors, the speaker 
 hints that he could say much for '' ourselves, them " (the 
 authors) " and the play. Did I not rest assured, the most 
 I see Hate impudence, and cherish modesty." There 
 is a touching tribute to Fletcher's memory in the 
 lines prefixed by way of prologue to and spoken before 
 the performance of his play of The Elder Brother, when 
 revived after his death ; and also in the prologue written 
 by Shirley for the revival in 1633 of Fletcher's Loyal 
 Subject (originally acted in 16 18). So also we find 
 genuine and hearty praise of Marlowe, when The Jew 
 of Malta was revived after his death, in both the pro- 
 logues written on that occasion, — the Court prologue 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 51 
 
 and the Stage prologue {vid. inf.). The praise of Ben 
 Jonson in both the prologue and the epilogue to the 
 Duke of Buckingham's Rehearsal is obviously introduced 
 only to give scope for an attack on the contrasted methods 
 of Dryden. And we may say the same of the lines 
 written by Dorset for epilogue to a revival of Ben 
 Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, where we have 
 the ghost of Ben once more expressing contempt for 
 his successors. 
 
 Dryden so far follows these excellent models, that he 
 rarely relapses into mere self-praise.* Self-justification, 
 
 * One instance only can I find of unprovoked self-exaltation, and that 
 is half-sportive in its tone. In the epilogue to The Maiden Queen (acted 
 1667, the play which Charles II. allowed to be called " his play," so highly 
 did he approve of it), Nell Gwynne is made to say of " her client," whose 
 cause she had undertaken to plead, that he 
 
 "... defies 
 
 The sharpest of his censurers to say. 
 
 Where there is one gross fault in all his play. 
 
 The language is so fitted for each part ; 
 
 The plot according to the rules of art," etc. 
 
 But then the epilogue (in the hands of Nell), afterwards proceeds to 
 make fun of this " rant," as she calls it. Nell Gwynne, as prologue-speaker 
 and pleader on behalf of "her client," reminds us of the many occasions 
 •on which Ambivius Turpio announced himself in prologues as " orator " on 
 behalf of Terence against his rival Luscius Lavinius, whose " Theonine 
 tooth" had exercised itself on some occasions in accusing the greater dramatist 
 of pilfering his plots from the Greek comedy (see prologues to the Andria, 
 Etmtichus, Hemttontimorumenos, and Adelphi, avowing and justifying the 
 alleged offence), on others in charging him with indebtedness to the older 
 native comedians, such as Plautus (this is denied stoutly in the prologue to 
 Texta.ce!sEunuchus), or to noble contemporaries such asLcelius and Scipio, 
 who, it was insinuated, did not wish their names to be connected with the 
 drama ; on others again in ridiculing his bad style ' ' tenuis oratio et scriptura 
 levis," (this last charge is dealt with in the prologue to the Phormid). The 
 charge of indebtedness to the "homines nobiles" — Loelius and Scipio — is 
 •curious, both because it is the only one which is not distinctly or indignantly 
 
52 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 it is true — vindication of his own theories and ridicule 
 of those of other writers— he does constantly indulge 
 in, but the setting himself up on a pedestal solely for 
 the audience to gaze at was as little characteristic of his 
 prologues as were wanton attacks on individuals, solely 
 because they were rivals, and successful. Dryden, not- 
 withstanding much that has been said to support such 
 a view, had by no means a carping or envious spirit ; 
 while his addresses to the spectators are singularly 
 devoid of animus against the writer, apart from his 
 method of writing. From Ben Jonson, on the other 
 hand, we scarcely ever get a coherent criticism of the 
 methods of others ; but we find (mingled with much 
 personal [abuse), now an attack on the spectacular 
 element in the drama, now a satirical reflection on 
 preternatural breaches of the Aristotelian rules, and 
 now a complaint of the improper use of "humours." 
 But he does not succeed in convincing us of the 
 genuineness of his antipathy to any one of these 
 literary methods and practices, whereas he does im- 
 press us most forcibly with the reality and heartiness 
 
 repudiated by Terence (see the hesitating answers contained in the pro- 
 logues to the Heautontimorumenos and to the Adelphi, amounting almost to 
 admissions of at least some assistance, unless we assume Terence's modesty 
 to have been excessive), and because it recalls the eccentric ascription by 
 two authors in recent times, Mr. Holmes and Lady Delia Bacon, of all 
 Shakespeare's plays to the great philosopher, who, it is urged on similar 
 grounds, did not wish his name to be identified with the stage. It is 
 noteworthy that all these prologues of Terence are more justificatory and 
 recriminative than wantonly aggressive. The only prologue that might 
 possibly bear the character of ^7riTijitr)TiK(Js in the phrase of Evanthius, 
 namely that to the Andria, he is careful to apologize for, as thinking that 
 the introduction of this new form required some justification. 
 
JN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 53 
 
 of the blows which he aims at the successful rival 
 behind the method which that rival may have adopted. 
 In the prologue to The Magnetic Lady we find, it is true, 
 some strictures of an apparently non-personal character, 
 where he complains that " most of those your people 
 call authors, never dream of any decorum, or what is 
 proper in the scene, but grope at it in the dark, and feel 
 or fumble for it," and similarly in the prologue to the 
 pastoral play of The Sad Shepherd, he criticises in 
 general terms those who imagine that there is only one 
 way of writing such a drama, and that 
 
 " No style for pastoral should go 
 Current, but what is stamped with Ah ! and Ok ! " 
 
 Such an author, he says : 
 
 " Like poet yet remains, as those 
 Are painters who can Only make a rose. " 
 
 This position, by the way, is amusingly inconsistent 
 with his vehement objections on other occasions to any 
 divergence on the part of others from the beaten track of 
 the three Unities, and the Aristotelian canons ; and 
 would lead us to suppose that even here he is aiming at 
 some such artist of pastoral masques as Inigo Jones, 
 whom he elsewhere (epilogue to The Tale of a Tub) 
 attacks with much violence under the name of " In-and- 
 in,'' as giving increased importance to those optical 
 effects, which Ben saw clearly would soon divert the 
 sympathy and attention of audiences from the laboured 
 wit which he employed himself, and from the stilted argu- 
 mentation which appealed to the ear more than to the 
 
54 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 eye, and to the mind more than either, — from, in fact, 
 what he calls in one of his prologues, " the abstractest 
 work Opposed to the stuffed nostrils of the drunken 
 rout." 
 
 In Dryden's case, however, it is nearly always a 
 theory which he has to support, or a theory which he 
 has to knock down ; and this appears both in the pre- 
 faces and in the prologues and epilogues to his plays. 
 Indeed, the concrete images and concise couplets of the 
 latter are but the sustained and abstract reasoning of 
 the former in another shape, and " writ small." 
 
 No one ever changed his theories of dramatic com- 
 position more frequently than Dryden. He followed 
 the shifting phases of the popular taste during his long 
 life, but always lagged a little behind them. He clung 
 to his old loves as long as he could, and then, when 
 a decent interval of championship had intervened to 
 satisfy the advocates of consistency, he abandoned them 
 and took to the new. So puzzled was he by the fluctua- 
 ting humours of his audiences that in one of his 
 epilogues (that to Aurengzebe) he confesses that "his 
 art's like physic, but a happy guess," while in another he 
 
 tells us that by this time 
 
 ". . . he knows 
 There is a mode in plays, as well as clothes." * 
 
 * Thomas Middleton had used and developed this metaphor before 
 Dryden, in the prefatory remarks addressed " To the Comic Play- 
 Readers, Venery and Laughter," and prefixed to his play of The Roaring 
 Girl, or Moll Cut- Purse. " The fashion of play-making," he there says, 
 " I can compare to nothing so naturally as the alteration in apparel : for in 
 the time of the Great Crop-doublet, your huge bombasted plays, quilted 
 with mighty words to lean purpose, were only then in fashion. And as the 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 55 
 
 He tried to keep up with tlie spirit of his time, and, 
 on the whole, gave most creditable evidences of his 
 pliability in meeting its requirements. The rhyming 
 plays, the heroic dramas, the tragi-comedies, the " love 
 and honour " productions introduced by D'Avenant, the 
 boisterous farces, the adaptations of Shakespeare, the 
 lyrical plays, the importations from France and Spain — 
 all these styles he, in turn, vigorously defended, till the 
 cause was hopeless, and then proceeded to eat his words 
 and renounce his favourite theories with the best grace 
 he could command. But when he writes of himself in 
 the above-mentioned epilogue : 
 
 " Our poet writes an hundred years too soon, 
 This age comes on too soon, or he too fast," 
 
 he entirely mistakes his relation to the age. It was the 
 age which was too fast for him, and which he followed 
 hand passibus csquis. 
 
 Let us note for a moment how these shifting phases 
 of literary taste are reflected in Dryden's prologues and 
 epilogues. And first as to the rhymed drama. No one 
 was more, or more excusably, addicted to the rhymed 
 couplet than Dryden. It was the choicest weapon in his 
 armouiy, and the one with which he was most at home. 
 He defended it in the most polished of his essays, and 
 wrote the best of his plays for a considerable period of 
 
 doublet fell, neater inventions began to set up. Now, in the time of 
 spruceness, our plays follow the niceness of our Garments, — single plots, 
 quaint conceits, lecherous jests, drest up in hanging sleeves, and those are 
 fit for the Times and the Termers : such a kind of light-colour summer 
 stuff, mingled with divers colours, you shall find this published Comedy," 
 etc. 
 
56 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 his literary life in this style. Yet in the prologue ,to 
 Aurengzebe, he at last admits that he "grows weary of 
 his long-loved mistress, Rhyme," though one may sus- 
 pect that it was not of " his mistress Rhyme " that he 
 was weary, but of the continued opposition of society 
 to what it considered a liaison of a discreditable cha- 
 racter. " Let him retire," he pleads for himself to the 
 audience, in lines which show that here, at all events, he 
 appreciated his real position, " let him retire, betwixt two 
 ages cast, The first of this and hindmost of the last." 
 He did not retire, however, but lived to write much 
 harder things of his " loved mistress " than he ventured 
 to write in this farewell. In the prologue to Limberham, 
 for instance, he has a hit at spectacular, heroic, farcical, 
 and rhyming plays within the compass of three 
 couplets : 
 
 " True wit has seen its best days long ago. 
 It ne'er loolied up since we were dipt in show ; 
 When sense in doggrel rhymes and clouds was lost, \ 
 
 And dulness flourished at the actor's cost. 
 Nor stopped it here : when tragedy was done, 
 Satire and humour the same fate have run, 
 And comedy is sunk to trick and pun. " 
 
 Yet, in bringing all these varieties of the drama to their 
 then condition, no one had been more influential than 
 Dryden himself; and all the modes which he here 
 denounces had found in him, at one time or other, their 
 most brilliant exponent.* In a later prologue, the Ghost 
 of Shakespeare arises to condemn the age which could 
 
 * Except, indeed, that he did not use " the fulsome clench," as he calls 
 the pun in the prologue to Troilus and Cressida, as adapted by him. 
 
m ENGLISH LITERATURE. 57 
 
 produce no " successors to his name," and poor Rhyme 
 
 comes in for more rebuke : 
 
 "Weak short-lived issues of a feeble age, 
 Scarce living to be christened on the stage ! 
 For humour farce, for love they rhyme dispense, 
 That tolls the knell for their departed sense." 
 
 In such lines as these we find evidences of Dryden's 
 wonderful facility of recantation and renunciation : a 
 facility which cost him dear at the hands of rival wits, 
 such as Tom Brown. Dryden had the courage to be 
 inconsistent, and to change his opinions when he saw 
 them to be untenable, and his methods -when he saw 
 them to be unsuitable to the age. He was honest in all 
 probability in his successive surrender of long-held con- 
 victions ; but such honesty, such consistency in inconsis- 
 tency, has always been open to misconstruction. He 
 was always recanting : he recanted in politics, he recanted 
 in religion, but most of all he recanted in literature. 
 Rhyme, of his intended abandonment of which he gave 
 notice in the address preceding the play of Aurengzebe, 
 he did in fact abandon in the play which he wrote next 
 after it, namely. All for Love, in^the prologue to which 
 he announces regretfully of " our poet," that he 
 
 " Gives himself for gone ; you've watched your time: 
 He fights this day unarmed, without his rhyme." * 
 
 * In his long advocacy of rhyming plays, Dryden was opposing him- 
 self to a current which had begun to set in even with Marlowe, and shows 
 himself, perhaps, to have been more behind his age in this respect than in 
 any other. Marlowe, who had rather a Jonsonian way of hitting out at his 
 competitors, says in the prologue to Tamburlaine the Great : 
 " From jigging veins of rhyming mother-v/it, 
 And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, 
 We'll lead you to the stately tent of war." 
 
S8 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 So also of the famous " love and honour " style of 
 play, with its stilted sentiment, and subtle disputations 
 on motives ; no one had used it more extravagantly 
 than " Glorious John " : yet, when he saw that it would 
 no longer do, he contemptuously put it aside, and called 
 that' which had provided motive and material for so 
 many of his plays, " dull honour, all that chaff, which 
 . . . makes the vulgar laugh." These words are from the 
 prologue to the first part of The Conquest of Granada,. 
 a play itself by no means deficient in this same " dull 
 honour " element ; but it was characteristic of Dryden 
 to give a warning note of recantation, before he actually 
 and publicly recanted. 
 
 Then, again, who more skilful in adopting French 
 form, and Spanish matter, than Dryden ? And who- 
 more sturdy, at one period of his career, in defending 
 either mode of procedure ? He began his theatrical life 
 by a play based on a Spanish foundation, The Wild 
 Gallant, though the Second Astrologer in the prologue 
 regrets "the author's lot. To be endangered by a 
 Spanish plot." And the French wit and literary form,, 
 lending itself so easily to antithesis, repartee, and 
 rhymed couplets, we have seen that he followed at first 
 with the utmost enthusiasm. Yet in his epilogue to his 
 adaptation of The Tempest, he speaks with contempt 
 both of the form and matter thus imported from over 
 seas : 
 
 " Among the muses there's a general rot, 
 The rhyming Monsieur and the Spanish Plot.''' 
 
 But in regard to adaptations, Dryden, it must be 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 59 
 
 admitted, always maintained his perfect right to take 
 material wherever it was to be found, and claimed that 
 whatever good there was in the plays which he had so 
 adapted, came from the adapter's mind, and not from 
 the material with which he worked. To those who 
 shrieked out that he stole his plots, he was fond of 
 quoting Charles the Second's observation to a caviller, 
 that "he wished he or anybody else would steal plots 
 half as well." 
 
 This charge has been brought, at various times, 
 against all English dramatists from Shakespeare * to 
 Tom Taylor, and, as years go on, is more and more 
 difficult to prove, if true, or to refute, if untrue. Greene, 
 we know, called Shakespeare an " upstart crow, beauti- 
 fied with the feathers of others " ; and Fletcher had to 
 meet similar attacks in his prologue to The False One : 
 
 " New titles warrant not a play for new, 
 The subject being old ; and 'tis as true, 
 Fresh and neat matter may with ease be framed 
 Out of those stories, that have oft been named 
 With glory on the stage ; what borrows he 
 From him that wrote old Priam's tragedy. 
 That writes his love to Hecuba ? " 
 
 * We may here refer to the continuous attacks on Terence and the 
 insinuations of Lavinius that he was a thief and not a poet ("furem non 
 poetam fabulam dedisse "). The poet defends himself in the prologue to the 
 Andria against the charge of stealing from the Greek : that he took plots, 
 he avows, but not the expressions and style. Nsevius, Ennius, and Plautus 
 took Greek plots before him, and he was content to be called a plagiarist 
 in their company. In the prologue to the Etmuchas he defends himself 
 against the charge of having taken his plots from Nasvius and Plautus. If 
 the plots were similar, they were not so to his knowledge. Ignorance 
 ("imprudentia") was the cause, he says, and appeals to the spectators. 
 As for the Greek plots, he admits here again, as in the prologue to the 
 Heautontimorumenos, that he took them, and justifiably took them. 
 
6o THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 So too Ford, in the prologue to The Lover's Melan- 
 choly, says that, " in the following scenes he doth not 
 owe to others' fancies," but in composing the play, has 
 only asserted " the right a scholar claims," that is, the 
 right expressed in the oft-quoted phrase, je prends moii 
 Men oil je le trouve. Apparently others had exceeded 
 this right ; for Ford, contrary to his usual practice, 
 goes out of his way to add to the above suggestive 
 lines : 
 
 "It is art's scorn, that some of late have made 
 The noble use of poetry a trade." 
 
 Dryden's most vigorous championship of his habit 
 of "conveying" or utilizing foreign material is to be 
 found in the epilogue to The Mock Astrologer (founded 
 on Le Feint Astrologue of Corneille, which was itself 
 an adaptation of Calderon's El Astrologo Pingido), in 
 writing which he had borrowed from both the happy 
 hunting-grounds of English dramatists, France and 
 Spain. The speaker of the epilogue says that, "his 
 part being small," he has had time "to mark the 
 various^ censures " on the play. " Among the rest," he 
 had noted a certain knot of critics who " kept a fearful 
 stir, in whispering that he" (the poet) "stole the As- 
 trologer." And then 
 
 " Up starts a Monsieur, new come o'er, and warm 
 In the French stoop, and pull back o' the arm ; 
 MorMcit, dit il, and cocks, I am a rogue. 
 But he has quite spoil'd the feigned Astrologzie," 
 
 The poet, when asked what excuse he could invent for 
 all this, 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 6i 
 
 "... most unlike an author, vow'd 'twas true ; 
 Yet said, he used the French like enemies. 
 And did not steal their plots, but made them prize." 
 
 Not a very handsome "confession and avoidance" 
 this; and still less generous is his extension of the 
 metaphor : 
 
 " But should he all the pains and charges count 
 Of taking them, the bill so high would mount, 
 That, like prize-goods, which through the office come, 
 He could have had them much more cheap at home." 
 
 Something like this recriminating plea, we fancy, 
 has been not uncommon among our adapters of late 
 years. Such as it was, Dryden would never give it 
 up. Ravenscroft, in the prologue to Scaramouch, 
 borrowing from French and Italian sources, was more 
 generous : " like but the play," he says, " let others have 
 the name ; Let both French and Italian share the 
 fame." * 
 
 When, however, Shakespeare or some other great 
 English dramatist of a past age came under his tinker- 
 ing hand, it must be admitted that Dryden devoted the 
 happiest conceits and neatest couplets of his prologues 
 to his praise and honour (witness the beautiful prologues 
 to the adaptation of The Tempest and of Troilus and Cres- 
 
 * In his Preface to the play of Don Sebastian, Dryden expounds and 
 defends philosophically his principles of " making prize " of plots. " It is 
 the contrivance, the new turn, new characters, which alter the property, 
 and make it ours. The materia petica is as common to all writers, as the 
 materia medica to all physicians." He adds that "the ancients were 
 accused of being plagiarists." Terence was, as we have seen, and, like 
 Dryden, urges (in the prologue to the Eunuchus), that the characters of 
 slave, parasite, whore, irascible old man, pimp, soldier, etc., were common 
 property. 
 
62 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 sidd), so much so that he left himself little justification 
 for his alterations.* Dryden's renunciations of succes- 
 sive methods of play-writing were due, it is to be feared, 
 in some cases not so much to argument or internal 
 persuasion, as to the pressure of the multitude that 
 gathered within the playhouse walls. Populus vult 
 decipi: decipiatur. He changed his methods in accord- 
 ance with its views : and then, in some prologue or 
 preface, summoned up from his inner consciousness, with 
 a facility peculiar to him alone, casuistical reasons for 
 the change, just sufficient to hold water with the critics 
 of literature as opposed to the critics of the stage. In 
 the prologue to The Rival Ladies, he contemptuously 
 and candidly tells his audience as much : 
 
 " You now have habits, dances, scenes, and rhymes ; 
 High language often, ay, and sense sometimes. 
 As for a clear contrivance, doubt it not ; 
 They blow out candles to give light to the plot. 
 And for surprise, two bloody-minded men 
 Fight till they die, then rise and dance again. 
 Such deep intrigues you're welcome to this day : 
 But blame yourselves, not him who writ the play. 
 Though his plot's dull, as can be well desired. 
 Wit stiff as any you have ere admired ; 
 He's bound to please, not to write well." 
 
 One more instance of the discrepancy between Dry- 
 den's real tastes and his practice. When the Italian opera 
 first attempted to gain a foothold in this country, bitter 
 
 * "For " as the Duke of Buckingham says in one of his prologues, " if 
 ill writing be a folly thought, Correcting ill is sure a greater fault. " Tate, 
 in the prologue to his adaptation of Coriolamis, claims to "make gold 
 from ore, And turn to money what lay dead before," — or, in other words, 
 to have "invested the play with artistic merit." 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 63 
 
 was the indignation of dramatists, managers, actors, and 
 critics at the innovation. John Dennis thundered at it 
 in the prologues to his Iphigenia, and to his Liberty 
 Asserted ; scoffed at it as emasculating, and called on 
 true "Britons" not to endure the masquerading of a 
 foreign crowd within the walls of their playhouses. 
 Dryden caught up the cry which, commenced by 
 Downes, in his Roscius Anglicanus, and Wright, in his 
 Historia Histrionica, was echoed in later times by Colley 
 Gibber, and afterwards again by Fielding.' Yet Dry- 
 den's most savage lines against the opera are to be 
 found, where? — in the prologue to an opera, Albion 
 and Albaniiis, written by Dryden himself, and sulkily 
 flung at the heads of the audience. This is what he 
 says : 
 
 " We now prescribe, like doctors in despair, 
 The diet your wealc appetite can bear. 
 Since hearty beef and mutton will not do, 
 Here's ]\xlep-dance, ptisan of song and show ; 
 Give you strong sense, the liquor is too heady. 
 You're come to farce — that's asses milk — already. 
 Some hopeful youths there are, of callow wit, 
 Who one day may be men, if heaven think fit ; 
 Sound may serve such, ere they to sense are grown. 
 Like leading-strings till they can walk alone." 
 
 Yet, who had not followed only, but led, the popular 
 taste in this direction, if not Dryden himself, by such 
 semi-operatic entertainments, as he admits (in the pre- 
 face to Albion and Albanius) his reconstruction of 
 Shakespeare's Tempest to have been .' 
 
 There was yet another recantation, and that the 
 most important and famous of all, which Dryden made 
 
64 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 in the autumn of his career. But here — though no 
 doubt the changing tastes of the people, as well as 
 his own consciousness of the poet's true vocation, 
 awakened by the lashes of Jeremy Collier, gave the 
 impulse — the recantation bears evident marks of genuine- 
 ness. He " pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expres- 
 sions, which could be truly argued of obscenity, pro- 
 faneness, or immorality." He continues : " If he " (Mr. 
 Collier) " be my enemy, let him triumph ; if he be my 
 friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be 
 otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance. It be- 
 comes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a 
 bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good 
 one." 
 
 But Sir Richard Blackmore, who, in his Satire 
 Against Wit, had also attacked Dryden on the score 
 of the obscenity and profanity of his dramas, was not to 
 escape so easily ; and " Quack Maurus," in the prologue 
 to The Pilgrim, is assailed with some of the most biting 
 shafts from the veteran poet's armoury of wit. Some 
 verses in the " State Poems," quoted in Sir W. Scott's 
 edition of Dryden, refer to this discomfiture of Black- 
 more, contrasting it with Jeremy Collier's triumph : 
 
 " John Dryden enemies had three, 
 Sir Dick, old Nick, and Jeremy ; 
 The doughty knight was forced to yield, 
 The other two have kept the field ; 
 But had his life been something holier. 
 He'd foiled the Devil and the Colher." 
 
 We have yet to notice the references in the prologues 
 of our earlier dramatists to the state of the theatres in 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 65 
 
 which their plays were produced, to the introduction of 
 various reforms in the externals of the stage, to the 
 poets' quarrels with actors, and to the social movements 
 of the time. These subjects may conveniently form the 
 material of our next chapter. 
 
66 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Epilogues depart from their primitive intention — The Rehearsal on 
 the prologues and epilogues of " Poet Bayes " — Prologues 
 acquire an independent status — Prologues printed separately 
 — Prologues reviling the actors — Ben Jonson and the actors of 
 his plays — Ravenscroft — Dryden's and Massinger's indulgence 
 to the players, as expressed in their prologues — Heyvifood's 
 prologue on Marlowe and " sweet Ned AUeyn " — The revival 
 of The Jew of Malta — Audiences as subjects of prologues — 
 Massinger's deference to them — Ben Jonson's contempt and 
 vilificatory prologues — George Peele — Dryden's view : " A 
 civil prologue is approved by no man " — His open abuse of 
 his audience's ignorance and want of taste — Various classes 
 of playgoers ridiculed and denounced in prologues of Ben 
 Jonson, Jasper Mayne, and Dryden — The " Hectors of the 
 pit "—The " tavern- wits "—The " civet-wit "— " Tom Dove's 
 brotherhood" — Abuse of the censors and critics ; of the coldly 
 applauding gallants — Appeals to the "judging few" — Profes- 
 sional damnation of plays — Denunciation of " prattlers " in the 
 audience — Critics compared by Dryden in various prologues 
 to thieves turned hangmen ; to butchers excluded from a 
 jury ; to scriveners ; to wolves ; to bankrupt gamesters ; to 
 vultures ; to fleas ; to locusts ; and to whips — Middleton and 
 Heywood on critics — " Court bespeaks " — Prologues at court, : 
 "to the King and Queen" — Heywood, Jasper Mayne, artdt/ 
 Massinger's prologues and epilogues ",.at '^^^litehall" — The 
 " town " and ." the city " contrasted in prologj^frf also Loil'don 
 and the Universities — Dryden and Oxford auOTences : "Oxford, 
 to him a dearer name shall be, than his own mother'-urfivfersity" 
 — The " Athenian jud^^es." 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 67 
 
 It has already been shown how soon the simple uses 
 of the Prologue and Epilogue came to be abandoned in 
 order to make way for more complex and subtle devices : 
 and how the dramatists discovered what excellent oppor- 
 tunities these addresses to the audience afforded of 
 introducing their pet hobbies, or venting private spleen. 
 The old form of prayer, in which the applause of the 
 spectators, or — as in the epilogue to Beaumont and 
 Fletcher's Elder Brother* — not applause only, but fre- 
 quent visit, were frankly invited, men in time voted 
 " something musty ; " as early, in fact, as the date of 
 The Humorous Lieutenant, by these same authors, we 
 find the speaker of the prologue evincing a manifest in- 
 clination to disburden himself of the well-worn style : 
 
 " Would some one would instruct me what to say ! 
 For this same Prologue, usual to a play 
 Is tied to such an old form of Petition. " 
 
 So in the epilogue to The Custom of the Country, Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher complain that here too, the " old 
 form " has been done to death ; and even add : 
 
 " Why there should be an epilogue to a Play, 
 I know no cause : the old and 'usual way 
 For which they were made, was to entreat the grace 
 Of such as were spectators " — 
 
 or, as Hieronimo says in The Spanish Tragedy (when 
 coming foirward to reveal the dead body of his son, 
 
 * Which concludes : 
 
 " Shew your loves and liking to his " (the author's) " wit, 
 Not in your praise, but by oft seeing it ; 
 That being the grand assurance that can give 
 The poet and the player means to live." 
 
68 THE PROLOGUE AXD EPILOGUE 
 
 instead of delivering the customary address to the 
 Court), " to excuse gross errors in the play." Similar 
 complaints are made by Shakespeare in the epilogue to 
 As You Like It, and by Massinger in that to A Very 
 Woman. The "old and usual way" is clearly in • 
 Shakespeare's mind, when he makes Theseus in A Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream say to the "' rude mechanicals " 
 who, after their play is done, suggest an epilogue : 
 " No epilogue I pray you ; for your play needs no excuse. 
 Never excuse ; for when the players are all dead, there 
 need none to be blamed." (Act v. sc. i.) In The 
 Little French Lawyer the speaker of the prologue plainly 
 discards the ancient types both of prologue and epilogue 
 in the words : 
 
 " To promise much, before a Play begin, 
 And, when 'tis done, ask Pardon, were a sin 
 We'll not be guilty of." 
 
 To the very first of our dramatists, then, and to them 
 only may we apply the words of Shakespeare in All's 
 Well that Ends Well, — " thus he his special nothing 
 ever prologues." By the time of Dryden the " special 
 nothing " had become a " special something "-^so special 
 indeed, and so devoid of any necessary relation to the 
 drama of which it was ostensibly the forerunner, that, in 
 The Rehearsal, the prologues and epilogues of this poet 
 are made the subject ff particular ridicule. "Bayes" 
 (Dryden) is introduced by the author, or rather authors, 
 of this witty burlesque, as inviting the criticisms of 
 Smith and Johnson, two visitors to the theatre on the 
 occasion of the rehearsals of his new play. Bayes 
 
IN ENGLISH: LITERATURE. 69 
 
 begins at the beginning, and first of all submits his 
 prologue to the judgment of his friends. 
 
 " Bayes. Now, gentlemen, I would fain ask your opinion of one thing. 
 I have made a Prologue and an Epilogue, which may both serve for either : 
 that is, the prologue for the epilogue, or the epilogue for the prologue ; 
 (do you mark?) nay, they may both serve too, ^ egad for any other play as 
 ivell as this. 
 
 Smith. Very well. That's, indeed, artificial. 
 
 Bayes. And I would fain ask your judgment, now, which of them 
 would do best for the Prologue ? For, you must know, there is, in nature, 
 but two ways of making very good prologues. The one is by civility, by 
 insinuation, by good language, and all that, to — a — in a manner, steal your 
 plaudit from the courtesy of the auditors : the other, by making use of some 
 certain personal things, vfhich may keep a hank upon such censuring 
 persons, as cannot otherwise, 'egad, in nature be hindered from being too 
 free with their tongues. " 
 
 The complimentary species of invocation is rare 
 indeed in Dr.yden : and, except in the prologue to The 
 Indian Queen and in some of the addresses prefixed to 
 plays acted before the University of Oxford, " civility, 
 insinuation, and good language " were conspicuous by 
 their absence. " To make use of some certain personal 
 things," was, as we shall see, a course which fell in more 
 with the usual mood of Poet Bayes. And what is said 
 in the above-quoted passage as to Dryden's prologues 
 being equally applicable to any play is, as regards some 
 of them at least, not very wide of the mark. " Probably 
 upon several occasions," says Sir W. Scott, " he actually 
 transferred the same prologue from one new play to 
 another. Thus he reclaimed, from his adversary Shad- 
 well's play of The True Widow, the prologue which he 
 had furnished, and affixed it to The Widow Ranter of 
 Mrs. Behn. Sometimes also he laid under contribution 
 
70 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 former publications of his own, which he supposed to be 
 forgotten, in order to furnish out one of these theatrical 
 prefaces. Thus the satire against the Dutch furnishes 
 the principal part of the prologue and epilogue to 
 Aiuboyna" 
 
 Thus the prologue and the drama, though nominally 
 married, had in Dryden's time separated by mutual con- 
 sent : and this separation was both evidenced and 
 encouraged by the growing practice of printing the 
 addresses to the audience on detached sheets or broad- 
 sides, and selling them at the entrances of the theatres. 
 So independent indeed had the prologue become of its 
 former lord and master, and so doubtful a question was 
 it, whether it or " the play '' was then to be accounted 
 " the thing," that even Dryden, though himself a liberal 
 contributor to the then state of things, notices with a 
 contemptuous sniff the degradation of the drama im- 
 plied in this disproportionate exaltation of the hereto- 
 fore "weaker vessel." In the prologue to The Rival 
 Ladies, he contrasts the old relations between the pair 
 with those obtaining in his time : 
 
 " . . . in former days 
 Good prologues were as scarce as now good plays, 
 For the reforming poets of our age 
 In this first charge, spend their poetic rage. 
 Expect no more when once the prologue's done ; 
 The wit is ended ere the play's begun." 
 
 In course of time, even the witty tricks and novelties of 
 the restoration prologues became antiquated, and just 
 as, long before the date of the seventeenth-century 
 dramatists, we find Beaumont and Fletcher complaining 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 71 
 
 of the " old form of petition " which characterized the 
 " theatrical prefaces " of Marlowe and Shakespeare, and 
 hankering after novelties ; so, when we reach Fielding, we 
 find these same novelties, so fascinating to the audiences 
 of " the King's house," becoming in their turn wearisome 
 and played out.* But — lest we should stray beyond 
 our present hmits — ^we will say no more of this later 
 epoch, but proceed to examine how the dramatists 
 from Ben Jonson onward came to make more and 
 more liberal "use of some certain personal things," as 
 Bayes has it, to enhance the attractiveness of their pro- 
 logues, — an attractiveness which at all events custom 
 did not stale within the period at present under con- 
 sideration. 
 
 Ben Jonson, the first of the thoroughly militant pro- 
 logue-writers, waged war, as we have seen, against rival 
 
 * In the prologue to The Debatichess^ or the yesuit Caught (1732), 
 Fielding specially alludes to the Dryden style of prologue, ridiculed in 
 The Reheaisal, and pronounces it tedious and unfitted for the times. He 
 begins : 
 
 "I wish with all my heart, the stage and town 
 Would both agree to cry all prologues down, 
 That we, no more obliged to say or sing, 
 Might drop this useless, necessary thing." 
 
 Then, after enumerating the kinds of " stuff the poets make us deal in " and 
 the " old worn-out jokes of their retailing," he proceeds; 
 
 " Perhaps, for change, yes, now and then, by fits, 
 We're told that critics are the bane of wits ; 
 How they turn vampires, being dead and damned, 
 And with the blood of living bards are crammed. 
 
 ***** 
 Thus modern bards, like Bayes, their prologues frame, 
 For this and that and every play the same. 
 Which you most justly neither praise nor blame," etc. 
 
72 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 authors, players, and even audiences. Of the anti-rival- 
 author species of prologue we have already said some- 
 thing. The remaining classes, in which the very men on 
 whom the dramatist is dependent for the success of his 
 plays are boldly and even rancorously denounced and 
 ridiculed, are less easy of explanation. Dryden delibe- 
 rately bullied audiences, we know, on grounds of policy : 
 but Ben Jonson bullied the players in his prologues and 
 epilogues because, we fancy, he could not help it : his 
 atrabilious humour so willed it ; or rather, if the poet 
 could have seen himself as others saw him, he would 
 have been compelled to offer the more candid and apolo- 
 getic explanation of a modern writer, — " son Altesse ma 
 Vanite ainsi le veut." In the prologue to The Poetaster, 
 he makes Envy inquire whether there were " no players " 
 to help to " damn the author," and so forward her 
 sinister designs. " They," she says : 
 
 "... could wrest, 
 Pervert, and poison all they hear or see. 
 With senseless glosses, and allusions." 
 
 And so keenly was Jonson smarting at this time under 
 supposed injuries at the hands of actors, that the open- 
 ing scene of the play itself, so to speak, tastes of the 
 prologue ; especially the lines in which " Ovid senior," 
 the lawyer, reproaches " Ovid junior," the poet, for his 
 neglect of his legal studies and addiction to the drama. 
 " Yes, sir," exclaims this very " heavy father " to his 
 refractory son, " I hear of a tragedy of yours coming forth 
 for the common players ; " and then follows a long tirade 
 against the said " common players," in which the still 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 73 
 
 more philistine Tucca joins. " Ovid junior " hastens to 
 protest in dignified language : 
 
 " I am not known unto the open stage, 
 Nor do I traffic in their theatres : " 
 
 though he admits that he has written a tragedy for the 
 private perusal of some " near friends, and honourable 
 Romans." It is obvious that this was the proud position 
 which Jonson would himself have wished to occupy — 
 a position in which all actors might with impunity have 
 been defied — were it not for the necessity laid upon him 
 by that powerful stimulus, '' negatas artifex sequi voces,'' 
 spoken of by Persius. The extraordinary thing in his 
 case is that, deeming it worth while to write for the 
 " common players " at all, he should have thought it not 
 impolitic to abuse them on every possible occasion, both 
 in the spoken prologues and dialogue of his plays, and 
 in the various printed additions, by way of preface or 
 justification, which he appended to them. For instance, 
 in committing one of his unsuccessful plays to the press, 
 he enlarges the title in the following burlesque epigraph, 
 significant of the resentment which he cherished against 
 both actors and audiences : " As it was never acted, but 
 most negligently played by some, the King's servants, 
 and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others, 
 the King's subjects." The dispassionate critic cannot but 
 suspect that there is something wrong with an author who 
 attributes the ill fortune of his drama to a conspiracy 
 of audience and performers. It is then admitted to be a 
 case of all the world against the poet : and in such a con- 
 test it is difficult to persuade the world that it is wrong. 
 
74 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 As may be supposed, no author but Ben Jonson has 
 been found bold enough to put into the mouth of an 
 actor a prologue directly vilifying his company and their 
 profession. In later times, we find, it is true, occasional 
 complaints of the excessive approbation bestowed on the 
 actors to the neglect of the poet who wrote the words 
 for them : thus Ravenscroft in the prologue to his much- 
 derided Scaramouch * " a comedy after the Italian 
 manner," founded on Moliere's plays. The Forced 
 Marriage and Scapin, gives this circumstance as the 
 apology for his having struck out a new line of his 
 own : 
 
 " The poet does a dangerous trial make, 
 And all the common roads of plays forsake. 
 Upon the actors it depends too much. 
 
 ***** 
 He rather chose in new attempts to fail, 
 Than in the old indifferently prevail. " 
 
 But not even Dryden ever became so infatuated and 
 violent as to cast aspersions on the performers at the 
 King's theatre, though he may have sometimes thought 
 that (where his efforts failed) the failure was due in 
 some degree to the acting. He seems, indeed, to have 
 been on the whole very indulgent to the players, though 
 not so to critics, audiences, and rival authors ; and the 
 only instance which I can find of his even privately 
 hinting at incompetency of representation, and then in a 
 
 * But Heywood, the dramatist, in the Epilogue to the Court, on the 
 revival of Marlowe's Jeia of Malta, allows the actors to disclaim any share 
 of responsibility in anything that may have gone wrong : 
 
 "And if aught here offend your ear and sight, 
 We only act and speak what others write." 
 
IX ENGLISH- LITERATURE. 75 
 
 by no means positive manner, is in the dedication of his 
 Assignation (a signal failure) to Sir Charles Sedley, 
 where he writes very fairly and sensibly as to the causes 
 of its unfavourable I'eception : " It succeeded ill in the 
 representation, against the opinion of many of the best 
 judges of our age, to whom you know I read it, ere it 
 was presented publicly. Whether the fault was in the 
 play itself, or in the lameness of the action, or in the 
 number of its enemies, who came resolved to damn it 
 for its title," — (a curious suspicion this, which finds a 
 place also in the epilogue to the play : " Some thought 
 the title of our play to blame ; they liked the thing but 
 yet abhorred the name") — " I will not dispute. That 
 would be too like the little satisfaction which an unlucky 
 gamester finds in the relation of every cast by which 
 he came to lose his money." * Pre-eminent in " the 
 number of enemies " to this unlucky drama was that 
 Ravenscroft whose Oriental dramas were so derided in 
 its prologue ; and who, in one of his own prologues (viz. 
 that to The Careless Lovers, produced shortly after The 
 Assignation) takes occasion to exult over his great rival's 
 discomfiture, attributing it rather to demerits of the play 
 
 * One remarkable instance to the contrary is furnished, not by any 
 prologue or epilogue to a play, but in his epistle to Granville, on the latter's 
 play of Heroic Lmie (acted in 1698). The following passage of this letter 
 oTended the actors, especially Powell, who retorted in print (see Scott's 
 Drydm, vol. i., p. 412, and vol. xi., p. 65) : 
 
 " Our sense is nonsense, through their " (the actors') " pipe conveyed ; 
 Scarce can a poet know the play he made 
 'Tis so disguised in death. . . . 
 Thus Itys first was killed, and after dressed 
 For his own sire, the chief invited guest. " 
 
76 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 itself, than to the " lameness of the action," except in so 
 far as the latter was consequent on the former : 
 
 " In fine, the whole by you so much was blamed, 
 To act their parts, the players were ashamed." 
 
 The Duke of Buckingham, however, would make us 
 believe that Dryden was not on such good terms with 
 the players as might be supposed from these prologues 
 and epilogues, but was in the habit of hectoring it over 
 them in private, however much he may have appeared 
 to respept them in public. In the last scene of The 
 Rehearsal, when the stage-keeper announces that " the 
 players are gone to dinner," after some hours' hard 
 work at their business, the rage of Bayes knows no 
 bounds. " How ! " he exclaims, " are the players gone to 
 dinner .? 'Tis impossible . . . 'Egad, if they are, I'll 
 make them know what it is to injure a person who 
 does them the honour to write for them, and all that. 
 A company of proud, conceited, humorous, cross- 
 grained persons, and all that. 'Egad I'll make them the 
 most contemptible, despicable, inconsiderable persons, 
 and all that, in the whole world, for this trick." He 
 then threatens " to lampoon '' them, and to sell his play 
 to the other house (the Duke of York's theatre), " and 
 so farewell," he concludes in high dudgeon, " to this 
 stage, 'egad, for ever." In the prologue to the Phormio 
 of Terence, the actors are indirectly complimented by a 
 suggestion that a certain play of a rival dramatist suc- 
 ceeded by virtue of their efforts only, and in spite of the 
 inefficient authorship. 
 
 But whatever Dryden's private opinion may have 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 77 
 
 been as to the acting of his plays, he was judicious 
 enough to conceal it in his public addresses to the 
 audience, if he did not go so far as to associate, after 
 the manner of the Elizabethan dramatists, the players 
 with the author as co-partners in the success or failui^e 
 of the play. Thus the modest Shakespeare couples 
 " author's pen " and " actor's voice," in his prologue to 
 Troilus and Cressida, as having like potency, under 
 ordinary circumstances, to inspire the confidence of 
 the prologue-speaker ; and in the induction to T/ie 
 Taming of the Shrew, the players there appearing, and 
 their vocation, are spoken of as kindly and genially as 
 in the well-known scene in Hamlet; though Pope, in 
 his preface to Shakespeare, brings forward their enter- 
 tainment " in the buttery,'' forsooth, as evidence of the 
 poet's contempt for the actor's art. Luckily Shake- 
 speare did not, if the writers of Queen Anne's time did, 
 judge men through the official spectacles of a wiAitre des 
 ceremonies, or according to the seats at table which they 
 occupied. In Plautus's time the actors of the poet's 
 company are sometimes referred to in very familiar, but 
 scarcely respectful, terms, e.g. in the epilogue to the 
 Cistellaria, a whipping is jocularly held out as the punish- 
 ment of a bad, and a drink as the reward of a good, 
 performance : " Qui deliquit vapulabit, qui non deliquit, 
 bibet." 
 
 The interests of the two branches of the dramatic 
 art are similarly identified by Massinger in his epilogue 
 to A New Way to Pay Old Debts ; "nor we," Wellborn 
 says of himself and fellow-players, — 
 
78 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 "... nor we 
 
 Nor he that wrote the comedy, can be free 
 Without your manumission ; which if you 
 Grant willingly, as a fair favour due 
 To the poet's, and our labours (as you may, 
 For we despair not, gentlemen, of the play) : 
 We jointly shall profess your grace hath might 
 To teach us action, and him how to write." * 
 
 It is clear that Massinger recognized the " creation " 
 of a role, in more senses than one ; and that, though he 
 could not use the modern term, in that French sense 
 which has recently given risen to some controversy, he 
 none the less appreciated the fact. Another epilogue of 
 this dramatist cannot be passed over in this connection, 
 — that to his play of The Einperoj' of the East, which not 
 only places once more the poet and the actor in friendly 
 juxtaposition, but throughout pays a cordial and grace- 
 ful tribute to the apparently youthful and untried per- 
 former of the principal part, only mentioning the author 
 in the last line. A doubt is expressed whether "he, 
 on whom . . . the maker did confer his Emperor's 
 part" had "given" the audience" satisfaction in his art 
 of action and delivery." 
 
 "... 'tis sure truth, 
 The burthen was too heavy for his youth 
 To undergo ; — but, in his will, we know 
 He was not wanting, and shall ever owe, 
 
 * Double responsibility is recognized by Middleton, in the epilogue to 
 the The Roa7-ing Girl (concluding lines) — 
 
 " Yet for such faults as either the writer's wit 
 Or negligence of the actors, do commit 
 Both crave your pardons : if what both have done 
 Camiot full pay your expectation." 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 79 
 
 With his, our service, if your favours deign 
 To give liim strength hereafter to sustain 
 A greater vi^eight. It is your grace that can 
 In your allowance of this, vi'rite him man 
 Before his time ; which if you please to do, 
 You make the player and the poet too." 
 
 Very different in tone were such utterances as these to 
 the lines in which Ben Jonson loved to proclaim his 
 contemptuous isolation from those who at least gave life 
 and form to his creations. Nor did the dramatists of 
 the Elizabethan era, as a rule, praise only the actors 
 who took their own parts to the disparagement of the 
 players of bygone times or rival houses. When Marlowe's 
 favourite play of The Jeiv of Malta, which originally 
 furnished Ned Alleyn with his most famous part, was 
 revived at the Cockpit, Perkins was entrusted with the 
 role of Barabbas, Alleyn being then dead. The " prologue 
 to the Stage," though encouraging Perkins, does iiot 
 attempt in any way to decry the merits of " sweet Ned," 
 whom even Ben Jonson could not but commend in 
 choicest verse, or to " damn with faint praise " either 
 the past creator, or the original exponent of " the Jew." 
 Says Hey wood, who revived the play : 
 
 " We know not how cur play may pass this stage. 
 But by the best of poets in that age 
 The Malta-Jew had being and was made : 
 And he then by the best of actors played. 
 In .Hero and Leander one * did gain 
 A lastiri'g memory, in Tamburlaine, 
 This Jew, with others many : th' other 'f., won 
 , The attribute of peerless, being a man '< ■ ■ 
 Whom we may rank with (doing no one ,Wr6ng) 
 -Proteus Tor shapes, and Roscius for''^ tongue ; 
 
 * Maflowe. ' ^ji.t.Alteyn, 
 
 ■ It. ■ 
 
So THE PROLOGUE. AND EPILOGUE 
 
 I 
 
 So could he speak, so vary : nor is't hate 
 
 To merit in him * who dotlj. personate 
 
 Our Jew this day : nor is't his ambition 
 
 To exceed, or equal ; being of condition 
 
 More modest : this is all that he intends, 
 
 (And that too at the urgence of some friends), 
 
 To prove his best, and, if none here gainsay it, 
 
 The part he hath studied, and intends to play it, t 
 
 In graving with Pygmalion to contend, 
 
 Or painting with Apelles, doubtless the end 
 
 Must be disgrace : our actor did not so : 
 
 He only aimed to go, but not outgo. 
 
 ***** 
 
 All the ambition that his mind does swell, 
 Is but to hear from you (by me) 'twas well." 
 
 The only occasion on which Plautus refers in pro- 
 logue or epilogue to any special actor, is in the " thea- 
 trical preface" to the Amphitryo. The prologue-speaker 
 there (evidently fearing a tumult of the Forrest and 
 Macready, or Kean and Booth type) begs the audience 
 not to factiously support any one actor against any 
 other. (He is evidently referring to some particular 
 individual, though he does not name him.) Let there be 
 no attempt in the " cavea " (or pit) to cry up any one 
 player ; but let every person, in theatrical as in higher 
 walks of life, win his spurs by merit. A good protest 
 against the claque-system is neatly expressed in the lines : 
 
 ' ' Eadem histrioni sit lex quae summis viris : 
 Virtute ambire oportet non fautoribus ; 
 Sed habet fautores semper, qui recte facit." 
 
 Shakespeare, as far as I know, refers by name to no 
 past or present actor of any of his characters, either for 
 praise or for blame, in his prologues and epilogues. This 
 
 * Richard Perkins. 
 
 t The same strain is apparent in the Epilogue to the Stage. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 8i 
 
 abstinence was in keeping with his courteous attitude 
 both to his audiences and to his brother-dramatists. 
 The practice of making allusions to players of rival 
 houses was commenced by Dryden, who, in a prologue 
 already cited, makes Nell Gywnne compare the broad 
 brim of her hat with that of Nokes at "t'other house." 
 The reference here is by no means an unkindly one ; 
 and, in fact, Dryden had formerly been under the 
 greatest obligations to this comedian (the object of 
 Colley Gibber's so fervent admiration), for having 
 played, when he belonged to the Duke's house, the 
 character of Sir Martin Mar-all, which the poet had 
 expressly written for him, in a manner to evoke the 
 enthusiasm of all the critics of the day, and insure the 
 success of the comedy. Davies, in his Dramatic Mis~ 
 cellanies, fancies that he can detect a vindictive glance 
 at Haines (a comedian whom we have already noticed 
 as specially identified with the delivery of extraordinary 
 and sensational prologues) in the conclusion of Dryden's 
 epilogue to The Pilgrim : 
 
 " But neither you nor me, with all our pains 
 Can make clean work ; there will be some remains, 
 While you have still your Oates, and we our Haines." 
 
 The reason, which Davies assigns for this opinion, is the 
 very oddest imaginable. He thinks that Tom Brown, 
 in penning the clever dialogue between " Poet Squab " 
 (Dryden) and Haines, comparing notes on their respec- 
 tive feats of recantation, had bitterly offended the 
 laureate (which is not improbable) ; and that thereupon 
 Dryden revenged himself, not on Tom Brown, but on 
 
 G 
 
82 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 the unoffending Haines, who was not responsible for 
 the base literary uses to which his name had been put 
 by the satirist. This, we think, is improbable; especially 
 considering the number of the poet's characters which 
 Haines had filled, and of the poet's prologues (such as 
 that to The Assignation, and several other plays) which 
 he had spoken. Probably poor Haines was necessary 
 to turn the couplet, supply the rhyme, and point the 
 antithesis : and he was accordingly sacrificed to the 
 necessities of the occasion. 
 
 We now approach what necessarily formed the largest 
 element in the farrago of which the average prologue 
 or epilogue of the Elizabethan and Restoration periods 
 was compounded ; that is, the reflections on the audi- 
 ences, on their tastes, and on their critical ability. 
 Here the contrast between the earlier and the later 
 epoch is very marked. In the days of Elizabeth, abuse 
 of audiences was confined to the prologues and epi- 
 logues of Ben Jonson and a few others of his kidney : 
 in Dryden's time, it was normal and habitual, and the 
 spectators would almost have been surprised to find 
 themselves treated otherwise. 
 
 The grave modesty and urbane deference to the 
 public voice which distinguished the prologues of Mas- 
 singer ; * and the quiet spirit of true courtesy — as far 
 
 * Compare especially the Prologues to The Guardian and The Bashful 
 Lover. From the former of these, it would appear that Massinger, for 
 some reason, had lost reputation before the date of the play which it 
 preceded, on account of his having produced nothing for so long a time, 
 and that certain envious persons had gone about spreading the report that 
 the author had written himself out. The poet, therefore, in this prologue 
 expresses a hope that he may prove that he can yet write a play. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 83 
 
 removed from grovelling self-abasement as from hector- 
 ing self-assertion — which pervaded (to take the most 
 notable instances) the prologue to Shakespeare's Troilus 
 and Cressida, or the epilogues to his second part of 
 Henry IV. and As You Like It, — these were quite alien 
 to the mental habit of that combatant dramatist, Ben 
 Jonson, who cannot at any rate be accused of milk-and- 
 water appeals to his audiences. Witness the latter's 
 arrogant prologue to Every Man Out of His Humour, 
 containing such lines as these : 
 
 "... if we fail 
 We must impute it to this only chance, 
 Art hath an enemy called ignorance, " — ■ 
 
 and the contemptuous terms in which the speaker of the 
 prologue to Cynthia's Revels is made to characterize 
 "the vulgar and adulterate brain," and "pied ignorance" 
 of the ordinary playgoer, and to disclaim for the poet 
 any anxiety as to the " popular applause, or foamy 
 praise, that drops from common jaws." In the epilogue 
 to The Poetaster, the author is almost beside himself 
 with rage, when he comes to deal with the professed 
 critics among his audiences, the " monsters," and " vile 
 Ibides," and " unclean birds," whose malevolent attacks, 
 he says, had almost forced him — 
 
 " To rive his stained quill up to the back. 
 And dainn his long-watched labours to the fire ; 
 Things that were born when none but the still night 
 And his dumb candle, saw his pinching throes ; 
 Were not his own free merit a more crown 
 Unto his travails than their reeking claps. " 
 
 Poor hot-tempered Ben ! When we think of those 
 
84 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 " long-watched labours," that " pallid face," the " still 
 nights," and the "dumb candle," we cannot but feel 
 a kindness for this earnest, hard-working, proud, con- 
 scientious, impolitic member of the- g-etms irritable; 
 though we can understand why so few of his contem- 
 poraries chose to follow him in this style of addressing 
 the spectators.* When, however, we arrive at the period 
 of Charles II., we find that playhouse audiences had 
 been thoroughly educated up to this kind of treatment 
 at the hands of their favourite authors. Dryden, in 
 fact, makes no secret of his persistent practice, and 
 boldly argues that playgoers preferred rough handling 
 to smooth compliments ; as, for example, in the second 
 prologue to The Maiden Qtieen, he avows to the audience 
 that: 
 
 " The most compendious method is to rail, 
 Which you so like, you think yourselves ill used 
 When in smart prologues you are not abused. 
 A civil prologue is approved by no man ; 
 You hate it as you do a civil vifoman. 
 Your fancy's palled, and liberally you pay 
 To have it quickened, ere you see a play. " 
 
 But in the prologue which he wrote for Southerne's 
 Disappointment (1684), " spoken by Mr. Betterton," the 
 then aged, and perhaps more temperate poet, while 
 admitting the custom, seems to doubt its policy : 
 
 * George Peele, indeed, who was almost as mad, though not so atra- 
 bilious as Ben Jonson himself, in the prologue to Sir Clyomon and Sir 
 Clamydes, writes very rudely of his patrons : 
 
 "... our author he is pressed to bide the taunt 
 Of babblers' tongues, to whom he thinks as frustrate all his toil. 
 As pearls taste to filthy swine which in the mire do moil. " 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 85 
 
 " How comes it, gentlemen, that nowadays, 
 When all of you so shrewdly judge of plays 
 Our poets tax you still with want of sense ? 
 All prologues treat you at your own expense. 
 Sharp citizens a wiser way can go ; 
 They make you fools but never call you so." 
 
 This looks as if Dryden purposely began the pro- 
 logue in a courteous strain, reflecting that he was writing 
 it for a less-known brother dramatist, and that the bully- 
 ing manner, which his own honoured name would suc- 
 cessfully carry off, might be thought ill-judged when 
 nominally proceeding from the mouth of Southerne ; 
 but that the excellent intentions with which he com- 
 menced could not hold out beyond the first two couplets, 
 or prevent the cloven hoof from appearing in the third, 
 where the sneer at the unalterable nature of the audience, 
 whatever might be the nature of the prologue, could not 
 have been attributed by the least discerning critic of the 
 day to any other than " Poet Bayes." If the audiences 
 really liked " abuse " in " smart prologues," as supposed, 
 then their debt to Dryden must indeed have been im- 
 mense. This is how the literary dictator estimates the 
 intelligence of the average frequenters of the King's 
 house ; he seems in these lines to despise himself for 
 submitting to regard them, even nominally, as pay- 
 masters and ultimate patrons, instead of tribute-render- 
 ing vassals and subjects : 
 
 " The unhappy man, who once has trailed a pen, 
 Lives not to please himself, but other men ; 
 Is always drudging, wastes his life and blood, 
 Yet only eats and drinks what you think good. 
 What praise so e'er the poetry deserve, 
 Yet every fool can bid the poet starve." 
 
86 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 This passage is extracted from the prologue which 
 Dryden wrote to Nat Lee's " bouncing play " of CcBsar 
 Borgia, which, as Colley Gibber tells us, only "just paid 
 candles and fiddles." He continues further on : 
 
 " You sleep o'er wit, — and by my troth you may ; 
 Most of your talents lie another way. 
 You love to hear of some prodigious tale, 
 The bell that toU'd alone, or Irish whale " — 
 
 referring in the last lines to diversions, akin to the Two- 
 headed Nightingale or the tattooed Greek nobleman, 
 provided by the Barnum or Farini of the period. In 
 another prologue the same hankering after grosser and 
 more personal amusements than the (presumably) ideal 
 presentations of the stage, — the taste for " drunken 
 prophecies, libels, and dreams," — the neglect of play- 
 writers in comparison with news-hawkers, — is denounced 
 with the same scornful vehemence : 
 
 ' ' If there be yet a few that take delight 
 In that which reasonable men should write, 
 To them alone we dedicate this night. 
 The rest may satisfy their curious itch 
 With city gazettes, or some factious speech. 
 Or whate'er libel, for the public good. 
 Stir up the Shrovetide crew to fire and blood. 
 Remove your benches, you apostate pit, " etc. 
 
 He recommends the pittites to go back to their 
 " dancing on the rope," and jeers at their inability to 
 swallow the solid food which he was able to present to 
 them : 
 
 " Weak stomachs with a long disease oppressed 
 Cannot the cordials of strong wit digest ; 
 Therefore thin nourishment of farce ye choose, 
 Decoctions of a barley-water muse. 
 A meal of tragedy would make ye sick, 
 Unless it were a very tender chick. " 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 87 
 
 Not very far removed was such a state of the drama, 
 and were such tastes on the part of the audience, from 
 those of the present day ; only we now tell the critical 
 public what we think in the smooth and palatable para- 
 graphs of a leading article, instead of in the pointed 
 couplets of a bitter and hard-hitting prologue. Dis- 
 tinctions, however, were usually made by dramatists 
 between the component sections of their audience. It 
 was understood that in attacking the majority, the poet 
 was but conveying a veiled compliment to the apprecia- 
 tive minority. And on this ground we can understand 
 the favourable reception which many of these addresses 
 enjoyed. It is open to every spectator to fancy himself 
 the "judicious one" who is not contemplated in the 
 general condemnation of " a whole theatre of others." 
 Even Ben Jonson often marked out the true wits and 
 critics of spirit from the common brainless herd ; but 
 who these former could have been in his opinion it is 
 difficult to discover. They are nowhere specified by 
 any distinguishing marks ; and from his prologues and 
 epilogues it would be as impossible a task to find them 
 out, as it would be to deduce from Burton's Anatomy 
 of Melancholy any mode of life which may not con- 
 duce to moodiness. In the prologue to Every Man out 
 of His Humour he says : 
 
 " Good men, and virtuous spirits, . . . 
 Will cherish my free labours, love my lines."* 
 
 * Again, he speaks of 
 
 "... attentive auditors 
 Such as vifill join their profit with their pleasure, 
 And come to feed their understanding parts," — 
 
88 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 But where were these " good men and virtuous 
 spirits ? " For of the three main classes, which made up 
 the audiences of the day, — namely " the understanding 
 gentlemen of the ground" (the pittites), the gallants 
 who sat and smoked on the stage (the fashionable 
 occupiers of the stalls they would now be), and the 
 professed tavern-wits (answering to the coffee-house 
 dictators of a later period, and the dramatic critics of 
 the present), — each and every one comes in for his 
 share of depreciation and contempt. The brain of the 
 " scaffolder " is " vulgar and adulterate " (prologue to 
 Cynthia! s Revels); or if the tenants of " the yard " were 
 at one time naturally disposed to like what is good in 
 a play, — this native . complexion had long since been 
 vitiated and poisoned by the soi-disant wits, whose 
 manner of delivering pretentious judgments they speedily 
 learned to imitate. Against these men, who pervert 
 the healthy instincts of humble admirers in embryo, 
 Ben is peculiarly, and not unnaturally, bitter. " O, I 
 would know them," says Asper in the prologue to Every 
 Man Out of His Humour : 
 
 " . . .for in such assemblies 
 They are more infectious than the pestilence. 
 
 * » * * * 
 
 How monstrous and detested 'tis to see 
 
 For these, and such as these, he promises that he will " prodigally spend 
 himself, and melt his brain into invention, coin new conceits, and hang his 
 richest words, as polished jewels in their bounteous ears." Again, in the 
 epilogue to The Poetaster, he avows (after Hamlet) : 
 
 " If I prove the pleasure but of one 
 So he judicious be, he shall be alone 
 A theatre unto me." 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 89 
 
 A fellow, that has neither art nor brain, 
 
 Sit like an Aristarchus, or stark ass, 
 
 Taking men's lines with a tobacco face. 
 
 In snuff, still spitting, using his wry'd looks, 
 
 In nature of a vice, to wrest and turn 
 
 The good aspect of those that shall sit near him 
 
 From what they do behold ! O, 'tis most vile." 
 
 Jasper Mayne, in the epilogue (at Blackfriars) to 
 his City Match speaks in the same strain of those persons 
 who devoted themselves to the labour of achieving a 
 reputation for wit and judgment, in the only place^ the 
 theatre, where it was possible for them to do so, and 
 among the only possible disciples — those " who six- 
 pence pay and sixpence crack." These men, says the 
 dramatist, 
 
 "... call 't reproof to make a face. 
 Who think they judge, when they frown i' the wrong place. 
 Who, if they speak not ill o' the poet, doubt 
 They lose by the play, nor have their two shillings out." 
 
 He ends by an appeal to the " true hearers," " who 
 to his comedy read, and unseen, Had thronged theatres, 
 and Blackfriars been," . . . since, he adds, " they can 
 only clap who know to praise." 
 
 Dryden also with his more polished rapier pricks 
 " the little Hectors of the pit " (second prologue to The 
 Maiden Queen), who, he seems to fancy, by demagogic 
 arts diverted the applause which was his due, and which 
 would otherwise have been rendered by his supporters 
 in that quarter. There was a league of self-constituted 
 censors who intercepted, or forbade the payment of 
 legitimate tribute : "looking for a judgment or a wit," 
 says the speaker of the epilogue to his Mock Astrologer, 
 
go THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 " Like Jews I saw them scattered through the pit : 
 And where a knot of smilers lent an ear 
 To one that talked, I knew the foe was there. 
 The club of jests went round ; he who had none 
 Borrowed o' the rest, and told it for his own." 
 
 The powers of corruption, whereby a little leaven of 
 confident criticism succeeds in leavening the whole lump 
 of inert pittites, " as easily led by the nose as asses are," 
 — and the manufacture of judgments on a play, are 
 described with the subtilty of a keen observer, and 
 the authority of a sufferer and expert. The process is 
 much the same in our own day. In the prologue to 
 Dr. Charles D'Avenant's Circe, Dryden again alludes, 
 after the manner of his predecessor, Ben Jonson, to the 
 contagious influence of the malevolent critics among the 
 simple-minded multitude, — those " who scattering '' their 
 " infection through the pit, with aching hearts and empty 
 purses sit." And he continues in terms which might 
 fairly be applied to certain audiences of some of our 
 London theatres of to-day (the Haymarket for instance) : 
 
 " And then you clap so civilly, for fear 
 
 The loudness might offend your neighbour's ear. 
 That we suspect your gloves are lined within, 
 For silence sake, and cottoned next the skin." 
 
 He ends by an appeal, also in Ben's style, from these 
 "usurpers" to "the only knowing, only judging few," 
 who had read the play previously in private, and ap- 
 proved it.* 
 
 * This was the kind of appeal made in the epilogue to The City 
 Match (in the passage above quoted). In the epilogue to Aurungzebe 
 Dryden ends after a like fashion, putting himself in the hands of those 
 select few, "who can discern the tinsel from the gold:" though it is a 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 91 
 
 That Dryden was sometimes at any rate, and in his 
 best-tempered moods, inclined to trust the verdicts of 
 the common juries of the playhouses, provided they 
 could be freed from the influence of the self-constituted 
 and incompetent judges who laid down bad law for 
 them, appears from the concluding lines of another of 
 his epilogues, in which he begs Phoebus above all to 
 "preserve the eighteen-penny place" (in the gallery) — but 
 for the "pit-confounders" and despotic tamperers with 
 the independent and healthy judges of the masses, — 
 
 " . . . let them go, 
 And find as little mercy as they show ! 
 The actors thus, and thus thy poets pray ; 
 For every critic saved, thou damn'st a play. " * 
 
 So too Lacy, the actor, in the prologue to his play 
 Old Troop or Monsieur Raggou, avows his preference 
 for the genial gallery in comparison with the critic- 
 ridden pit : 
 
 " Defend me, O my friends of th' upper region 
 From the hard censure of this lower legion : 
 I was in hope that I should only see 
 My worthy crew of th' upper gallerie : 
 What made you wits so spitefully to come ? 
 To tell you true, I'd rather had your room." 
 
 Considering the extent to which the theatres and the 
 actors (Lacy himself especially) were then dependent on 
 the Court and the nobility, this plain avowal, though of 
 course in a sportive strain, is decidedly significant. 
 
 hopeless matter, he fears, for notwithstanding that it is " their prerogative 
 to use the mind," yet he cannot but dread more "their votes who cannot 
 judge, than theirs who can. " 
 
 * On the mutability of the pit, as denounced in another of Dryden's 
 prologues, see Scott's Dryden, vol. vi. , p. 382. 
 
92 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 Yet these tavern and coffee-house celebrities, who 
 made the damnation of plays their peculiar business, 
 actually went through some sort of training for the 
 purpose, reading up French, Spanish, and old English 
 plays, in order to be first in the field where a plagiarism 
 was to be unearthed, and they claimed some measure of 
 acquaintance with literature. But the gallants, who would 
 have thought it beneath them to show much knowledge 
 of such matters, and who went to the playhouse merely 
 because it was fashionable, and in order to put them- 
 selves en evidence, excited Ben Jonson's wrath, although 
 they did not irritate Dryden, more than the professed 
 critics. This is how Ben (prologue to Every Man out of 
 His Humour) depicts for us " a gallant of this mark." 
 Such a one, 
 
 " . . . to be thought one of the judicious 
 Sits with his arms thus wreathed, his hat pulled o'er, 
 Cries mew " (cat-calls), " and nods and shakes his empty head, 
 
 ifc 4: 3): ift * * 
 
 And now and then breaks a dry biscuit jest, 
 Which, that it may more easily be chewed, 
 He steeps in his own laughter." 
 
 The best picture, however, of this sort of auditor is to 
 be found in the Induction to Cyntkia's Revels, where one 
 of the children describes the " Civet-wit," who " knows no 
 other learning " than " the price of satin and velvets : 
 nor other perfection than the wearing of a neat suit ; 
 and yet will censure as desperately as the most pro- 
 fessed critic in the house, presuming his clothes should 
 bear him out in it." Next we have a portrait of 
 a very well-known figure at all times in theatrical 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 93 
 
 circles, the laudator temporis acti who remembers the 
 " palmy days " of the drama, and groans over its sub- 
 sequent degeneracy. " Another, whom it hath pleased 
 nature to furnish with more beard than brains, prunes 
 his mustaccio, lisps, and with some score of affected 
 oaths, swears down all that sit about him ; that the 
 old Hieronomo, as it was first acted, was the only 
 best and judiciously penned play in Europe." Do 
 we not all know this type very intimately ; is he not 
 to be seen at the first nights of revivals of old plays — 
 (he rarely goes to absolutely new performances), and 
 does he not always most offensively call to mind the 
 original first night at which he was present, say forty 
 years ago t Just as Ben Jonson's next species of 
 fashionable playgoer "talks of twenty years since, and 
 when Monsieur was here, and would enforce all wits 
 to be of that fashion, because his doublet is still so." 
 Have we not here too our " modern instances ? " How 
 often have been dinned into our ears the superficial 
 vapourings of some gallicizing monomaniac, who can 
 never be persuaded that any cup-and-saucer piece of 
 French indecency and pert dialogue can be otherwise 
 than ineffably perfect and true to (heaven save the 
 mark !) nature .-' Next to this is described the proto- 
 type of another sort of " gallant," whom we fancy 
 we can detect any evening in the Gaiety stalls, ■ — the 
 blas6 young nian who thinks Romeo's protestations, 
 and Hamlet's soliloquies, unnatural, and Shakespeare 
 unsuited for the age. Such a one " miscalls all by 
 the name of fustian, that his grounded capacity" 
 
94 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 ("grounded" refers to the pit, as does the expression 
 " gentlemen of the ground " or floor of the house) 
 " cannot aspire to." " A fifth " — and he is much the 
 most harmless of them all — " only shakes his bottle 
 head, and out of his corky brain squeezeth out a 
 pitiful learned face, and is silent." Would that this 
 last qualification were noticeable in more of our boxes 
 and stalls than it is at the present day ! But the mis- 
 fortune of a visit to the theatre has been, in all ages 
 and places, the circumstance that the pleasure of the 
 innocent playgoer who wishes to hear the words of the 
 drama is absolutely at the mercy of any ill-bred person 
 who may think his own concerns and conversation of 
 more moment to those about him than that which they 
 presumably "came forth for to see." This detestable 
 nuisance at any rate existed in Dryden's, as it had in 
 Ben Jonson's day, and met with the same public rebuke 
 conveyed through the same medium (almost the only 
 possible one), the prologue or epilogue. In the epilogue 
 written upon the occasion of the union of the two rival 
 companies (the Duke's and the King's) in 1 686, Dryden 
 draws particular attention to 
 
 "... a sort of prattlers in the pit, 
 Who either have, or who pretend to wit ; 
 These noisy sirs so loud their parts rehearse, 
 That oft the play is silenced by the farce. " 
 
 We are reminded in these lines of the often-told 
 story of the cynical Frenchman at the play, who, after 
 in vain endeavouring to hear what the actors were say- 
 ing, in consequence of the continuous chatter of the 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 9S 
 
 occupants of the neighbouring box, at length, when 
 asked by them the cause of his vexation, rephed that 
 " the foolish players were making so much noise that 
 he could not catch the diverting conversation of the 
 ladies and gentlemen near him." In plays of a later 
 date, such as Wycherley's Country Wife, we find similar 
 remonstrances — inserted in the dialogue of the play 
 itself — against the still prevaiHng practice of gallants 
 of the "Sparkish," type perambulating the house to 
 circulate their own good things, instead of giving an 
 opportunity to others of hearing those of the play. 
 
 But it was not so much on the "judging fops," the 
 amateur criticasters,' — still less on the barbarian taste of 
 the gallery,* except so far as it afforded an easy prey to 
 the insidious influences of the regulars, that this fine 
 dramatic despot wasted his weapons either of coercion 
 or conciliation. It was the professed censors, the dis- 
 appointed or rival authors, who possessed enough ac- 
 quaintance with the tricks of the trade to bear hardly 
 upon any technical faults which their wolfish eyes could 
 detect, and just enough tincture of literary cultivation 
 to make the ebullitions of spite pass for the matured 
 deliverances of sense and experience, or help the advo- 
 cate to pose as the judge — it was such men as these 
 who moved Dryden's sharpest denunciation.! He 
 
 * Though these " Bear-garden friends," too, receive some hard hits in 
 the prologues to Ckomenes and some other plays. 
 
 t Swift (^Tale of n. Tub, sect, iii., "on Critics") says, "I deem the 
 invention, or at least the refinement of prologues, to have been owing to 
 these younger proficients" — that is, to those "junior scholars," as he else- 
 where calls them, in the art of criticism, who, — at first appointed to attend 
 
96 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 attacks them again and again in the neatest couplets 
 of his neatest prologues : he compares them now to 
 this offensive object, now to that ; and, in hitting off 
 their characteristics, often makes use of his happiest 
 images. In the prologue to the second part of The 
 Conquest of Granada he, like Lord Beaconsfield and 
 several writers before and after him, regards the majority 
 of professional critics as authors who have failed in 
 their own vocation, but improves upon the adage by 
 going further, and pronouncing the remainder of this 
 class to be made up of would-be scribblers, men guilty 
 in thought and intent, if not in deed, of the cacoethes 
 scribendi. 
 
 " They who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write, 
 Turn critics, out of mere revenge and spite : 
 A playhouse gives them fame ; and up there starts, 
 From a mean fifth-rate wit, a man of parts. 
 (So common faces on the stage appear, 
 We take them in, and they turn beauties here). 
 Our author fears these critics as his fate ; 
 And those he fears by consequence must hate, 
 For they the traffic of all wit invade, 
 As scriveners draw away the bankers' trade. " 
 
 He likens these critics who have failed to " thieves con- 
 demned," and afterwards made hangmen, in the prologue 
 to The Rival Ladies. 
 
 A very happy comparison occurs in the second pro- 
 logue to The Maiden Queen, where the critics, whose 
 reputation depends upon the number of plays they can 
 cry down, are described : 
 
 theatres, "spy out the worst part of a play, '' and duly report to their tutors, — 
 "grow up in time to be nimble and strong enough for hunting down large 
 game " on their own account. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 97 
 
 "No critics' verdict should, of right, stand good, 
 They are excepted all, as men of blood ; 
 And the same law should shield him from their fury, 
 Which has excluded butchers from a jury." * 
 
 A few lines further on, knowing the uselessness of 
 appealing to these critics in his character of poet, he 
 very funnily changes his ground, and avowing himself 
 to be as truculent a critic as any of them, begs that, as 
 a brother in the art, he may be spared : 
 
 " Good savage gentlemen, your own kind spare ; 
 He is, like you, a very wolf or bear ; 
 Yet think not he'll your ancient rights invade, 
 Or stop the course of your free damning trade ;' 
 For he (he vows) at no friend's play can sit, 
 But he must needs find fault, to show his wit." 
 
 But then he expresses a hope that his critics have 
 something in hand which he may criticize and rend to 
 pieces in turn : 
 
 " With such he ventures on an even lay, 
 For they bring ready money into play." 
 
 But as for the would-be writers above referred to, who 
 shrink from the perils of an even dramatic encounter, 
 and will give no hostages to fortune in the shape of 
 productions of their own pen : 
 
 " Those who write not, and yet all writers nick, 
 Are bankrupt gamesters, for they damn on tick. " 
 
 In the prologue to Southerne's Loyal Brother Dryden 
 draws an elaborate and witty parallel between the sly 
 critics, who profess to mean well, and the class of 
 
 * Cf. the prologue to The Indian Eviferor, beginning — "Almighty 
 critics, whom .our Indians here Worship, just as they do the devil— for 
 fear." 
 
 H 
 
98 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 persons whom, next to these, he hated most of all (at 
 this period at any rate), — Whigs : 
 
 " Poets, like lawful monarchs, ruled the stage, 
 Till critics, like damned Whigs, debauched our age, 
 Mark how they jump ! Critics would regulate 
 Our theatres, and Whigs reform our state ; 
 Both pretend love, and both (plague rot them) hate. 
 The critic humbly seems advice to bring. 
 The fawning Whig petitions to the king ; 
 But one's advice into a satire slides, 
 T'other's petition a remonstrance hides. 
 These will no taxes give, and these no pence. 
 Critics would starve the poet, and Whigs the prince.'' 
 
 In the prologue to All for Love, the first play, it will 
 be remembered, in which Dryden " fought unarmed, 
 without his rhyme," the critics are supposed to be 
 conscious of the poet's disadvantage, and are appro- 
 priately likened to vultures gloating over an easy victim, 
 and " all gaping for the carcase of a play." After a few 
 lines, however, the simile is evidently thought too digni- 
 fied for the occasion, and the odious tribe are, in a 
 passage containing a very well-known and oft-quoted 
 couplet, considered in the light of a far less majestic 
 animal : 
 
 " Let those find fault whose wit's so very small. 
 They've need to show that they can think at all ; 
 Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow ; 
 He who would search for pearls must dive below. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 Half-wits are fleas, so little and so light. 
 We scarce could know they live, but that they bite. " 
 
 Such being the opinion of this dramatist on his 
 judges, "the Dons of wit," we cannot be surprised to 
 find that his wishes in regard to their fate and future 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 99 
 
 are not remarkable for tenderness. The least savage 
 prayer on the subject is to be found in the prologue 
 to Limberham, where his natural foe is compared to 
 another genus of insect, the locust : 
 
 " Next summer, Nostradamus tells, they say. 
 That all the critics shall be shipped away, 
 And not enow be left to damn a play. 
 To every sail beside, good heaven, be kind. 
 But drive away that swarm with such a wind. 
 That not one locust may be left behind ! " 
 
 Yet Dryden should have been grateful to these same 
 assailants, if, as he avows in the epilogue to The Maiden 
 Queen, they supplied him with a stimulus to exertion, 
 and if 
 
 " Critics were the whip, and he the top ; 
 For as a top spins more, the more you baste her. 
 So every lash you give, he writes the faster, " 
 
 On the whole, however, it would appear, that the first 
 line of the epilogue to the adaptation of Troilus and 
 Cressida, put into the mouth of Thersites, candidly repre- 
 sented the poet's feelings in the matter : " these cruel 
 critics " he there writes, " put me in a passion ; For in 
 their lowering looks I read damnation." Dryden's 
 hatred of the critics, and the many choice passages 
 above-quoted which evidence it, were clearly present to 
 the minds of the Duke of Buckingham, and his clever 
 ■coadjutors, in writing the burlesque of The Rehearsal, 
 where Poet Bayes, in the first act, after informing his 
 interlocutors that he does not write to "please the 
 country" or after "the old plain way," but solely to 
 gratify " some persons of quality, and peculiar friends " of 
 his, " that understand what flame and power in writing 
 
100 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 is " — (a hit at the poet's justificatory, explanatory, and 
 often adulatory dedications of his plays to the Earls 
 of Danby, Rochester, Buckingham, etc.), goes on to 
 announce that ' he will have " two or three dozen of his 
 friends to be ready in the pit," to applaud and protect 
 his fame against envious assailants ; " for," he explains, 
 " even let a man write ever so well, there are nowadays, 
 a sort of persons they call critics, that, 'egad, have no 
 more wit in them than so many hobby-horses ; but 
 they'll laugh at you, sir, and find fault, and censure 
 things, that, 'egad, I'm sure they are not able to do them- 
 selves. A sort of envious persons, that emulate the 
 glories of persons of parts, and think to build their fame, 
 by calumniating of persons that, 'egad, to my knowledge, 
 of all persons in the world , are, in nature, the persons 
 that do as much despise all that, as — a — In fine, I'll say 
 no more of them." It is needless to say that the poet's 
 manner of daily conversation, and little tricks of speech, 
 are so faithfully reproduced here, that we can almost 
 fancy ourselves at Will's coffee-house, with the short- 
 tempered dictator in his armchair, vouchsafing to us a 
 pinch out of his snuff-box, the while he delivers his 
 harangue, with interjectional "in nature's" and"'egads." 
 " Were it not," he winds up, " for the sake of some 
 ingenious persons, and choice female spirits " {e.g. Mis- 
 tress Reeves,* the actress of the King's Theatre, his 
 liaison with whom was made the subject of a good deal 
 of fun in this burlesque) " that have a value for me, I 
 would see them all hang'd, 'egad, before I would e'er set 
 * She spoke the epilogue to The Maiden Queen "in man's clothes.'' 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. lol 
 
 pen to paper, but let them live in ignorance, like 
 ingrates." 
 
 It will appear from the above that it must have been 
 a sufficiently hard task to satisfy all the multifarious 
 tastes which found their proper representatives in the 
 theatres of the period-; more especially when we con- 
 sider the paucity of these playhouses, in comparison 
 with the great number and variety of those of modern 
 times, in some one of which almost any individual may 
 find his peculiar fancy gratified, and his favourite style 
 of play in vogue. But from the times of Shakespeare 
 to those of Dryden, the dramatist had several distinct, 
 and even diametrically opposed, orders of mind to con- 
 sult ; and the wonder is, not that Shakespeare occasion- 
 ally introduced his clown or grave-digger, and Dryden 
 his farce or dagger and bowl, but that these poets made 
 no more use of such expedients than they did. Mas- 
 singer, in the prologue to The Bashful Lover, conscious 
 of the playwright's difficulties in this respect, hopes that 
 it is " no crime " — 
 
 ' ' To be a little difSdent, when we are 
 To please so many with one bill of fare." 
 
 And in other prologues and epilogues we find the 
 like complaints. Middleton, for instance, in the epilogue 
 to The Roaring Girl draws an elaborate parallel between 
 the dramatist who tries in vain to please the many- 
 headed Demos, and the painter who made a picture, 
 which " in striving to please all, pleased none at all," 
 and proved a monstrosity. So also Heywood, in the 
 epilogue to his Woman Killed with Kindness, compares 
 
102 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 the playgoers of the time to a miscellaneous crew of 
 connoisseurs in wines assembled at a tavern, and passing 
 their different judgments on the liquor brought them by 
 mine host ; the result being that — 
 
 " . . . ill one hour. 
 The wine was new, old, flat, sharp, sweet, and sour.'' 
 
 " Unto this wine," he adds, " we do allude our play." 
 By the time of Dryden it had become evident that there 
 were two, and only two, proper methods of dealing with 
 the conflicting elements of the audience ; one of which 
 was to attach one's self definitely to the most cultivated 
 or the most popular portion, and exalt it to the skies at 
 the expense of the others ; the other was to abuse all 
 classes alike, after the manner of Jonson and Dryden 
 himself Like the barrister, who having six cases in the 
 courts of Westminster at the same time, took a ride in 
 the park, and deserted them all, on the ground that this 
 was the only way of doing equal justice to all his 
 clients ; so Ben and John agreed in their custom of im- 
 partially proclaiming the equal crassness of each and 
 every of the different judgments which went to make up 
 the parti-coloured sense of contemporary play-houses.* 
 
 But it was not always to a miscellaneous audience 
 that the dramatist was forced to write. Occasionally he 
 was honoui'ed with a " court bespeak," and, under such 
 
 * Dryden's epilogue to The Indian Emferor distinguishes the various 
 provinces of theatrical critics, and attempts to assign his peculiar sphere to 
 each — the sonneteer, the burlesque-wit, the coffee wit, the don of wit, the 
 pittite, the disappointed poet, etc. In the prologue to The Spanish 
 Friar, the fickleness -and unreliability of dramatic tastes and sympathies is 
 severely noticed. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 103 
 
 circumstances, when he knew his critics and patrons, it is 
 needless to say that his confidence was much greater. 
 Special prologues and epilogues were always composed 
 for these occasions ; the formal modesty of which 
 expressed a well-grounded assurance as unmistakably as 
 the blustering attitude of the corresponding addresses at 
 the common playhouse betokened an uneasy diffidence. 
 In the old editions of the separate plays of Massinger, 
 Chapman, and other Elizabethans, we frequently come 
 across a double set of prologues and epilogues, one set 
 purporting to have been delivered " at Blackfriars," the 
 other " at Whitehall " ; and to compare the language of 
 the two is instructive. Thus in the revival of Marlowe's 
 Jew of Malta, above referred to, at the Cockpit, there 
 was both a prologue " to the Stage " (as it was called), 
 and a prologue " spoke at Court," beginning " Gracious 
 and great ...',' and appealing to the " dread sove- 
 reign " ; also a pair of epilogues to match. To Jasper 
 Mayne's City Match there was one "prologue to the 
 King and Queen," and another " at Blackfriars." In the 
 former the author humbly beseeches his royal master to 
 consecrate the work of his hands, and make it " clean," 
 and very shabbily professes to be ashamed of his play, 
 and of play-writing, taking care to explain that he is 
 only an amateur at the business ; and would consider it 
 dishonourable to be otherwise : 
 
 "... none he holies, sit here, upon his wit, 
 As if he poems did, or plays commit: 
 
 * A He * * 
 
 For lie is not o' the trade, nor would excel 
 In this kind, where 'tis lightness to do well." 
 
104 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 It was the King alone, he says, who saved his play 
 from the fire. Afterwards it seems to have been per- 
 formed at Blackfriars (reversing the common order, 
 which, in the matter of plays, was people first and 
 King afterwards), — ^where the author did not fail in his 
 prologue to mention (somewhat offensively) the fact of 
 its having been formerly approved by the Court, and 
 stamped with a more potent imprimatur than any mere 
 mob of Blackfriars groundlings could confer. He 
 boasts again that he knows not " the cares " of " them 
 that eat by the stage and wit," and that he could " make 
 the actors," though the audiience "came not twice, no 
 losers, since " they acted " at the King's price," who 
 had made " the play public." And a similar contrast 
 is observable in the tone of the two epilogues. 
 
 As, in the case of The City Match, the author 
 having, so to speak, applied successfully to the supreme 
 court, afterwards comes down haughtily with a sort of 
 prerogative writ of mandamus to the court of inferior 
 jurisdiction, and, metaphorically, throws his play at 
 their heads, with an " accept this ! you are bidden to do 
 so by your betters ; " — so (conversely) Massinger in his 
 Emperor of The East, having first sued in a humble 
 prologue to the inferior court, and failed apparently in 
 his petition, betakes himself thereupon to the ultimate 
 court of appeal, and, in his prologue " at Court," thus 
 prays that the judgment below may be reversed : 
 
 " As ever, Sir, you lent a gracious ear 
 To oppressed innocence, now vouchsafe to hear 
 A short petition. At your feet, in me, 
 The poet kneels, and to your majesty 
 Appeals for justice." 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 105 
 
 The play, he says, has been 
 
 "... laboured that no passage might appear 
 But what the queen without a blush might hear : 
 And yet this poor work suffered by the rage 
 And envy of some Catos of the stage : 
 Yet still he hopes this play which then was seen 
 With sore eyes, and condemned out of their spleen. 
 May be by you, the supreme judge, set free. 
 And raised above the reach of calumny." 
 
 After the Restoration, the sovereign, instead of 
 ordering special performances at Whitehall, took to 
 visiting the theatre more frequently in person :, and with 
 the decline of "court bespeaks," the special class of 
 court prologues declined also. Consequently we do not 
 often find Dryden writing them. The sad fate of the 
 one which he wrote for the court masque of Calisto we 
 have already noticed. 
 
 The only sort of distinction between audiences 
 
 which could be drawn in Dryden's time was that 
 
 between the " town " and the " city " of London, or 
 
 , again, that between London itself and the Universities.* 
 
 The prologue to Eastward Hoe (printed, 1605), the 
 
 joint work of Jonson, Marston, and Chapman, is one 
 
 of the first to mention "the city," as likely to form an 
 
 audience of a special and distinctive character, — an 
 
 audience to appreciate a drama dealing with goldsmiths, 
 
 la\yyers, apprentices, tailors, usurers, and altogether 
 
 strongly redolent of Cheapside. It concludes : 
 
 " Bear with our willing pains ; if dull or witty 
 We only dedicate it to the city." 
 
 * Another prologue dealing generally, and in no very conciliatory 
 • spirit, with the audiences of the day, was that writteij by Dryden for 
 Lodowick Carlell's play, Arviragtis and Philicia. 
 
io6 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, and several other 
 of his plays, appeal in like manner to the peculiar tastes, 
 and humours of mercantile London. And even Dryden, 
 in the epilogue to his Marriage a-la-Mode, takes this 
 interest into consideration, and appears to cater for its 
 exclusive vote ; " since, therefore," he sums up, 
 
 "... court and town will take no pity, 
 I humbly cast myself upon the city." 
 
 But the far more important distinction between the 
 London audiences and those of the Universities was 
 fully recognized by our playwrights from the earliest 
 times, and their sense of this distinction signified by the 
 widely different character of prologue or epilogue which 
 they penned for their plays, according as they were to 
 present them to the more or to the less refined 
 gathering of the two. 
 
 Most of the earliest plays acted at the Universities pre- 
 served to a considerable extent the old Morality flavour, 
 and dealt largely in abstractions ; such plays, for instance, 
 as Lingua, The Return from Parnassus, etc. : and they 
 were at first usually written in Latin, such as Emilia, 
 Ignoramus, MelantJie, etc., ... so that when Albumazar 
 (afterwards revived, with a prologue written for it by 
 Dryden) was acted in English before King James in the 
 hall of Trinity College, Cambridge (Maixh 7, 1614), it 
 was thought necessary to apologize in the original pro- 
 logue for this innovation, necessitated (as it was ex- 
 plained) by the presence of ladies. From this time 
 English plays became common at the Universities, and 
 Dryden made them more popular than ever, principally 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. • 107 
 
 by the delicate flattery which he infused into the very 
 neat and scholarly prologues which he wrote for these 
 occasions. The incense was of such fragrancy and 
 subtilty that not even the erudite nostrils of Oxford 
 could withstand its influence. Comparisons are freely 
 drawn between the coarseness of London, and the refine- 
 ment of academic criticism : and Dryden repeats to 
 the University dons and students (though in choicer 
 verses) the sneers which (to do him justice) he had 
 never hesitated to address face to face to the play- 
 goers of the King's house. Again and again (for these 
 prologues to the Universities are very numerous) he 
 commiserates himself for being compelled to do so 
 much hack-work for London pits, and felicitates himself 
 that he is occasionally permitted to address an Oxford 
 audience. Thus in a prologue to this University (of the 
 year 1674) he writes : 
 
 "Poets must stoop when they would please our pit, 
 Debased even to the level of their wit ; 
 Disdaining that which yet they know will take, 
 Hating themselves what their applause must make. 
 But when to praise from you they would aspire. 
 Though they like eagles mount, their Jove is higher. 
 So far your knowledge all their power transcends. 
 As what should be, beyond what is, extends. 
 
 Again in an epilogue to the same society (1673), he 
 compliments in graceful verses, both Vice-Chancellor 
 Bathurst, and " the Athenians " over whom he presided, 
 and whose "learned hospitality" he dispensed. One 
 cannot but think, when we consider the poet's life in 
 London, with his four plays a year to write for the 
 King's house, his literary quarrels, his dubious relations 
 
io8 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 to noble patrons (insulted and beaten by their bravos 
 with clubs one day, and daubing them with fulsome 
 flattery the next), and his continual unrest,* that there 
 was genuine feeling in the wistful words with which 
 this epilogue commences : 
 
 " Oft has our poet wished this happy seat 
 Might prove his fading Muse's last retreat." 
 
 Surely this much-vexed writer, working under such 
 unsuitable conditions, and in such an alien age — yoking 
 his genius to such prosaic ploughs to turn over so coarse 
 and heavy loam — must often have hoped to exchange 
 the dissolute court-life and wrangling coffee-houses of 
 London for the cloistered seclusion of a college chamber, 
 and sighed 
 
 " . . . for quiet and content of mind 
 Which noiseful towns and courts can never know. 
 And only in the shades, like laurels, grow. 
 Youth ere it sees the world here studies rest, 
 And age, returning thence, concludes it best. 
 What wonder if we court that happiness 
 Yearly to share, which hourly you possess. 
 Teaching e'en you, while the vext world we show. 
 Your peace to value more, and better know ? " 
 
 The most marked compliment to Oxford, as com- 
 pared with London, taste in matters theatrical is to be 
 found in the " Prologue to the University of Oxford," 
 spoken (as usually on these occasions) " by Mr. Hart, at 
 the acting'' of Ben Jonson's Silent Woman. Dryden 
 there tells his "Athenian Judges " that 
 
 * Cf. Dryden's mournful testimony to his neglect by Charles II. 
 " The pension of a prince's praise," was, he says, "all that could be got 
 from that quarter." " Little was the muses' hire, and light their gain," 
 in the time of the Merry Monarch. 
 
, IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 109 
 
 " Poetry which is in Oxford made 
 An art, in London only is a trade. 
 There haughty dunces, whose unlearned pen 
 Could ne'er spell grammar, would be reading men. 
 Such build their poems the Lucretian way, 
 So many huddled atoms make a play ; 
 
 To such a fame let mere town wits aspire, 
 And their gay nonsense their own cits admire. 
 Our poet, could he find forgiveness here, . 
 Would wish it rather than a plaudit there. 
 He owns no crown from those Prsetorian bands. 
 But knows that right is in the Senate's hands. 
 ***** 
 Kings make their poets whom themselves think fit, 
 But 'tis your suffrage makes authentic wit." 
 
 In the last couplet he subordinates not only popular 
 applause, but the titular laureateship, to the approval of 
 his favourite University. It is curious, by the way, that 
 Oxford should have been his favourite University, for he 
 was educated at Cambridge. In another of his prologues 
 to the former he alludes to and avows his preference, 
 without attempting to assign any cause for it, in the 
 concluding lines : 
 
 " Oxford to him a dearer name shall be 
 Than his own mother-university. 
 Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage ; 
 He chooses Athens in his riper age. " 
 
 Cambridge must have mortally offended the poet at 
 some point of his career, to have warranted this not very 
 complimentary reference to the Boeotian city. 
 
 In the last-mentioned prologue we have one more 
 tirade against the King's house pit, coupled with judicious 
 laudation of the critical acumen of Oxford scholars. And 
 
no THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 the praise is supposed to come on this occasion from the 
 actors, as it formerly proceeded from the author : 
 
 " Though actors cannot much of learning boast, 
 Of all who want it we admire it most : 
 We love the praises of a learned pit, 
 As we remotely are allied to wit. 
 
 * * * # # 
 
 "Wlien our fop gallants, or our city follow. 
 Clap over loud, it makes us melancholy : 
 We doubt that scene which does their wonder raise. 
 And, for their ignorance, contemn their praise. 
 Judge then if we who act, and they who write, 
 Should not be proud of giving you delight. 
 London likes grossly, but this nicer pit 
 Examines, fathoms all the depths of wit ; 
 The ready finger lays on every blot ; 
 Knows what should justly please, and what should not," 
 
 These University prologues, it is needless to say, like 
 everything else which Dryden wrote, furnished the poet's 
 persistent assailant, Tom Brown, with an opportunity 
 for ridicule not to be resisted. In The Reasons for 
 Mr. Bayes Changing his Religion (one of his numerous 
 pamphlets) this satirist hints that Dryden was " of my 
 Lord Plausible's opinion in The Plain Dealer^' and 
 makes him say, "If I chance to commend any place 
 or order of men, out of pure friendship, I choose to do it 
 before their faces ; and if I have occasion to speak ill of 
 any person or place, out of a principle of respect and 
 good manners, I do it behind their backs ; " and then 
 Bayes proceeds to instance his University experiences. 
 If (as Sir W. Scott thinks) it is meant by this that 
 Dryden laughed at his University friends in the London 
 prologues, there is (as we have seen) no foundation for 
 the charge ; but I think the reference rather is to the 
 
IN ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 1 1 1 
 
 poet's private letters, such, for instance, as that to the 
 Earl of Rochester, in which he (certainly with con- 
 temptible pettiness of character) writes : " I have sent you 
 a prologue and epilogue which I made for our players, 
 when they went down to Oxford — I hear they have 
 succeeded — and by the event your lordship will judge 
 how easy 'tis to pass anything upon a University, and 
 how gross flattery the learned will endure." I do not 
 however for a moment believe that these lines repre- 
 sented the real state of Dryden's mind, or were written 
 for any other purpose than to amuse the disreputable 
 patron whom he was addressing. 
 
THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Information as to stage-usages contained in prologues and epilogues 
 — The various parts of the theatre, and their respective tenants 
 — Allusions to the tariff of the playhouse — The " sinful six- 
 penny mechanics " — The " twopenny gallery " — The " scaf- 
 folders" — The stools on the stage — The "yard" — The "under- 
 standing gentlemen of the ground " — The " private room " — 
 The half-crown pit of the Restoration — Allusions to the curtain 
 —The " Naples silk" of the " Red Bull " ; " Banding tile and 
 pear " against it " to allure the actors " — The curtain before 
 the stage balcony — The t" three blasts of the trumpet " sum- 
 moning the " quaking Prologue " — The incidental music — The 
 duration of a play — The " two hours' traffic of our stage " — 
 Allusions in prologues and epilogues to the scenery, the 
 properties, the dresses, and superior embellishment of masques 
 — Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones — The "thunder machine" — 
 Shakespeare's " squibs " and " rolled bullet " in Ben Jonson's 
 prologues — References to theatrical customs ; to wagers on 
 actors ; to " table-books " ; to the author's " second day " and 
 " third day " ; to the time of the commencement of the play ; 
 to the title of the play ; " hanging up the title ; " to the first 
 women-actors ; apologies for the innovation — The " nurseries " 
 of young Maximins referred to in prologues — Allusions to the 
 morals of the contemporary stage and of contemporary society 
 — Loyal prologues — Party prologues — Political prologues. 
 
 The interest which a study of the Prologue, and of its 
 various changes in form and substance, must possess for 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 113 
 
 one who is employed in investigating the characters and 
 literary aims of the successive dramatists, will always be 
 considerable. Even more valuable must such a study 
 be for the purposes of the minute historian of the English 
 stage — of the art of acting, that is, as opposed to dra- 
 matic composition, and of its various accessories, customs, 
 and appliances. What copious use may be made of pro- 
 logues and epilogues for the illustration of the usages 
 of the Shakespearian theatres is apparent from the 
 constant references to them in the pages of Malone and 
 Mr. Collier. Later periods furnish a similar abundance 
 of material, though up to the present, at any rate, no 
 Collier of the Restoration drama has appeared to ransack 
 the numerous prologues of Dryden and his contempo- 
 raries with the same results as have been achieved by 
 researches into the prologues of Shakespeare and the 
 playwrights of his day. I now propose to touch very 
 briefly on a few instances of stage-usages and con- 
 ventions recorded or hinted at in some of the addresses 
 to the audience written by the dramatists of the sixteenth 
 and seventeenth centuries. 
 
 The general appearance and several divisions of the 
 auditorium in an Elizabethan playhouse are now suffi- 
 ciently well known. To the pit (or " yard " as it really 
 was in the inns out of which in pre-Shakespearian times 
 theatres were frequently extemporized), — the galleries, 
 or "scaffolds," surrounding the pit, — the ''rooms" or 
 private boxes underneath the galleries, — and the stools 
 set apart for the gallants and critics on the stage itself, 
 the allusions in our earliest prologues are frequent, and 
 
 I 
 
114 TBE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 too familiar to need quotation here. But besides these 
 well-marked provinces appertaining to the various classes 
 of playgoers, we find references to certain very badly 
 placed and low-priced boxes at each side of the balcony 
 which formed a sort of fixed property of the stage, and 
 was placed at its back. From their obscurity, we are 
 told in Dekker's Gul's Hornebooke, that "much new 
 satten was there dampned by being smothered to death 
 in darkness." But the very peculiarity of sitting in such 
 an out-of-the-way place tempted, as was natural, some 
 of the more exquisite spirits ; and in an old prologue we 
 find a reference to a " private box " in this position being 
 " taken up at a new play " for a gentleman of the period 
 and " his retinue," which proceeding is described as 
 
 "... a fresh habit 
 Of a fashion never seen before, to draw 
 The gallants' eyes, that sit upon the stage." 
 
 This latter class, the " gallants, that sit upon the stage," 
 their stools, their tobacco, and their pages, are perhaps 
 more frequently made the subject of allusion, for pur- 
 poses of ridicule or otherwise, than any other, in the 
 prefatory couplets which the poet confided to the " black 
 cloak." Thus in the induction to The Malcontent we 
 are introduced to William Sly (the player), " followed 
 by a tireman with a stool." William Sly takes his 
 seat, notwithstanding the remonstrances of the tireman, 
 on the stage, explaining that this was allowable at " the 
 private house " (as Blackfriars was), and leading us to 
 suppose that it was. not customary at the less select 
 theatres known as " public playhouses." Sly and Lowin, 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 115 
 
 as spectators in the course of this same Induction, invite 
 one another to take tobacco on the stage, according to 
 the practice of the day, and the " private rooms " are 
 also mentioned. The arrangement of the auditorium 
 continued much the same till Drj'den's time, as appears 
 from the phrase of his contemporary Howard of which 
 so much use is made in Tlie Rehearsal. This dramatist, 
 whenever he wished to prophecy the complete success of 
 a play in a single comprehensive expression, used to 
 vow that it would " box, pit and gallery it, 'egad, with 
 any play in Europe." The audience on the stage held 
 their position, and asserted their prescriptive rights, till 
 the reformer Garrick, to the intense relief of his brother 
 actors, finally swept them and their stools away.* 
 
 But though the "scientific frontiers" remained the 
 same, the taxation changed. The managers of Dryden's 
 time exacted a considerably heavier tribute thaii the 
 Elizabethans. The materials for estimating the prices 
 of admission to the different parts of the theatre in the 
 pre-Restoration period, which may be gathered from 
 contemporary prologues and epilogues, are exceedingly 
 abundant, but unfortunately also exceedingly con- 
 flicting and unsatisfactory : conflicting, because the 
 houses for which the various prologues were written 
 were of various characters, and consequently prescribed 
 various tariffs ; and unsatisfactory, sometimes, because 
 
 * Royal proclamations had been issued with this object, in 1664 first, 
 and in subsequent years, but apparently without any lasting effect. In 
 France, too, Voltaire, as Mr. Collier tells us, complains of " la foule de 
 3pectateurs confondue sur la seine avec les acteurs," even so late as his 
 own time. 
 
Il6 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 the prices at first nights, for which, of course the pro- 
 logues were composed, were often not the normal prices, 
 but raised for the occasion. However, checking the 
 prologues by other evidences, we arrive at the following 
 usual tariff of the playhouses which flourished before 
 the Puritan domination: — (Common) "Rooms," Scaffold 
 or Gallery, 2d. (sometimes \d., sometimes 6^.) ; Ground, 
 Yard, or Pit, 6d.; Private Rooms, \s. (sometimes is. 6d., 
 2s., or even 2s. 6d?} ; Stools on the Stage, 6d. or is. 
 The " twopenny tenants " are addressed in the epilogue 
 (already quoted) to Dekker's Satiromastix; and the pro- 
 logue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Woman Hater more 
 specifically talks of " the utter discomfiture of all two- 
 penny Gallery men!' On the other hand, the lowest class 
 of Bankside theatres, such as the Hope and Rose, pro- 
 vided " penny rows " for the " gallery commoners," while 
 Jasper Mayne, in his epilogue to The City Match is 
 clearly alluding to the humblest branch of the audience, 
 that is the " scaffolders " or " gallery commoners," where 
 he disdains any fear that 
 
 "... his name can suffer much. 
 From those who sixpence pay and sixpence crack." 
 
 But this was at the Blackfriars, a somewhat select 
 theatre, where the prices would naturally be higher 
 than at the more popular riverside houses. 
 
 The "sinful sixpenny mechanics" of the pit, the 
 " understanders " who sat in the " oblique caves and 
 wedges of the house," are made the subject of some of 
 Ben Jonson's pleasant animadversions in the induction 
 to The Magnetic Lady, not to mention numerous other 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 117 
 
 prologues ; while the shilling private boxes are referred 
 to evidently as the best places in the house by William 
 Sly, who, in the induction to The Malcontent, protests to 
 his friend Burbage that " any man that hath wit may 
 censure, if he sit in the twelvepenny room." So at a 
 later period, Beaumont and Fletcher, addressing the 
 most refined members of their audience, in the prologue 
 to The Mad Lover, conclude : 
 
 " Remember you're all venturers ; and in this play 
 How many twelvepences you've staked to-day." * 
 
 In the induction to Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair 
 we have a scale of prices mentioned from sixpence to 
 half a crown, whence we must conclude that even at the 
 Hope (by no means a superior house) as much as 
 two shillings and sixpence was, at all events on special 
 occasions, charged for some of the private boxes. " It 
 shall be lawful," the poet there says, " for any man to 
 judge his sixpenny- worth, his twelvepenny- worth, so to 
 his eighteenpence, two shillings, half a crown, to the 
 value of his place — provided always his place get not 
 above his wit." Two shilling prices for private boxes 
 are mentioned in the prologue to Habington's Queen of 
 Arrago7i (1640), and in the epilogue to Jasper Mayne's 
 City Match (1637). "Haifa ci'own boxes" even are 
 referred to in one of Fletcher's plays, acted as early as 
 1620. 
 
 The best stools on the stage might be hired for a 
 shilling, and others (presumably the less comfortable, or 
 
 * Cf. tlie prologue to King Henry VIII. 
 
ii8 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 worse placed) for sixpence, as appears frora the induction 
 to The Malcontent, where Sly tells the tireman that 
 if he had taken him for one of the players, he would, by 
 way of punishment for the aifront, have paid him only 
 sixpence (the lower price) for the use of his stool. In 
 Dryden's time, doubtless owing to the intermittent royal 
 proclamations forbidding playgoers to sit on the stage, 
 we have no public references in prologues to "twelve- 
 penny-stool gentlemen ; " for any such allusion would of 
 course, under the circumstances, have been very impolitic 
 on the part of the dramatist, however much the presence 
 of these persons may have been winked at. The tariff of 
 the three remaining parts of the house during the later 
 period is fairly easy to ascertain, owing to the fact that 
 there were only two recognized theatres in London from 
 the Restoration to 1686, the King's and the Duke's, and 
 after that date only one. The prices had then con- 
 siderably risen, and were — Gallery, is. 6d. ; Pit, 2s. 6d. ; 
 Private Boxes, ^s. 
 
 The gallery is alluded to by Dryden in an epilogue 
 (to what play is uncertain), in which he prays Phoebus, 
 above all, to " preserve the eighteen-penny place." The 
 half-crown pit seats are continually mentioned in the 
 Restoration prologues, especially in those of Diyden ; 
 but the price of the boxes we gather from Pepys, Tom 
 Brown, and other play-going gossips of the time.* 
 
 * The epilogue to Dryden's Cleomenes (spoken by Mrs. Bracegirdle) 
 contains this couplet : 
 
 " Buy a good bargain, gallants, while you may ; 
 I'll cost you but your half a crown a day." 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 119 
 
 The barrier between the auditorium and the stage — 
 the barrier which divided the world of romance from the 
 world of reality, the dagger and bowl and honeyed 
 speeches of the players from the nuts and cards and cat- 
 calls of the noisy spectators — was naturally as prominent 
 a feature in the prologue of the infant drama, as it was 
 a matter of deep interest to the " gazing scaffolders," or 
 to the groundlings. These latter, indeed, before the 
 commencement of the play, often manifested their 
 impatience at the close-drawn mysteriousness of the 
 obstructive curtain not less strongly, though more irreve- 
 rently, than Charles Lamb, who, in one of his most 
 charming essays, describes his sensations in viewing the 
 green and weird-looking thing which refused to roll itself 
 up out of sight, till the (as it seemed to the enthusiastic 
 boy) long-delayed magic tinkle of the prompter's bell. 
 But Elia only gazed and waited in dreamy rapture : not 
 so the lusty Elizabethan pittite, who, instead of possess- 
 ing his soul and seat in patience, would rise up and hurl 
 a brick or orange at the offending tapestry. The head 
 of the company of " Fortune players," on removing to 
 the Red Bull playhouse, in the prologue written for that 
 occasion (1640), being as proud of his new silk curtains, 
 as a modern manager is of the latest aesthetic " drop," 
 takes occasion to remonstrate with the audience in this 
 matter : 
 
 " Only we would request you to forbear 
 Your wonted custom, handing tile and pear 
 Against our curtains, to allure us forth : — 
 I pray take notice, these are of more worth ; 
 Pure Naples silk, not worsted.''^ 
 
I20 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 It will be seen from the above that the Elizabethans did 
 not use our curtain rolled up and down, at the com- 
 mencement and close of the play, as now, nor yet the 
 curtain of the ancient drama drawn up from below, but 
 two curtains drawn apart or closed together, and moving 
 on an iron rod. Thus the epilogue to Tancrei and 
 Gismund (1592) concludes: "Now draw the cuftaines, 
 for our scene is done : " whence it would appear that the 
 Prologue or Epilogue did not appear in front of the 
 curtains, as at a later period, but that they had the stage 
 to themselves as much as the actors. " The curtains are 
 drawn open again, and the Epilogue enters" — says a 
 stage direction of 1658. In the prologue to The Merry 
 Devil of Edmonton (circ. 1608), a play which, if we 
 write Peter Fabel for Faustus, opens in much the same 
 way as Marlowe's famous drama, we appear to have 
 an' exception to this rule : for in the middle of his 
 speech, the Prologue " draws the curtain," according to 
 the stage direction, and discovers Peter Fabel — " behold 
 him here laid on his restless couch." The curtain used 
 here, however, may have been that before the balcony at 
 the back of the stage, which, as we know, must have 
 been made use of in Hamlet and in King Henry VII L, 
 and several other Shakespearian plays. 
 
 No tinkling of a bell, either, as in modern times, 
 announced the Prologue ; nor even the [three blows of 
 the hammer, so long in force at the House of Moli^re ; 
 but three blasts of a trumpet, the last of which brought 
 the " quaking Prologue " (as Dekker has it) to his place. 
 The "third sounding" is referred to in the prologue to 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 121 
 
 Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour and in the 
 induction to Cynthia's Revels, and elsewhere.* 
 
 It must not, however, be supposed that the three 
 soundings, together with the " alarums," the " funeral 
 marches," and the like, so frequently prescribed in the 
 course of a play of Shakespeare, constituted the sum of 
 the music performed during the performance. It is 
 frequently assumed that, in conformity with the rude 
 adornments of the stage in other respects, there was an 
 entire absence in those days of any " concord of sweet 
 sounds " between the acts ; but this is a mistake. In 
 the prologue to Hannibal and Scipio (1637) we discover 
 a clear allusion to- the custom : 
 
 " The places sometimes chang'd too for the scene, 
 Which is translated, as the musick plays 
 Betwixt the acts." 
 
 And the stage directions of the period ("playe musicke," 
 and the like) are still more explicit. In Marston's 
 Sophonisba (1606) at the end of an act, "the ladies" are 
 directed " to draw the curtains about Sophonisba ; the 
 cornets and organs playing loud full musicke for the 
 act." 
 
 The average duration of a Shakespearian performance 
 (including these musical intervals) seems to have been 
 not much more than two hours. Thus the prologue to 
 Romeo and Juliet (which play recently took three hours 
 
 * Evidences of this custom are, however, as may be expected, to be 
 found chiefly in the stage directions preceding the text of the prologue, as 
 those at the commencement of Greene's Alphomtis, King of Arragon 
 ^cited by Mr. Collier) : " After you have sounded thrice, let Venus be let 
 ■down from the top of the stage, and when she is down, say ; " etc. 
 
122 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 and a half to act at the Lyceum), speaks of the " two hours 
 traffic of our stage." Allowing the length of the pauses 
 for music between the acts to have been much the same 
 then as now (but if anything, of course, rather shorter), 
 and that " the two hours traffic of our stage," may well 
 have been a round-numbers expression representing a 
 performance of something like two hours and a half, this 
 still leaves an entire hour to be accounted for by taking 
 into consideration the enormous amount of time occu- 
 pied in working the scenic appliances of our modern 
 theatres, and in perfecting realistic by-play, "local 
 colour," and " business " generally. " Two hours," in- 
 deed, even then, will almost seem too short a time for 
 an Elizabethan representation ; but the prologues of the 
 day continually mention this as the normal and allotted 
 period. Thus the prologue to King Henry VIII. under- 
 takes that the spectators "if they be still and willing 
 . . . may see away their shilling in two short hours" 
 So also Ben Jonson, in the prologue to The Alchemist, 
 begins : 
 
 "Fortune that favours fools, these two short hours 
 We wish away : " 
 
 and Middleton, in the induction to his Michaelmas 
 Term, says to the audience : " we dispatch you in two 
 short hours without demur ; your suits hang not long 
 after candles be lighted." The epilogue to 7!^!? Hog 
 hath lost His Pearl (by one Robert Tailor, acted 1612), 
 contains these lines : 
 
 " For this our author says, if 't prove distasteful. 
 He only grieves you spent two hours so wasteful " — 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 123 
 
 while the epilogue to Ram Alley or Merry Tricks (by 
 Lodowick Barry) commences : 
 
 " Thus two hours have brought to an end 
 What many tedious hours have penn'd." 
 
 But Beaumont and Fletcher in the epilogue to The 
 Loyal Subject, disregarding the conventional " two short 
 hours," speak of " three hours of precious time " having 
 been consumed in the representation. By the time of 
 Dryden,* when songs, dances, and music had largely 
 encroached on the province of acting proper, three hours 
 would certainly have been nearer the mark ; though 
 in a curious pamphlet of the Bettertonian period, con- 
 taining an estimate of the average times which it took 
 to play the various dramas then in possession of the 
 stage, I find such a very long tragedy as Hamlet set 
 down for two hours and forty minutes only : but it does 
 not appear whether this included, or not, the time occu- 
 pied' in music between the acts. 
 
 Certainly the fathers of our dramas did not spend 
 much time in change of scenes ; for it has been estab- 
 lished now beyond doubt that in the regular theatres at 
 least (whatever may have been the case in the court 
 masques superintended by Inigo Jones) there were no 
 scenes — in the modern English sense of the word — to 
 change. There were, however, pictures painted in per- 
 spective on the arras (but probably for purposes of general 
 adornment merely), as would appear from the following 
 passage in the induction to Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels, 
 
 * Cf. Dryden's Works (ed. Sir W. Scott), vol. iv., p. 442. 
 
124 THM. PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 where one of the children says to another: "Away, wag; 
 what, wouldst thou make an implement " (or " property " 
 as we now term it) " of me ? 'Slid, the boy takes me 
 for a piece of perspective, I hold my life, or some silk 
 curtain, come to hang the stage here ! Sir crack, I am 
 none of your fresh pictures, that use to beautify the 
 decayed dead arras in a public theatre." Properties our 
 ancestors had in abundance, and (as we have seen) 
 permanent balconies, which were useful for an extra- 
 ordinary variety of purposes, but no movable scenes 
 painted on cloth and capable of being rolled up on 
 cylinders. It is obvious that in such extracts from 
 prologues or choruses as the following, the term is used 
 in its modern French sense : 
 
 " Unto Southampton do we shift our scenes." 
 
 Chorus to King Henry V. 
 " But if conceit with quick-turned sceans 
 May win your favours. " 
 
 Prologue to Ram Alley, 
 " For all my life has been but as a sceite 
 Acting that argument." 
 
 King Hairy IV. , Part I J, 
 
 But, at the Restoration, — partly owing to the galli- 
 cizing mania brought over by Charles II., and partly to 
 the individual energy and enterprise of Sir William 
 D'Avenant, and the success attending the elaborately 
 mounted masques at Whitehall and elsewhere, which 
 the theatres strove to rival — large innovations in this 
 respect took place ; which, though opposed for a time 
 by Betterton and the great actors who had no desire to 
 be snuffed out by external ornamentation or become 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 125 
 
 mere parts of a spectacle, found an enthusiastic advocate 
 in their introducer. D'Avenant, in the prologue to The 
 Wits (1662) ridicules the sturdy sticklers for the usages 
 of Elizabeth's tin:ie — " as if," he writes : 
 
 " As if a guinea and louis had less 
 Intrinsick value for their handsomeness. 
 So divers, who outlive the former age, 
 Allow the coarseness of the plain old stage, 
 And think rich vests and scenes are only fit 
 Disguises for the want of art and wit.'' 
 
 Here " scenes " is obviously used in the modern accepta- 
 tion. And so also in the prologue to The Generous 
 Enemies (1672) by an opponent of the new-fangled 
 ways : 
 
 " Your aged fathers came to plays for wit. 
 And sat knee-deep in nutshells in the pit ; 
 Coarse hangings then, instead of scenes were worn. 
 And Kidderminster did the stage adorn." 
 
 It is curious to observe, as early as 1660, the counter- 
 part and prototype of the modern wailings of old play- 
 goers over the encroachments of the decorative acts on 
 the province of the histrionic. Even Dryden, whose 
 stage directions involve the most ample contributions 
 from the scene painter, the dancer, and the singer, railed 
 ■more suo against all of these as long as he decently 
 could. In an epilogue which he composed for a revival 
 of Ben Jonson's Silent Woman he contemptuously 
 alludes to the novelties imported from France by the 
 " hot Monsieurs " who, though they had come over to 
 act in England for a short time only, yet, " in that short 
 time " had " left their itch of novelty behind." To these 
 succeeded the " Italian Merry Andrews," so that — 
 
126 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 "Nature was out of countenance, and each day- 
 Some new-born monster shewn you for a play. 
 But when all failed, to strike the stage quite dumb 
 Those wicked engines, call'd machines, are come." 
 
 Here we have the stage-machinist (now a famih'ar figure 
 on our play-bills) added to the list of actor-gagging 
 nuisances. He continues by making a special reference 
 to the thunder-and-Hghtning machines*— (this protest is 
 amusing as corning from a dramatist who himself made 
 such habitual use in his plays of these atmospheric pheno- 
 mena, that the authors of The Rehearsal represent him 
 as particularly pluming himself on the composition of a 
 prodialogue between two characters representing "the 
 loud Thunder" and "the brisk Lightning") : 
 
 " Thunder and Lightning now for wit are played, 
 And shortly scenes in La23land will be laid. " 
 
 The thunder-machine is, with other "fantastical ap- 
 pliances " fetched " from Paris, Venice, and from Rome," 
 made the subject of most vehement derision in the 
 prologue to Tunbridge Wells (1678) : 
 
 " Th' old English stage confined to plot and sense. 
 Did hold abroad some small intelligence ; 
 But since the invasion of the foreign scene, 
 Jack-pudding farce, and Thundering machine. 
 Dainties to your grave ancestors unknown. 
 Who never disliked wit because their own, 
 There's not a player but is turned a scout," etc. 
 
 Dryden's principal objection, however, seems to have 
 been to the vast outlay involved in the elaborate mount- 
 
 * Not unknown in a rude form even in Shakespeare's time. Ben 
 Jonson tells his audience in the prologue to Every Man in His Humour that in 
 his play no " nimble squib " would be seen " to make afeard The gentle- 
 women ; nor rolled bullet heard To say, it thunders." 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 127 
 
 ing necessitated by the tastes of the Restoration 
 audiences. The more money was spent for such pur- 
 poses, the less there would remain for him as a sharer 
 in the proceeds of the King's theatre ; unless the in- 
 creased expense should attract larger audiences, which 
 (judging from the expressions used by him), it did not 
 succeed in doing. In the prologue which he wrote for 
 the revival of Beaumont and Fletcher's Prophetess, and 
 which Betterton delivered, he begins : 
 
 " What Nostradame, with all his art, can guess 
 The fate of our approaching Prophetess ? 
 A play which, lil^e a perspective set right, 
 Presents our vast expenses close to sight ; 
 But turn the tube, and there we sadly view 
 Our distant gains, and these uncertain too ; 
 A sweeping tax, which on ourselves we raise. 
 And all, like you, in hope of better days. 
 Wlien will our losses warn us to be wise ? 
 Our wealth decreases, and our charges rise. 
 Money, the sweet allurer of our hopes, 
 Ebbs out in oceans, and comes in by drops. 
 We raise new objects to provoke delight, 
 But you grow sated 'ere the second night. " 
 
 Even as originally performed, this play required 
 " thunder-bolts brandished from on high," and " chariots 
 drawn through mid-air, by flying dragons," — but, on its 
 revival, it was turned into an opera outright, with songs 
 and superior scenic embellishment added by Betterton — 
 (" to what base uses .'' " etc.), — and with music by Henry 
 Purcell. All this would cost an amount of money, 
 which, we may imagine, " glorious John " watched 
 " ebbing out in oceans '' with infinite disgust. 
 
 In the prologues and epilogues of our period there 
 
128 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 were frequent allusions to curious theatrical customs, of 
 which we have little evidence from other sources. One 
 of these (peculiar, apparently, to the period before the 
 Restoration) was the habit prevalent among the choicer 
 critics of wagering on the relative merits of two rival 
 actors playing the same part at different houses. An 
 umpire we presume, was appointed, whose decision was 
 final. The famous Ned Alleyn, who rarely disappointed 
 his backers, was the subject of many of these bets. 
 Heywood, in his prologue to Marlowe's Jew of Malta, 
 as revived by him, was evidently not unmindful of this, 
 when recommending Richard Perkins to the indulgence 
 of the audience, on that actor's attempting to play the 
 part which had become so indelibly associated with the 
 name of Alleyn. He is afraid that the spectators will 
 think that he was presumptuous enough to invite com- 
 parison, and that the usual wagers had been laid as to 
 whether Perkins would prove a better artist than his 
 great predecessor ; and therefore he disclaims any such 
 thought or intention : 
 
 " Nor think that this day any prize was played, 
 Here were no bets at all, no wagers laid." 
 
 So in the induction to The Malcontent, Sinklow, who 
 is anxious to persuade his interlocutors that he " might 
 have been one of the college of critics once," after dis- 
 covering from Condell that Burbage is entrusted with 
 the title-role of the play, offers to " lay four of mine 
 ears the play is not so well acted as it hath been." 
 
 The double use of " table-books " — on the one hand 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 129 
 
 for the dramatist to note down the good things he heard 
 in taverns and other resorts of the witty, and then insert 
 them in his play ; and, on the other hand, for the critics 
 among the audience who would transcribe the jests of 
 the play and retail them afterwards in conversation as 
 their own — is often hinted at in the Elizabethan pro- 
 logues. As illustrating the latter use, we find William 
 Sly, in the last-mentioned induction, telling the tireman 
 — " I am one that hath seen this play often, and can give 
 them" (the players) "intelligence for their action. / 
 have most of the jests here in my table-book" Beaumont 
 and Fletcher, in the prologue to The Custom of the 
 Country, declare that they 
 
 "... dare look 
 On any man that brings his table-book, 
 To write down what again he may repeat 
 At some great table to deserve his meat. " 
 
 The converse process is evidently alluded to, though 
 not directly mentioned in the induction to Ben Jonson's 
 Cynthia's Revels, where the author, in the person of one 
 of the three Children, expresses a wish that his rival 
 poets "would not so penuriously glean wit from every 
 laundress or hackney-man, or derive their best grace 
 . . . from . . . observation of the company they con- 
 verse with ; as if their invention lived wholly upon 
 another man's trencher." It is somewhat amusing, after 
 this, to find that this very habit was principally charged 
 against Ben by his rival Dekker in the Satiromastix. 
 The dramatic commonplace-book of Dryden also figures 
 largely in The Rehearsal. 
 
 K 
 
130 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 It is well known that the authors of Shakespeare's 
 day sold their plays to the theatres sometimes outright, 
 but more frequently for a lump sum, and the net profits 
 (whatever they might be) of the second — in later times, 
 the third — performance. Thus Mr. Collier tells us that 
 one Daborne sold a " book " to Henslowe (Alleyn's 
 partner in the management of the Fortune playhouse) 
 "for £i2 and the overplus of the second day." This 
 customary " second day " is often noticed in the prologues 
 of the period. Thus Jasper Mayne, in an already-quoted 
 prologue (that to The City Match) says of himself, and 
 his non-professional position : 
 
 " He's one whose unbought muse did never fear 
 An empty second day, or a thin share." 
 
 The last half of the second line alludes to a mode of 
 payment which was afterwards more frequently adopted. 
 Dryden, for instance, was a sharer in the profits of the 
 King's house, for his three or four plays a-year, besides 
 receiving remuneration in other forms. The author's 
 benefit performance soon came to be put off to the third 
 day — a rather serious consideration for him at a time 
 when six afternoons constituted a respectable "run." 
 Dekker, in the prologue to his quaintly titled play If 
 it be not good, the Devil is in it, speaks with contempt 
 of the dramatist who 
 
 "... with squint eyes doth gaze 
 On Pallas' shield, not caring (so he gains 
 A crammed third day) what filth drops from his brains." 
 
 At a very much later period (1696), Dryden, in his 
 old age writing a prologue for his son John's maiden 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 131 
 
 play, The Husbarid his own Cuckold, speaks of " the third 
 day," as furnishing the authors' normal and only pay. 
 In comparing a young poet producing his first play with 
 a young parson preaching his first sermon, he writes : 
 
 " Both say, they preach and write for your instruction, 
 But 'tis for a third day, and for induction. 
 The difference is, that, though you lilce the play, 
 The/orfj gain is ne'er beyond his day, etc." * 
 
 I may be asked by those who consider how com- 
 paratively recent is the growth of dramatic copyright, 
 as recognized by law, what was to prevent one house 
 playing a piece sold by its author to another house 1 
 The answer is that plays were never printed till long after 
 they had seen the stage, unless they had been complete 
 failures ; and that, though people could and did take 
 down the dialogue sometimes " by stenographic " (as Mr. 
 Collier has pointed out) at the theatre, yet there was, at 
 any rate at the best playhouses, an honourable under- 
 standing or custom, practically as valid and binding as 
 a law, that no unfair advantage should be reaped in this 
 way. In the induction to The Malcontent, William Sly 
 asks Henry Condell the actor, how he had "come by 
 this play " {j.e. The Malcontent, about to be performed). 
 " Faith, sir, the book was lost ; and because 'twas pity 
 so good a play should be lost, we found it, and play it." 
 Sly affects not to credit this plea of treasure-trove, and 
 rejoins : " I wonder you would play it, another company 
 having interest in it" 
 
 * For some valuable information on this head, see the late Mr. Dutton 
 Cook's entertaining .Soo^ of the Play, vol. ii., pp. 126-129. 
 
132 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 The time of commencement of the play is often 
 noted in the prologues and inductions of the various 
 periods. It is curious in comparing these to watch how 
 the hour at which the doors of the theatre were opened, 
 and the flag waved from the roof, to signify to all con- 
 cerned outside the house that the performance was about 
 to begin (as the three soundings of the trumpet notified 
 the same to all persons within its walls), gradually 
 became later and later. In Shakespeare's time it was 
 twelve o'clock, and candles were rarely wanted to see 
 out the play with, even in the depth of winter ; then it 
 was one o'clock, and shortly before the Puritan sup- 
 pression of plays two o'clock. After the Restoration 
 three o'clock became the normal time, as appears by 
 a curious old bill of one of the first plays performed 
 by the newly constituted King's players shortly after 
 Charles II. 's return. Amongst other sources of infor- 
 mation on this point we may take the following extract 
 — (part of which has been cited above to illustrate 
 another point) — from the commencement of the induc- 
 tion (called here introduction) to Richard Flecknoe's 
 Damoiselles u-la-Mode, which was produced seven years 
 after the Restoration. The passage also illustrates the 
 customs (above mentioned) of drawing back the curtains 
 from the centre, and of playing music before the per- 
 formance. The interlocutors strangely have no names, 
 but are numbered like convicts. 
 
 " The candles lighted before the curtain's drawn. 
 Enter one of the Actors, another {supposed no Actor') 
 calling after him. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 133 
 
 '^ I. Hark you, hark you, whither away so fast ? 
 
 " 2. Why to the Theatre, 'tis past three o'clock, and 
 
 the Play's ready to begin. 
 
 « » * * » 
 
 " I. But has he " (the Author) "any Faction for him? 
 Has he any to cry him up, in court or town ? else he'll 
 be sure to be cryed down, before the Curtain's drawn, or 
 Musick play." 
 
 In the prologue to The Cheats half-past three is 
 referred to as the time of the commencement of the 
 performance. Towards the end of Dryden's career the 
 hour came to be fixed at four o'clock, and since then has 
 been steadily growing later and later. 
 
 Among the dramatic customs of our ancestors, we 
 must not omit to notice their habit of hanging up on a 
 pole, and exhibiting to the view of the audience, the title 
 of the play to be performed.* " Hang up the title," says 
 Hieronimo, before commencing the "play within a play" 
 which is so important an element in the curious plot of 
 The Spanish Tragedy. So, also, in another play-scene 
 which occurs in Richard Brome's Antipodes (above 
 referred to), Quailpipe, one of the characters in the play, 
 speaks the prologue, which begins : 
 
 " Our far-fetched title over land and seas 
 Offers unto your view the Antipodes." 
 
 The practice, however, was by no means invariable, and 
 it was often the duty of the Chorus or prologue-speaker 
 
 * From the evidences of this custom has originated, I suppose, the 
 modern belief (for which I can find no evidence), that the Elizabethan 
 actors used to put up boards, with scrawls of " this is Athens," etc., upon 
 them, to denote the scenes. 
 
134 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 — (there being then no papers to advertise in, but only 
 "posts," which several would not have seen) — to 
 announce the title to the spectators, and if necessary 
 to explain it, or comment upon it. But one or other of 
 the two modes of making it known was essential. Thus 
 in the play-scene in Hamlet, where the prologue is only 
 in three short lines, which say nothing about the title 
 and where the play itself is preceded by nothing else 
 than the " dumb show," the King, after the action has 
 commenced, seeing, we may suppose, no title hung up, 
 is forced to inquire of Hamlet, " How call you this 
 play .'' " eliciting the well-known answer, in which the 
 young prince (not having considered the matter before, 
 amidst thoughts of a far more enthralling character) 
 straightway extemporizes a title. In the prodialogue to 
 Wily Beguiled both methods are combined after a some- 
 what extraordinary fashion. The interlocutors make 
 remarks on the title, in the course of which first the old 
 style of the play (as originally acted) is hung up, namely 
 Spectrum, and afterwards the new, or Wily Beguiled. The 
 stage directions are " Spectrum, the Prologue : " that is, 
 the title-board is to have Spectrum written upon it, and 
 the Prologue is to enter. Then, after he has said a few 
 words, " enter one of the Players," of whom he asks — 
 " What play shall we have here to-night ? " The answer 
 is, " Sir, you may look upon the title," to which the 
 Prologue rejoins in disgust, "What, Spectrum once 
 again ? Why, noble Cerberus, nothing but patch-panel 
 stuff, old gally-mawfries, and cotton-candle eloquence } " 
 After a time " a Juggler " enters, who by a conjuring 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 135 
 
 trick, ■' a cast of clean conveyance," as he calls it, con- 
 veys away the old title, and " Wily Beguiled" say the 
 stage directions, " stands in the place of it.'' 
 
 Ford makes the prologue-speaker announce and 
 comment on the title of his Witch of Edmonton. He 
 excuses, or rather justifies, its selection, which, he 
 appears to think, might have been impugned owing to 
 its resemblance to that of another famous and popular 
 play. The Merry Devil of Edmonton, which Ben Jonson, 
 in his prologue to The Devil is an Ass, calls the 
 audience's " dear delight." 
 
 " The town of Edmonton hath lent the stage 
 A Devil and a Witch, both in an age. 
 To make comparisons it were uncivil 
 Between so even a pair, a Witch and Devil," etc. 
 
 But, Master Ford concludes — 
 
 " In acts deserving name, the proverb says, 
 ' Once good and ever ' ■- why not so in plays ? " 
 
 A similar apology for the title is to be found in the 
 prologue to Eastward Hoe. The authors Jonson, Chap- 
 man, and Marston, evidently think that the audience 
 may deem it pointless and inapposite. They hasten to 
 forestall criticism on this head : 
 
 " And for the title, if it seem affected. 
 We might as well have called it, God you good even ! 
 Only that eastward, westwards still exceeds ; 
 Honour the sun's fair rising, not his setting. 
 Nor is our title utterly enforced. 
 As by the points we touch at you shall see." 
 
 It will be confessed that on the authors' own showing 
 the title seems to have as little to do with the subject of 
 
136 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 a play, as many modern titles have to do with the 
 subjects of the novels to which they are affixed. 
 
 The proper place, however, for justification and 
 excuse is the epilogue, not the prologue, which should 
 merely announce. Accordingly Dryden waits till the 
 epilogue before entering his defence of the title of The 
 Assignation, to which certain squeamish critics had 
 objected, on the ground of its suggestiveness. The 
 poet's pleading is characteristic : 
 
 " Some thought the title of the play to blame ; 
 They liked the thing, but yet abhorred the nama " 
 
 It remains to notice two theatrical institutions of the 
 seventeenth century, one of which, though an important 
 novelty then, has lost its interest now ; while the other 
 reflected an interest which though having no prominence 
 then, has lately been considered of much moment. We 
 allude first to the introduction of women to act female 
 parts in the place of boys, secondly, to the " nurseries," 
 or places for the education of young actors in their art. 
 
 The first lady who ventured to defy the pj-ejudices, 
 not only of Puritans like Prynne, but of playgobrs gene- 
 rally, and appear upon the stage to perform female cha- 
 racters, was probably Mistress Saunderson, the talented 
 actress, whom the great Betterton afterwards married. 
 She appeared as Desdemona in Othello; the year being 
 either 1659 or 1660. It is evident from the fexcuses 
 and pleas set forth at great length both in the prologue 
 and the epilogue written for the occasion by Thomas 
 Jordan, that the step was regarded by the profession as 
 one of great gravity and danger. Jordan only attempts 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 137 
 
 to justify it on the ground of absolute necessity. The 
 boys who used to play the female parts, had, he implies, 
 during the long period of inaction necessitated by the 
 Puritan rule (1642-1660), grown up into bearded men 
 totally unfit to assume the characters of gentle heroines, 
 and there were no others forthcoming to supply their 
 place. This famous prologue is called by its author '" a 
 prologue to introduce the first woman that came to act 
 on the stage, in the tragedy called The Moor of Venice" 
 In the course of it, he appeals, somewhat tremulously, to 
 " the star-chamber of the house, the pit," and says : 
 
 " . . . in this reforming age 
 We have intents to civilize the stage. 
 Our women are defective, and so sized 
 You'd think they were some of the guard disguis'd : 
 For, to speak truth, men act, that are between 
 Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen ; 
 With bone so large, and nerve so incompliant. 
 When you call Desdemona, enter Giant,'" 
 
 The epilogue, dealing with the same subject, appeals 
 to " the ladies," on behalf of the adventurous actress : 
 
 " But ladies what think _)/(?« ? for if you tax 
 Her freedom with dishonour to your sex, 
 She means to act no more, and this shall be 
 No other play but her own tragedy. " 
 
 Similar apologies are offered in the prologue to 
 D'Avenant's second part of The Siege of Rhodes, in 
 which also women acted (April, 1662). So winning, 
 however, was the grace and modesty of Mistress Saun- 
 derson, that good sense prevailed over prejudice, and 
 we soon find the tables turned, and young men apolo- 
 gizing for attempting that which should have been left 
 
138 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 to women. In a prologue to a play called The Royal 
 Arbour, acted before Charles II., the actors implore his 
 Majesty's indulgence in regard to this mistake, as they 
 avow it to be : 
 
 " For, doubting that we should never play again. 
 We have play'd all our women into men : 
 They are of such large size for flesh and bones, 
 They'll rather be taken for amazons 
 Than tender maids . . . 
 
 If this be pardoned, we shall henceforth bring 
 Better oblations to my lord the king." 
 
 Kynaston, however, for a few years held his own 
 in female parts against his fair rivals ; and, that the 
 old custom did not expire all at once at the time 
 of the Restoration, is evident from the story of the 
 excuse which was offered to, and accepted by, the Merry 
 Monarch, when complaining of the tardy commence- 
 ment of a play — "May it please your Majesty, the 
 queen has not shaved yet." 
 
 In a very short time after this, a yet greater novelty 
 was introduced : women began to take male parts. In 
 the prologue to Dryden's adaptation of The Tempest 
 (1667) we find these lines : 
 
 " But if for Shakespeare we your grace implore 
 We for our theatre shall want it more 
 Who, by our dearth of youths, are forced to employ 
 One of our women to present a boy ; 
 And that's a transformation, you will say, 
 Exceeding all the magic in the play." 
 
 In the same dramatist's Maiden Queen (1672) all 
 the male characters in the play were assumed by 
 women : the prologue is spoken by Mrs. Boutell, " in 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 139 
 
 man's clothes," and the epilogue by Mrs. Reeves (Dry- 
 den's mistress), also " in man's clothes." At a still 
 later period we find Peg Woffington taking such coarse 
 parts as Harry Wildair, and in our own times such 
 rdles as those of Hamlet and Romeo have been assumed 
 by distinguished actresses. 
 
 Now, as to the establishments for the use of embryo- 
 actors, "the young men of the stage," as Ravenscroft 
 and Pepys used to call them. These were termed 
 " nurseries," the principal of which was in Golden Lane, 
 near the Barbican. The young men trained in these 
 places were allowed to act in the two great theatres — 
 the Duke's and the King's — when those stages were not 
 required by the regular company, just as morning 
 performances of amateurs are often given at our modern 
 theatres. The Wednesdays and Fridays in Lent were 
 usually set aside for the young aspirants to histrionic 
 fame : * and Ravenscroft did not disdain to write " a 
 Lenten play " for them on one of these occasions, — the 
 much ridiculed Mamamouchi, to wit, though he is 
 careful to tell us that it was knocked off cicrrente calmno, 
 and that " one week completed it." Perhaps it was the 
 association of this play — the work of a bitter rival — 
 with the nursery in Barbican, which led Dryden in his 
 Mac Flecknoe, to ridicule this institution : 
 
 "Where queens are formed and future heroes bred, 
 Where unfledg'd actors learn to laugh and cry, 
 Where infant punks their tender voices try, 
 And little Maximins the gods defy . " 
 
 * See the epilogue to The Rival Kings. 
 
140 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 We have already seen how Ben Jonson, when in 
 wrath against the best companies of the players, would 
 resort to the children of the Revels to play his dramas. 
 Bayes is represented in The Rehearsal — notwithstanding 
 the sentiments expressed above — as threatening to do 
 something similar, namely, "to bend all his thoughts 
 for the service of the Nursery, and mump the proud 
 players." Pepys's remarks on the Nursery, which he 
 occasionally visited, were usually not very compli- 
 mentary. On the 24th of February, 1667-8, he writes : 
 " To the Nursery, where none of us ever were before ; 
 the house is better and the musick better than we 
 looked for, and the acting not much worse, because I 
 expected as bad as could be : and I was not much 
 mistaken, for it was so. . . . Here was some good 
 company by us, who did make mighty sport at the folly 
 of their acting, which I could not refrain from some- 
 times, though I was sorry for it." Another Nursery 
 was in Hatton Garden ; this latter had the honour of 
 training the redoubtable comedian and wag, Jo Haynes, 
 and was superintended by one Captain Bedford. On 
 the 7th of March, 1668, the aforesaid Samuel was 
 especially pleased at the King's playhouse with a part 
 by " one Haynes, only lately come thither from the 
 Nursery, an understanding fellow." * 
 
 Leaving now the innocent customs of the theatre, 
 let us come to weightier matters, and see what in- 
 
 * Charles II. granted a patent, dated March 3rd, 1664, to William 
 Legge, Groom of the Bedchamber, for setting up a Nursery for young 
 actors. No particular place is named for it in the patent. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 141 
 
 formation can be extracted from prologues as to the 
 morals of the stage. One would have thought that not 
 the most indiscreet even of the Restoration playwrights 
 would, in addressing the public through prologue or 
 epilogue, have avowed or dwelt upon the lax morality 
 of the professors of his art in private life. That they 
 should have made some allusion to, and have excused 
 or justified, as the case might be, the licentious tone 
 of their plays, and of the speeches assigned to the 
 characters in them, was natural enough ; but this was 
 an entirely different matter from openly exposing to 
 view the follies or vices of actors and actresses off the 
 boards. When Dryden threw the blame of indecent 
 comedies on to the Court (" Whitehall the naked Venus 
 first revealed ") and denied that it could attach in any 
 way to the actors or the dramatists ; or when Lord 
 Lansdowne (in his prologue to The Jew of Venice 
 revived) asserted that neither the one nor the other 
 class, but the great public itself, was responsible ; * we 
 feel that such prologues occupy legitimate ground. But 
 
 * " The man of zeal, in his religious rage 
 
 Would silence poets, and reduce the stage ; 
 The poet, rashly to get clear, retorts 
 On kings the scandal, and bespatters courts. 
 Both err ; for, without mincing, to be plain, 
 The guilt's your own of every odious scene ; 
 The present time still gives the stage its mode ; 
 The vices, that you practice, we explode. " 
 
 An old argument, continually used even now by gentlemen who write 
 " without mincing, to be plain." Tradition, however, has not rendered it 
 one whit less radically bad in the nineteenth, than it was in the seventeenth 
 century. 
 
142 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 when the soiled linen of the actor's domestic existence 
 is elaborately, even exultingly, washed in the market- 
 place, to amuse the degraded appetite of a prurient 
 audience, it would demand a taste no nicer than that 
 of a seventeenth-century critic to refrain from crying, 
 " hold, enough ! " Yet that most audacious of all pro- 
 logists — if we may coin a word — John Dryden, did not 
 stick even at this. In the epilogue to The Assignation, 
 in which play Hippolita, a nun, is introduced, he con- 
 cludes by saying : 
 
 " Our poet meant no scandal in his play ; 
 His nuns are good, which on the stage are shewn, 
 And, sure, behind the scenes you'll look for none. " 
 
 In the epilogue " to the King and Queen " on the 
 occasion of the union of the two companies in 1686, 
 Dryden writes : 
 
 "We beg you, last, our scene-room to forbear, 
 And leave our goods and chattels to our care. 
 Alas, our women are but washy toys. 
 And wholly taken up in stage employs : 
 Poor willing tits they are, but yet I doubt, 
 This double duty soon will wear them out. 
 Then you are watched besides with jealous care ; 
 What if my lady's page should find you there?" 
 
 Similarly the prologue to Marriage d-la-Mode speaks 
 by no means highly of " playhouse flesh and blood," 
 or of their ability to withstand the advances of " braves 
 and wits." 
 
 Into the mouth of the famous Mistress Bracegirdle, 
 whose alleged chastity has been the subject of very 
 unkind comments on the part of different writers from 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, 143 
 
 Colley Gibber * to Macaulay (the latter of whom not 
 obscurely hints that it was by no means unsaleable, but 
 only saleable at a higher price than that of others) 
 Dryden, in the epilogue to Cleomenes, puts the most 
 extraordinary expressions. The lady, delivering the 
 epilogue, is supposed to be making her will, and 
 bequeathing her " movables " — her youth, her chastity, 
 her truth, her judgment, her devotion, and finally her 
 person, as to which she is very frank : 
 
 " I give my person, let me well consider, — 
 Faith, ev'n to him that is the highest bidder." 
 
 In the epilogue to King Arthur, a\so "spoken by 
 Mrs. Bracegirdle," the actress is represented as pulling 
 out of her pocket, and reading over the various billets- 
 doux which she had that day received from " fops and 
 wits and cits and Bow Street beaux " — epistles of the 
 kind which Peg WofiSngton describes in Masks and Faces. 
 In her remarks on these, she is made to exhibit a quaint 
 combination of keen judgment on pecuniary stability 
 with a virtue not absolutely inexpugnable.' 
 
 From the morality of the dramatic profession to the 
 morality of other classes and professions, and of the 
 public in general, is but a short step, and it is needless 
 to say that the more combative of the prologists, such as 
 Ben Jonson, and particularly Dryden, have much to say 
 on a subject which so temptingly invited their strongest 
 
 * Colley Gibber is fairly puzzled — (see his Apology). He does not 
 know what to make of a quality so opposed to the tendencies of his age 
 and profession ; and with a few dubious suggestions and sniffs, gives up the 
 riddle. 
 
144 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 powers of scathing sarcasm or malicious innuendo.* 
 How Dryden rebuked the court, and excused the stage, 
 in the matter of the then prevalent licentiousness of 
 comedy, we have already mentioned. The strongest 
 attack was contained in the last epilogue written by the 
 poet, in the last year of his life (1700), and shortly after 
 that celebrated treatise of Jeremy Collier which elicited 
 his somewhat tardy repentance. It will be seen that the 
 language is as nervous and pointed as ever, and the 
 advocacy as brilliant, though the reasoning is unsound, 
 and the apology sophistical. He begins by a respectful 
 reference to " Jeremy," and one in keeping with his 
 famous recantation ; but, at last, his wit runs away with 
 him, and he becomes as combative and as audacious as 
 in his earlier and more militant days : 
 
 " Perhaps the parson, stretched a point too far 
 When with our theatres he waged a war. 
 He tells you that this very moral age 
 Received the first infection from the stage. 
 But, sure, a banished court, with lewdness fraught, 
 The seeds of open vice, returning, brought. 
 
 ***** 
 The poets, who must live by courts, or starve, 
 Were proud so good a government to serve ; 
 
 * * * # if ' 
 
 Thus did the thriving malady prevail ; 
 The court its head, the poets but the tail." 
 
 * In the prologues and epilogues of the Roman comedy, I find only 
 one allusion to social morality. In the epilogue to the Captivi of Plautus, 
 the author takes credit to himself for the good moral motive and tone of his 
 play; — " Spectatores, ad pudicos mores facta hsec fabula est." In one 
 Other instance, a social question is touched upon, and for thirty-one lines 
 of the prologue to the Rudens, a sort of hustings-oration is delivered 
 justifying the policy of the recognition of slave's marriages (" serviles 
 nuptiae "), and the examples of Carthage, Apulia, and Greece are referred 
 to as precedents. 
 
m ENGLISH LITERATURE. I4S 
 
 Waxing bolder, he hints that this brazen-faced 
 licentiousness was the natural result of the outward 
 vigour and inward hypocrisy of the Puritan ascendancy 
 when 
 
 " Nothing but open lewdness was a crime," 
 
 and 
 
 " A monarch's blood was venial to the nation. 
 Compared with one foul act of fornication." 
 
 " Now," he goes on, " they " (that is, the Puritans, 
 and first and foremost, Jeremy Collier, we may pre- 
 sume) 
 
 " Would silence us, and shut the door 
 That let in all the bare-faced vice before." 
 
 Dryden is not sanguine as to the result of this 
 attempt to moralize the stage, as he avows with cynical 
 candour : 
 
 " As for reforming us, which some pretend. 
 That work in England is without an end ; 
 Well may we change, but we shall never mend. " 
 
 The poet had not, however, always taken this line. 
 In the prologue to The Spanish Friar, at a time when 
 the Stuarts were still in possession of the throne, it does 
 not seem to have occurred to him to make use of the 
 argument, though the dangers to public morality which 
 that argument assumes must have been more recent in 
 1680 than in 1700. On the contrary, he there takes the 
 public to task for the immorality of the stage.* It was 
 
 * He complains of a new-grown versatility and inventiveness in vice 
 on the part of the English people as a whole and compares it with 
 
 L 
 
146 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 not till long after the abdication of James II. that the 
 versatile poet thought an extinct dynasty, which nobody 
 would be interested in defending, might conveniently 
 serve for scapegoat to bear on its head the sins of the 
 stage. 
 
 About the same date (1684), another dramatist, 
 Ravenscroft, rates the public for suddenly becoming 
 squeamish, and more than hints that the professed nice- 
 ness of certain lady-critics is unreal. ' Having altered 
 his play of Dame Dobson or the Cunning Woman (taken 
 from the French), to suit the requirements of the more 
 exacting judges on this score, he thus addresses his 
 audience in the prologue : 
 
 " In you, chaste ladies, then, we hope to-day, 
 This is the poet's recantation play. 
 Come often to 't that he at length may see 
 'Tis more than a pretended modesty : 
 Stick by him now, for if he finds you falter. 
 He quickly will his way of writing alter ; 
 And every play shall send you blushing home, 
 For though you rail, yet then we're sure you'll come. 
 
 » * * * * 
 
 A naughty play was never counted dull — 
 Nor modest comedy e'er pleased you much." * 
 
 the corresponding conservatism of the Dutch, the Spanish, and other 
 nations : 
 
 " The heavy Hollanders no vices know 
 But what they used a hundred years ago. 
 « 4: * * 4: 
 
 Their patrimonial sloth the Spaniards keep. 
 And Philip first taught Philip how to sleep. 
 The French and we still change ; " etc. 
 
 * See Wright's History of Caricature, pp. 402, sqq. At a later 
 date (Fielding's time) the prologue-writer learnt to combine sanctimony 
 with subtlety in a more artful manner. One of the prologues of the period 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 147 
 
 The practice of scolding society generally was not 
 really so bold as it seems ; because where everybody is 
 attacked, nobody is attacked. But when the dramatist 
 split up the public into classes, professions, or interests, 
 and singled out some one or more of them for ridicule 
 and vilification, the resentment against the author was 
 proportionate to the smallness of the class, and the 
 facility with which it was possible for others to identify 
 it. Thus, as we have already seen, when Ben Jonson 
 attacked the people generally for not crowding to see 
 his plays, the people remained placid enough ; but when 
 he proceeded to gird at lawyers, soldiers and players 
 seriatim, these various professions were up in arms 
 immediately, and retained Dekker to advocate their 
 cause, and be their " Satiromastix." 
 
 When reproved on this score, it is of course always 
 open to the dramatist to plead, as against the objector, 
 that " the cap fits." Ben Jonson himself again and again 
 resorted to this mode of defence. So, too, William Cart- 
 wright (a great favourite of Ben, who called him " my 
 son," after the fashion of the poets of that day), in the 
 prologue to his play. The Ordinary (probably written in 
 1634), modestly says of himself: 
 
 " His conversation will not yet supply 
 Follies enough to write a comedy " — 
 
 and, therefore, he concludes — 
 
 which the author proposes to the manager in the introduction of Don 
 Quixote in England, is described as follows : "the first twelve lines inveigh 
 against all indecency on the stage, and the last twenty lines show you what 
 it is." 
 
148 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 "... those will be to blame 
 Who make that person, which he meant but name." 
 
 He disclaims attacks on individuals : 
 
 " No guilty line traduceth any ; all 
 We here present is but conjectural." 
 
 Richard Brome, in the prologue to his Antipodes (acted 
 1638, printed 1640), accounts it a grievance that 
 
 "... nothing can 
 Almost be spoken, but some other man 
 Takes it unto himself, and sayes the stufife 
 If it be vicious, or absurd enough, 
 Was woven upon his back." 
 
 So also Dryden complains, in his prologue to Nathaniel 
 Lee's Casar Borgia that 
 
 " Every fool can bid the poet starve " 
 
 since 
 
 " That fumbling letcher to revenge is bent, 
 Because he thinks himself or whore, is meant : 
 Name but a cuckold, all the city swarms ; 
 From Leadenhall to Ludgate is in arms." 
 
 Similarly, in the witty prologue which he wrote for 
 Shadwell's True Widow : 
 
 " Fools you will have, and raised at vast expense; 
 And yet as soon as seen, they give offence. 
 Time was, when none would cry, — That oaf was me ; 
 But now you strive about your pedigree. 
 Bauble and cap no sooner are thrown down, 
 But there's a muss of more than half the town." 
 
 And, in the prologue to The Assignation : 
 
 " Poets, poor devils, have ne'er your folly shewn, 
 But, to their cost, you proved it was their own. 
 
 ***** 
 Your poets daily split upon this shelf — 
 You must have fools, yet none will have himself." 
 
JN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 149 
 
 In the prologue to The Pilgrim he implies that any 
 single living fop does himself far too much honour in 
 supposing that an ideal stage-fop is copied from him : 
 " more goes to make a fop than fops can find." 
 
 In time, however, the grumbles of these " cap-fitters " 
 had their effect; and, in 1690, in the prologue to his 
 Amphitryon, Dryden complains that genuine satire is 
 being banished from the stage, to find a new home (and 
 here a touch of professional jealousy is perhaps to be 
 detected) with the lampoon-mongers and libel-writers, 
 as it did with the epigrammatists of an earlier day. 
 " What," Mrs. Bracegirdle asks on behalf of the poet — 
 
 " What gain you by not suffering him to tease ye? 
 He neither can offend you now, nor please ye. 
 The honey bag and venom lay so near, 
 That both together you resolve to tear ; 
 And lost your pleasure, to secure your fear. 
 How can he show his manhood if you bind him 
 To box, like boys, with one hand tied behind him ? 
 This is plain levelling of vrit ; in which 
 The poor has all the advantage, not the rich. 
 The blockhead stands excused, for wanting sense ; 
 And wits turn blockheads in their own defence. 
 Yet though the stages traffic is undone. 
 Still Julianas interloping trade goes on : 
 Though satire at the theatre you smother, 
 Yet, in lampoons, you libel one aizother." 
 
 From these same lampoons the poet himself had 
 suffered ; and there is little doubt that he smarted more 
 keenly under the lash of Tom Brown, the satirical 
 pamphleteer, than under that of Buckingham, the satirical 
 dramatist ; and that the " Mr. Bayes " of the Reasons, 
 etc., offended him more than the "Mr. Bayes" of The 
 
150 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 Rehearsal. The above-mentioned Julian was a notorious 
 lampooner of the coffee-house ; and from the words 
 " interloping trade " we may conclude that he sometimes 
 succeeded in amusing where Dryden failed, and drew 
 away the wits from the playhouse to the tavern. Political 
 libels were then more fascinating even than dramas ; and 
 in a prologue of 1680 (already cited) Dryden complains 
 of his audiences satisfying their " envious itch " with 
 libels and " city gazettes " or " factious speeches." 
 
 However, Dryden was a man who, above all things, 
 moved with the times ; and seeing that the people loved 
 political wrangles between Whig and Tory, proceeded 
 to take a side himself, and violently assailed the Whigs 
 and defended the Tories. Politics the people wanted ; 
 politics they should have not only in the plays them- 
 selves — where the bias was judiciously veiled — but also 
 in prologues and epilogues, where the doses were un- 
 tempered and undisguised. 
 
 Loyalty had, of course, always distinguished the 
 addresses of the " black cloak " to the audience from the 
 earliest times ; * and the expressions of this feeling were 
 probably not merely formal and usual, but genuine, con- 
 sidering that the Puritan suppression of plays had taught 
 
 * In the prologue, written probably for the second performance of a 
 play (mentioned already) — The Hog hath lost His Pearl — any intention of 
 reflecting on the civic authorities is carefully disclaimed, and this was the 
 more necessary as the city magnates of the period were so " sharp-witted " 
 (as Henry Wotton writes to Sir Edward Bacon) that they understood the 
 then Lord Mayor "to be meant by the Hog, and the late Lord Treasurer 
 by the Pearl. " On the occasion of the first performance, at which Wotton 
 "assisted," the sheriffs entered and carried off some of the actors, "to 
 perform the last act at Bridewell," as Wotton pleasantly puts it. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 151 
 
 actors how intimately their profession was bound up 
 with the fate of the monarchy. Before the execution 
 of Charles I., and after the accession of Elizabeth, we 
 may notice certain graceful customs which tended to 
 exhibit a sentiment of devotion to the throne, such as 
 the old way of terminating the epilogue by offering 
 prayers for the reigning sovereign ; * and also we find, of 
 course, the ordinary phrases of deference and devotion 
 freely scattered through the prologues " spoken at court " 
 (as we have already had occasion to observe) ; but not till 
 the actors had experienced the sharp contrast between 
 the long winter of discontent which set in under the 
 domination of the Puritans, and the " glorious summer " 
 which succeeded it at the Restoration, did they 
 thoroughly appreciate the blessings, for their profes- 
 sion, of monarchy. The expressions of loyalty now 
 became effusive and unrestrained. Charles II., that 
 most unheroic '' Nell-Gwynne Defender of the Faith," 
 as Carlyle calls him, is called " godlike Charles ; " and 
 Lord Orrery, in the prologue to his Black Prince 
 (1667), does not hesitate to claim that "our Charles, 
 not theirs " (sc. of the French, Charlemagne) " deserves 
 the name of Great." And this of a man to whom 
 Killigrew was allowed to sugest that " he " (Killigrew) 
 "should go to hell to fetch Oliver Cromwell back to 
 
 * Thus the prose efWogae io King Henry IV. , Part II. , "spoken by 
 a dancer," concludes thus : " My tongue is weary ; when my legs are too, 
 I will bid you good night : and so kneel down before you, — but, indeed, to 
 pray for the queen.'" In the old Hindoo drama the prologue commenced 
 with a short prayer or benediction. Whether the existing authorities were 
 mentioned in it is not so certain. 
 
152 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 govern the kingdom, since his successor did not know- 
 how to do it." 
 
 After these ebullitions had taken time to waste 
 themselves, the feeling of loyalty to the person of the 
 sovereign took another shape, namely, that of devotion 
 to the king and the Tory party or to the king and the 
 Whig party, as the case might be. Gradually the king 
 came to be virtually, though by no means nominally, 
 dropped out ; and the real contests of the prologists and 
 pamphleteers were between the defenders of the Whigs 
 and the defenders of the Tories, in which latter class we 
 may number Dryden and Dennis, whose expressions of 
 loyalty are always intermingled with denunciations of 
 the disloyalty and perfidy of their opponents.* 
 
 It would be a weary task to dilate on the scores of 
 prologues in which the belligerent dramatists, Dryden, 
 Otway, Lee, D'Urfey, Crowne, and Southerne, on the 
 Tory side, and Elkanah Settle and Shadwell (the Og 
 and Doeg of Absalom and Achitophel) on the WRig, 
 vented their political spleen.t In these numerous efforts 
 of Dryden against Settle and Shadwell the literary 
 
 * See especially the p-ologue to the King (James II. ) and Queen upon 
 the Union of the Two Companies (the King's and the Duke's) in 1686. It is 
 bursting with loyalty to James, but still more with hatred of the Whigs. 
 It concludes: "Whig poets" (Settle and Shadwell) "and Whig sheriffs 
 may hang together." A Whig sheriff, Henry Cornish, had lately (1680) 
 been hanged, apparently for no other reason than that he was a Whig. 
 See also the prologue to Amboyna ; directed against the Dutch, and full 
 of bellicose ToiTism. 
 
 t See Dryden's prologue to The Duke of Guise, Shadwell's prologue to 
 Bury Fair ; also a prologue of Dryden's (to what play is uncertain) in the 
 tenth volume of Sir Walter Scott's edition (p. 353) ; also the prologue and 
 epilogue which he composed for Southerne's Loyal Brother. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 153 
 
 jealousy was added to the public rivalry ; in fact, I am 
 inclined to think that the former passion in this case 
 determined the latter, and that Dryden's pretence of 
 hating these two poets for being Whigs, was only his 
 way of concealing his hatred of the two Whigs for daring 
 to be poets. It is more probable that the Pope Joan of 
 the one, and The Lancashire Witches of the other were 
 distasteful to the laureate on the ground of their having 
 taken as plays, than because they offended his Tory 
 principles. His bitterest attack on his two opponents is 
 to be found in his prose Vindication of the Duke of Guise, 
 the play thus *' vindicated" having a decided application 
 to contemporary political events, which the dullest critic 
 could not fail to perceive ; and having, in consequence, 
 drawn on him the 'wrath of the Whig playwrights,* who 
 are accordingly assailed in the Vindication with the per- 
 fervid animosity which was so characteristic of its author. 
 Elkanah Settle had always been a bitter opponent 
 and rival of Dryden, on public, private, and professional 
 grounds. This is the kind of coarse cudgel which 
 " Doeg " wielded in the encounter — (the extract is from 
 the prologue to his Emperor of Morocco, acted in 
 168 1-2): 
 
 " Poets we all know can change, like you. 
 And are alone to their own interest true ; 
 Can write against all sense, nay even their own : 
 The vehicle c^X^ii pension makes it down. 
 No fear of cudgels, where there's hope of bread : 
 A well-filled paunch forgets a broken head.'" 
 
 * Shadwell, in some verses called A Lenten Prologue refused by the 
 Players, and in a work called Reflections on the tretended parallel in the 
 Play called the Duke of Guise. 
 
154 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 The allusions in the last lines are to Dryden's 
 pension as laureate and histriographer royal (a very 
 small one — ;^300 a year, and a butt of canary, neither 
 paid in full nor punctually) and to the beating which he 
 received at midnight in the streets by some hired 
 bravos of a nobleman whom he had offended in a 
 literary quarrel. But to accuse such an uncompromising 
 Tory as Dryden * with trimming in politics, however 
 he may have trimmed in other matters, was very unfair, 
 and, if felt at all by the object of the attack, must have 
 been felt as the unkindest cut of all. 
 
 With Shadwell, on the other hand, Dryden was at 
 first, and at intervals afterwards, on friendly terms. 
 The quarrel was originally literary, and arose out of the 
 two dramatists' different views on the proper method of 
 writing plays, on the merits of Ben Jonson, and the 
 relative value of plot and "humours" in constructing a 
 drama. Gradually the contest took on a political hue ; 
 and " Og " poses as a Whig, laughing, in pamphlets and 
 lampoons, at first, and then in the prologue to his Bury 
 Fair, at Dryden's " most confounded loyal plays " — 
 loyal, that is, to the departed majesty of the Stuarts : 
 for it is needless to say that Shadwell would not have 
 used such an expression before the downfall of that line. 
 But with the new regime Shadwell reaped his reward, 
 such as it was ; and Dryden, sticking to his colours, 
 received his punishment. The latter was deposed from 
 
 * One of Dryden's prologues (which I cannot at present lay my hands 
 upon), and also one of his epilogues (that to Nathaniel Lee's Constanthie 
 the Great), contain long passages directed against "The Trimmer" — 
 (neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring.") 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 155 
 
 his office as poet-laureate ; and Dorset recommended as 
 his successor to the new king William, the man who 
 
 ' ' In prose and verse was own'd without dispute, 
 Througli all the realm of Nonsense absolute. " 
 
 In the above-mentioned prologue, " Og " most in- 
 decently exults over his prostrate rival, and proclaims 
 his past fidelity through good and evil report — this is 
 the first occasion on which we hear of it — to the cause 
 which, having now triumphed, elicits these jubilant 
 strains. Speaking of the Stuart period, he says : 
 
 ' ' 'Twas precious loyalty that was thought fit 
 To atone for want of honesty and wit. 
 No wonder common sense was all cried down, 
 And noise and nonsense swaggered through the town. 
 Our author, then oppressed, would have you know it, 
 Was silenced for a non-conformist poet ; 
 In those hard times he bore the utmost test, 
 And now he swears he's loyal as the best. 
 
 ***** 
 He found esteem from those he valued most ; 
 Proud of his friends, he of his foes could boast." 
 
156 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Prologues and epilogues attacking Puritans — Those attacking 
 Papists qnd Jesuits — Those attacking the clerical profession 
 generally (Dryden) — "Occasional" prologues ; on the retire- 
 ment of Betterton from the stage ; on the production of 
 Dryden's last play ; on the union of the King's and the Duke's 
 companies, in 1686; on the first programme of the new 
 Theatre Royal, in 1674 — Mention and caricature in dramas 
 of the current styles of prologue and epilogue ; as, in A 
 Midsummer Night's Dream, The City Match, The Malcontent, 
 etc. — Dryden's prologues and epilogues ridiculed in The 
 Rehearsal — The " thunder and lightning " prodialogue of the 
 Poet Bayes— Dryden, the prince of prologists ; in him the 
 art culminates, and since his time has been steadily declin- 
 ing — His death and the close of the seventeenth century — Lines 
 originally written for a prologue afterwards developed into 
 a play {Albion a7id Albaiiius) — Modern French use of the term 
 " prologue " as a preliminary act of the drama — Plays without 
 prologues— George Peek's extraordinary prologue without a 
 play. 
 
 Having dealt with Dryden's political prologues, we 
 ought next to notice, before passing on, a certain large 
 and important class of prologues which chiefly excited 
 the wrath of Jeremy Collier, as expressed in his great 
 work on the Profanity of the Stage, namely those ridi- 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 157 
 
 culing the clergy. The manner m which Bafebones and 
 Scruple,* and Bird and Mrs. Flowerdew, not to mention 
 other characters in the plays of the period from Shake- 
 speare to Dryden, are introduced upon the stage, con- 
 stitutes sufficient evidence of the extent to which the 
 godly fraternity of Puritans were continually held up 
 to contempt in the dramas themselves. But this was 
 rather by action and implication ; when we come to 
 Dryden it is needless to say that we soon find direct 
 and unmistakable references in prologues and epilogues, 
 not merely to Puritan zeal or hypocrisy, but to the 
 clergy generally, qn& clergy. Dryden indeed pretended, 
 as a Roman Catholic, to be aiming more particularly at 
 the Protestant priesthood, but Jeremy Collier on the 
 whole clearly makes out (from a comparison of passages) 
 that the poet aimed at exposing the office itself to con- 
 tumely, whether Jesuit or Protestant, monk or curate, 
 happened to be the holder of it. It is true that in the 
 prologue to The Duke of Guise Dryden directs all the 
 force of his satire against the Protestants — clergy and 
 laity both — who had invented before then the Holy 
 League, which was the subject of the play, and who 
 were now concocting a sort of Solemn League and 
 
 * A play scoffing at a certain Nonconformist preacher of this name (see 
 Wright's History of Caricature, p. 382), was stopped by the authorities. A 
 prologue (spoken, I believe, by Lacy) to another play subsequently pro- 
 duced, refers to this incident ; playing upon the double sense of " hypocrite " 
 (play-actor, uTro/cpiT^s) : 
 
 "... with us — no fear 
 Scruple's a silenced minister. 
 
 Would'st know the cause ? The Brethren snivel and say, 
 No one must play the hypocrite but they." 
 
158 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 Covenant, with Shaftesbury at its head* .It is true, 
 also, that, in his essay on The Character of a Good 
 Parson, he attempted to show that he was not in- 
 sensible to the capacity, or to the virtues of the clerical 
 profession, if properly exercised. But this was a sketch 
 of an ideal. What Dryden's views of the actual parsons 
 he saw about him were, is sufficiently obvious from the 
 following extracts from two of his epilogues. The first 
 is that written for his son's play. The Husband His Oivn 
 Cuckold: 
 
 Aofain : 
 
 ' ' With the parson 'tis another case, 
 He, without hoUness, may rise to grace." 
 
 "Dulness well becomes the sable garment ; 
 I wanrant that ne'er spoiled a priest's preferment. " 
 
 Here the charge is only against the dulness and want 
 of learning characteristic of the order ; f but in the 
 other epilogue to which we have referred, namely, that 
 to The Spanish Friar, graver charges are adduced, and 
 here, at all events, there can be no question of Papist 
 V. Protestant. It was simply a case of bitter and 
 strongly felt, whether well founded or not, distrust and 
 abhorrence of clericalism in every shape. The poet 
 appears to have anticipated that this epilogue would 
 draw down censure upon him, for he describes it as 
 
 * He avows this boldly at the opening : 
 
 " Our play's a parallel ; the Holy League 
 Begot our Covenant ; Guisards got the Whig. '' 
 
 t Cf. his prologue to the revival of Troilus and Cressida : 
 " The insipid stuff which here you hate 
 Might somewhere else be called a grave debate ; 
 Dulness is decent in the Church and State." 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 159 
 
 written "by a friend of the author's," an absurd dis- 
 guise, which (the reader will agree after reading the 
 lines) could have deceived no one : 
 
 " How are men cozened still with shows of good ? 
 The bawd's best mask is the grave friar's hood ; 
 Though vice no more a clergyman displeases 
 Than doctors can be thought to hate diseases. 
 'Tis by your living ill that they live well, 
 By your debauches their fat paunches swell. 
 'Tis a mock-war between the priest and devil, 
 When they think fit, they can be very civil." 
 
 He ends by a stirring appeal to fathers and husbands to 
 follow the example of Sweden and drive the priests out 
 of the land, and ends with the significant couplet : 
 
 "Your wives and daughters soon will leave the cells, 
 When they have lost the sound of Aaron's bells. " 
 
 We can hardly be surprised that such a passage as this 
 excited the wrath of a Milbourne or a Blackmore, or 
 even of a Swift ; or, if it moved the expostulation of 
 his own sons, to whom he writes in answer, " For your 
 sak'es I will struggle with the plain openness of my 
 nature, and keep in my just resentments against that 
 degenerate order." Still less can we be surprised that 
 his rivals. Settle the dramatist and Tom Brown the 
 pamphleteer, fastened upon him and made capital out 
 of his ostentatious contention with this particular class 
 of men. Least of all can we be astonished to find 
 Jeremy Collier, who was possessed of a stern, robust 
 morality, both in theory and practice (of which Tom 
 Brown and Settle most certainly were not), at once 
 taking up the cudgels and putting his finger on the 
 real motive v/hich animated Dryden, namely, animosity 
 
l6o THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 against clericalism, not of this or that kind, but of all 
 kinds. " But, prithee," says Tom Brown, " why so severe 
 always on the priesthood, Mr. Bayes .-' What have they 
 merited to pull down your indignation ? I thought the 
 ridiculing of men of that character on the stage was by ■ 
 this time a topic as much worn out with you as ' love 
 and honour ' in the play, or good fulsome flattery in 
 the dedication." Then comes a very bitter insinuation. 
 " But you, I find, still continue your old humour to 
 date from Hegira . . . or since orders were refused 
 you." More dignified is Jeremy Collier's rebuke, ad- 
 ministered after a careful review of the various pass- 
 ages in which his order is slighted : " Thus we see 
 how hearty these people are in their ill-will ; how they 
 attack religion under every form, and pursue the priest- 
 hood through all the subdivisions of opinion. Neither 
 Jews nor Heathens, Turks, Christians, Rome nor Geneva, 
 church nor conventicle, can escape them. They are 
 afraid lest virtue should have any quarters, a disturbed 
 conscience any refuge to retire to, or God worshipped in 
 any place." 
 
 And now, to dismiss these keen " encounters of 
 wit," and approach a less disturbed region, it may be 
 of interest, before concluding this chapter, to glance at 
 the kind of prologues known as " occasional " prologues, 
 or addresses to the public framed solely with a view to 
 commemorate some event of importance. In these the 
 quarrelsome humours of dramatists are for the moment 
 put aside, and we breath a purer and more genial air. 
 Foremost amongst, such prologues and epilogues are 
 
m ENGLISH LITERATURE. i6i 
 
 those spoken at performances given for the benefit of 
 some retiring veteran of the stage. And of these 
 veterans who should be named first, if not the fine old 
 actor who covered the whole period from the Restoration 
 to Queen Anne, Thomas Betterton ? He was seventy- 
 four years old when Mrs. Bracegirdle and Mrs. Barry 
 supported him on this occasion in the play of Love 
 for Love. The prologue, spoken by his old colleague 
 Mrs. Bracegirdle, and written by Congreve, has never 
 appeared in print, but the touching epilogue composed 
 by Nicholas Rowe has survived and is recorded amongst 
 his other works. Mrs. Barry spoke the lines, supporting 
 Betterton on one side, while Mrs. Bracegirdle stood on 
 the other ; and both actresses clasped round the waist, 
 the aged partner of many a bygone triumph during the. 
 delivery of the following passage : 
 
 " So we, to former leagues of friendship true, 
 Have bid once more our peaceful homes adieu, 
 To aid old Thomas and to pleasure you. 
 * « * * « 
 
 Time was when this good man no help did lack. 
 And scorned that any she should hold his back. 
 But now, so age and frailty have ordained, 
 By two at once he's forced to be sustained. 
 You see what failing nature brings man to. 
 And yet, let none insult ; for aught we know. 
 She may not wear so well with some of you. 
 Though old, you'll find his strength is not yet passed. 
 But true as steel, he's metal to the last. 
 If better he performed in days of yore, 
 Yet now he gives you all that's in his power ; 
 What can the youngest of you all do more ? " 
 
 In praise of this hard-working and gifted actor — who 
 had proved his power in every sort of play from Shake- 
 
 M 
 
i62 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 speare to Congreve — even the homely spirit of Rowe 
 is warmed into eloquence. What a splendid epilogue 
 Dryden could, and doubtless would, have written for 
 this memorable occasion, had he not long since gone 
 over to the majority, in the year 1700, six years before 
 which date he had finally given up writing for the stage, 
 making an eloquent appeal to the man whom he recog- 
 nized as his successor (Congreve) to " defend from ill " 
 the name of his " departed friend." The last play which 
 Dryden wrote for the English stage, and which, curiously 
 enough, was, like his first, a failure, was acted in 1694. 
 Love Trmmphant was its name, and not till fifteen years 
 afterwards did Betterton, who spoke the prologue on the 
 occasion of the retirement of the great dramatist, him- 
 self make his last exit. It is needless to say that the 
 poeticules exulted over the unfavourable reception which 
 this play encountered at the King's house. One of these 
 congratulates himself that the " minor poets " will be 
 encouraged thereby, and "huffing Dryden vexed to 
 madness." "It was damned," he writes, "by the universal 
 cry of the town, nemine contradicente but the conceited 
 poet. He says in his prologue that this is the last the 
 town must expect from him ; he had done himself a 
 kindness had he taken his leave before." The prologue, 
 referred to in the above letter, together with the corres- 
 ponding epilogue, in which the poet takes leave of the 
 stage, had been privately read by him, a few weeks 
 previously, to John Evelyn, who thus records the event 
 in his diary for the nth January, 1694: "Supped at 
 Mr. Edward Sheldon's, where was Mr. Dryden, the poet, 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 163 
 
 who now intended to write no more plays, being intent 
 on his translation of Virgil. He read to us his prologue 
 and epilogue to his valedictory play now shortly to be 
 acted." It is significant that the retiring dramatist did 
 not venture to recite any of the passages from "the 
 valedictory play" itself; if he had done so he might 
 have startled the grave and decoi'ous Evelyn. In the 
 ensuing March the play was acted, and in the prologue 
 Dryden clearly announced his intention ; and, unlike 
 Ben Jonson, who so often threatened "to leave the 
 loathed stage " without doing so, he was as good as his 
 word, and thus was severed a connection which, even at 
 its best, was never perhaps a happy one. Now for the 
 prologue, in which it will be seen that the poet maintains 
 his old militant and satirical disposition to the last. 
 After comparing himself to a treasurer " laying down his 
 stick," and working out the parallel in some score of lines, 
 he then, as Mrs. Bracegirdle is made to do on another 
 occasion, imagines himself to be bequeathing his effects : 
 
 " He dies, at least to us, and to the stage, 
 And what he has he leaves this noble age. 
 He leaves you first all plays of his inditing, 
 The whole estate which he has got by writing. 
 The beaux may think this nothing but vain praise ; 
 They'll find it something, the testator says ; 
 Tor half their love is made from scraps of plays. 
 To his worst foes he leaves his honesty, 
 That they may thrive upon't as much as he. 
 He leaves his manners to the roaring boys 
 "Who come in drunk, and fill the house with noise. 
 He leaves to the dire critics of his wit 
 His silence and contempt of all they writ. 
 To Shakespeare's critic he bequeaths the curse 
 To find his faults, and yet himself make worse.'' etc. 
 
l64 THE TROLOGVE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 The somewhat penurious and bitterly disappointed 
 laureate — disappointed with fair promises and small 
 payments, with much patronage and little support — 
 appears prominently in the caustic words, "That they 
 may thrive upon't as much as he." That he was still 
 poor is implied in the " Epistle Dedicatory," prefixed to 
 this " valedictory play," in which he speaks of " this 
 lowness of my fortunes, to which I have voluntarily 
 reduced myself, and of which I have no reason to be 
 ashamed ; " and also of having " nothing to boast of 
 but my misfortunes." He is presumably referring here 
 more particularly to the very niggardly practical assis- 
 tance which he had received from the Stuarts, to whom 
 he had always so loyally adhered — an adherence repaid 
 no otherwise than by the most graceful compliments. 
 
 The epilogue to Love Triumphant, spoken by 
 Dalinda, one of the characters in the play, has no 
 reference to Dryden's leave-taking, except that con-, 
 tained in the opening couplet, which pleads that — 
 
 " In good manners nothing should be said 
 Against this play, because the poet's dead ; " 
 
 recalling the corresponding lines in the prologue. 
 
 Six years after this date, as we have said, came the 
 time for Dryden to retire from a larger stage than 
 that of the King's house. Shortly before, or shortly 
 after, his death — it is not quite cei-tain which — The 
 Pilgrim was performed either for his or his son's benefit. 
 Dryden had never severed his connection with the stage 
 so far as to refuse to write complimentary prologues for 
 the " first nights " of young dramatists in whom he 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 165 
 
 might be interested, or for other special occasions. 
 Accordingly he wrote both the prologue and the epi- 
 logue for this adaptation and revival of Fletcher's play, 
 besides also furnishing a Song and Secular Masque. 
 This benefit performance is supposed by Malone to have 
 taken place on the 25th of March, 1700; Dryden died 
 on the ensuing ist of May ; and the play was printed 
 on the 17th of June. But there is no certainty about 
 the first date ; and Gildon speaks of the benefit having 
 been for Drydetis son. On the other hand, as Malone 
 points out, it is probable that the Secular Masque v/ould 
 have been performed as early in the year as possible. 
 The prologue contains no allusion, direct or indirect, to 
 the circumstances which led to the performance, but is 
 occupied with the attack on Sir Richard Blackmore, the 
 physician (" Quack Maurus ") — the author of the Satire 
 against Wit, and the poet's assailant in the matter of 
 morals and decency — to which we have made some 
 reference in an earlier chapter. That which prompted 
 Dryden to retort so severely on the doctor, when he 
 had succumbed so humbly to Jeremy Collier, was the 
 obviously personal nature of the attack in the former 
 case. Amongst other offences, " Quack Maurus " had 
 very ungenerously used against the dramatist the con- 
 fession of poverty which is to be found in his above- 
 quoted prologue taking leave of the stage. In the 
 preface to his epical poem on King Arthnr Sir 
 Richard Blackmore writes, with a very plain allusion 
 to Dryden, " 'Tis a mighty dishonour and reproach to 
 any man, that is capable of being useful to the world in 
 
l66 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 any liberal or virtuous profession, to lavish out his life 
 and wit in propagating vice and coiTuption of manners, 
 and in battering from the stage the strongest entrench- 
 ments and best works of religion and virtue. Whoever 
 makes this his choice, when the other was in his power, 
 may he go off the stage unpitied, complaining of neglect 
 and poverty, the just punishment of his irreligion and 
 folly." * 
 
 Thus, witty, satirical, provocative, belligerent to the 
 last, Dryden passed away with the century, the domi- 
 nating tastes of which he had so clearly reflected in 
 the dramas which he wrote for it. Colley Gibber 
 was chosen by Sir John Vanbrugh, who adapted The 
 Pilgrim, to speak the epilogue ; and Dryden himself 
 entrusted the same young actor with the prologue also, 
 as soon as he had heard him recite the former. " Young 
 Master Colley," as he was called, had previously been 
 noticed by Betterton, and thus enjoyed the proud dis- 
 tinction of having been first brought into prominence by 
 the veteran dramatist and the veteran actor of the 
 seventeenth century. 
 
 * It was this passage, we cannot help thinking, that furnished the 
 motive for the very bitter lines concluding Dryden's epilogue : 
 
 "Well, let him go — 'tis yet too early day 
 To get himself a place in farce or play ; 
 We know not by what name we should arraign him : 
 For no one category can contain him. 
 A pedant, canting preacher, and a quack 
 Are bad enough to break an ass's back. 
 At last, grown wanton, he presumed to write, 
 Traduced two kings, their kindness to requite ; 
 One made the Doctor, and one dubbed the Knight." 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 16? 
 
 A somewhat celebrated occasion, for which Dryden 
 at an earlier date wrote both prologue and epilogue, 
 was the union of the two rival companies, the King's and 
 the Duke's (in 1686), which henceforth together formed 
 the only recognized body of " His Majesty's Servants." 
 There was considerable opposition on the part of the 
 King's actors, because the Duke's company undoubtedly 
 obtained very advantageous terms in the reconstruction. 
 To this, however, they were clearly entitled ; as, for the 
 last few years, whatever CoUey Gibber and Dryden 
 might say, they had been attracting by far the better 
 houses. As early as 1672 there seems to have been 
 some project on foot for amalgamating the two houses, 
 as Dryden makes the epilogue-speaker to The Maiden 
 Queen, acted in that year, express a belief and fear 
 that such a fate was threatened.* But not till 1686 did 
 the thunderbolt fall. Up to that time the two houses 
 had been vying with one another in lavish expenditure 
 on scenes, dresses, machines, operas, and the like, with the 
 result that both were reduced to something very like 
 bankruptcy, though the Duke's house was, as we have 
 said, much less involved, and attracted greater audiences 
 than the other. Thereupon the King intervened, and 
 commanded a union ; and a strong and stable body of 
 
 * " This would prevent the houses joining too, 
 At which we are as much displeased as you ; 
 For all our women most devoutly swear, 
 Each would be rather a poor actress here 
 Than to be made a Mamamouchi there. " 
 
 The reference in the last line is to a play of Ravenscroft at the Duke's 
 theatre, acted in 1672, The Citizen turned Gentleman. 
 
i6S THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 actors was formed out of thd remnants of the two old 
 companies.* The prologue alludes rather grumblingly 
 to the situation, and compares the factious and dissatis- 
 fied persons, who then were leaving the country for 
 Pennsylvania and Carolina in large numbers, to the 
 rebellious band of younger actors, who, by intriguing 
 against the veterans Hart and Mohun in the/ King's 
 house, eventually brought about (according to Dryden, 
 and Gibber also) the fall of that theatre and the conse- 
 quent necessity of its company " leaving theirfstation " 
 and migrating to the " new plantation." He tljus works 
 out the parallel between recent political event^ and the 
 proceedings of the turbulent actors which led to the 
 granting of the fresh patent for one company only : 
 
 " The factious natives never could agree. 
 But aiming, as they called it, to be free, 
 These playhouse Whigs set up for property. ! 
 
 Some say, they no obedience paid of late ; 
 But would new fears and jealousies create, 
 Till topsy-turvy they had turned the state. 
 Plain sense, without the talent of foretelling. 
 Might guess 'twould end in downright knocks and quelling ; 
 For seldom comes there better of rebelling. 
 When men will needlessly their freedom barter 
 For lawless power, sometimes they catch a Tartar — 
 There's a damned word that rhimes to this, called Charter." 
 
 This " Charter '' is apparently considered analogons to 
 the fresh patent granted to the united company. In the 
 
 * Genest informs us that this year — an important one for the theatrical 
 world — was marked absurdly enough on one occasion by the insertion of 
 an extra line in the short address of the players to the Court in the play- 
 scene of Hamlet. The lines then ran : 
 
 " Here stooping to your clemency, 
 This being a year of unity " etc. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 169 
 
 epilogue Dryden seizes the opportunity to state the 
 grievances of those behind the curtain, in respect of 
 what was habitual before it. He complains principally 
 of the noise, drunkenness^ quarrels, and disorderly con- 
 duct of the audience,* both in the pit among the gallants 
 and the " vizard-masks," and also especially in the gal- 
 leries, where the lacqueys were allowed to have places 
 for nothing when their lords were visiting the theatre ; \ 
 and he further animadverts severely on the growing 
 practice among the beaux of visiting the " scene-room " 
 (our " green-room "), and the actresses there assembled. 
 He concludes in a manner thoroughly characteristic of 
 an unbending Tory of the Stuart period : 
 
 ' ' Thus, gentlemen, we have summed ujd in short 
 Our grievances, from country, town, and court ; 
 Which humbly we submit to your good pleasure ; 
 But first vote money, then redress at pleasure." 
 
 Another interesting occasion, for which a characteristic 
 
 * So Terence had bitterly complained (in the prologue to the Hecyra) 
 of the unruliness, fickleness, and bad taste of the spectators, who permitted 
 themselves to be lured away from his comedies to the gross entertainments 
 of rope-dancers (" funambuli "). 
 
 t " Then for your lacqueyS . . . 
 
 They roar so loud, you'd think behind the stairs 
 Tom Dove, and all the brotherhood of bears. 
 They've grown a nuisance, beyond all disasters ; 
 We've none so great but — their unpaying masters. 
 We beg you. Sirs, to beg your men, that they 
 Would please to give you leave to hear the play. " 
 
 Then lacqueys were often told off by the masters to keep places for them. 
 See Dryden's prologue to Carlell's Arviragus and Philicia : 
 
 "And, therefore. Messieurs, if you'll do us grace. 
 Send lacqueys early to preserve your place." 
 
I70 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 prologue was written by Dryden, was " the first day of 
 the King's house acting after the fire." In January, 
 1671-72, the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane was burnt 
 down. While the playhouse was being rebuilt, the 
 King's players acted at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn 
 Fields, which had theretofore been used by the Duke's 
 company, but had now been deserted by them for their 
 new and more gorgeous home in Dorset Gardens. 
 Under these circumstances, the prologue is very lugu- 
 brious, making special allusion to the harshness of the 
 players' fate in having to put up with the cast-off 
 mansion of their rivals : 
 
 ' ' From that hard climate we must wait for bread. 
 Whence even the natives, forced by hunger, fled. " 
 
 Then, alluding to the restored magnificence of the city 
 since the great fire of 1666, "the poet concludes : 
 
 " Our great metropohs does far surpass 
 Whate'er is now, and equals all that was ; 
 Our wit as far does foreign wit excel, 
 And, like a king, should in a palace dwell. 
 But we with golden hopes are vainly fed. 
 Talk high, and entertain you in a shed ; 
 Your presence here, for which we humbly sue. 
 Will grace old theatres and build up new. " 
 
 The new Theatre Royal, at this time in course of con- 
 struction, was ready for the players, after their two 
 years' homelessness, on the 26th of March, 1674. Sir 
 Christopher Wren had superintended the erection. The 
 new house was distinguished from D'Avenant's house at 
 Dorset Gardens by the simplicity of its external decora- 
 tions — a simplicity, we are told, though it is hardly 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 171 
 
 credible, recommended by Charles II. The emptiness 
 of the coffers of the King's players was, we imagine, a 
 stronger incentive to adopt a modest style of architec- 
 ture than the counsels of the King himself. But in his 
 prologue written for this occasion, Dryden puts forward 
 his Majesty's commands, as it was only polite to do, by 
 way of excuse for the plainness of the house as contrasted 
 with the grandeur of the Duke's. He takes the oppor- 
 tunity, also, of inveighing against the practice of 
 encumbering plays with over-magnificent embellish- 
 ments, and feeding the eye to repletion with spectacle 
 while starving the mind with scanty pittances of wit. 
 Poor Dryden felt not unnaturally that in the rivalry 
 between the two houses the longer purse, and not the 
 finer wit, would win ; and that by more and more lavish 
 expenditure the Duke's house would ultimately force 
 the King's players into beggary. He thus sums up the 
 situation : 
 
 " They, who are by your favours wealthy made, 
 With mighty sums may carry on the trade ; 
 We, broken banlcers, half desti'oyed by fire, 
 With our small stock to humble roofs retire ; 
 Pity our loss, while you their pomp admire. 
 For fame and honour we no longer strive. 
 We yield in both, and only beg — to live. 
 Unable to support their vast expense. 
 Who build and treat with such magnificence. 
 That like the ambitious monarchs of the age. 
 They give the law to our provincial stage. 
 
 ***** 
 Yet, if some pride with want may be allowed. 
 We in our plainness may be justly proud ; 
 Our Royal Master willed it should be so ; 
 Whate'er he's pleased to own can need no show. 
 
172 TBE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 'Twere folly now a stately pile to raise, 
 To build a playhouse, while you throw down plays. 
 While scenes, machines, and empty operas reign. 
 And for the pencil you the pen disdain. 
 
 ***** 
 Well, please yourselves ; but, sure, 'tis understood 
 That French machines have ne'er done England good. 
 I would not prophecy our house's fate, 
 But while vain shows and scenes you overrate, 
 'Tis to be feared — 
 
 That as a fire the former house o'erthrew, 
 Machines and tempests will destroy the new." 
 
 This vigorous and masculine protest against the inno- 
 vations imported by Davenant and others did not evoke 
 the sympathy which it merited. The pubHc taste had 
 by that time been too far debauched ; and the melan- 
 choly prophecy contained in the last few lines was 
 verified in 1686, when, after a twelve years' ruinous 
 competition in magnificence with the other house, the 
 King's players were merged into the larger and more 
 powerful company, retaining, indeed, their old name as 
 some sorry consolation, but forfeiting every other mark 
 of individuality. 
 
 In the epilogue written to match the above-quoted 
 prologue Dryden makes another distinction between the 
 money and sensuous "shows" of the "other house," and 
 the wit and intellect of the old company. Alluding to 
 the portraits of poets which adorned the Duke's theatre, 
 he says : 
 
 " Though in their house the poets' heads appear, 
 We hope we may presume their wits are here," — 
 
 and promises the audience that they shall be relieved 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 173 
 
 in the new theatre not only from "the frights of ill- 
 paved streets, and long dark winter nights," which were 
 necessary accompaniments of the old house in Lincoln's 
 Inn Fields (separated, as it was then, from the city by 
 a large space unbuilt over), but also from "the worn 
 plays and fustian stuff of rhyme," which, it is implied, 
 were characteristic of the rival theatre in Dorset 
 Gardens. 
 
 One other " occasional " prologue, and we have done 
 with this branch of our subject. A year after Dryden's 
 death Grenville presented to the poet's son Charles the 
 profits arising from the " author's night " of his adap- 
 tation of The Merchant of Venice — for Shakespeare 
 could only be tolerated in that age when adapted, 
 operatized, or otherwise operated upon. On that night 
 a prodialogue was written by one Bevil Higgins, the 
 interlocutors being the ghosts of Shakespeare and 
 Dryden. The impudence of the Shakespeare-tinkers 
 of the period appears from the words put into the 
 mouth of the elder ghost, who is made to say : 
 
 " These scenes in their rough native dress were mine, 
 But now improved with nobler lustre shine ; 
 The first rude sketches Shakespeare's pencil drew, 
 But all the shining master-strokes are new. " 
 
 Truly a confident person this Mr. Bevil Higgins ! That 
 he should have penned the lines at all without the 
 smallest idea that he would thereby outrage any one's 
 sense of propriety, or excite any mirth, is a sufficiently 
 damning testimony of the degradation of public taste 
 at the close of the seventeenth century. Dryden's 
 
174 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 ghost is made to complain that he had " toiled in vain 
 for an ungenerous age," and adds : 
 
 " They starved me living ; nay, denied me fame, 
 And scarce, now dead, do justice to my name ; 
 Would you repent ? Be to my ashes kind ; 
 Indulge the pledges I have left behind." * 
 
 We may note, in conclusion, that during the period 
 which we have traversed the prologue and epilogue 
 rapidly came to be considered such an important and 
 interesting part of the evening's, or rather afternoon's, 
 entertainment, and on many occasions, especially in the 
 hands of Dryden, so stood out by themselves as things 
 to be remembered for their wit, their audacity, or their 
 allusions, and for the person by whom, or the manner 
 in which, they were delivered ; that in the various plays 
 ridiculing contemporary dramas and dramatists, we 
 often find independent references to them, in the way 
 
 * The recipient of this benefit, Charles Dryden, was drowned three 
 years afterwards (August, 1704), in attempting to swim across the Thames 
 at Datchet. We may mention here that prologues introducing ghosts of 
 defunct dramatists were not at all uncommon during the Restoration period. 
 Thus the Duke of Buckingham evokes the ghost of his favourite Ben 
 Jonson to rebuke the age of his degenerate successors ; for a similar pur- 
 pose Dryden summons Shakespeare's ghost to speak the prologue to his 
 adaptation of Troilus and Cressida (Ben Jonson, with his humours, he left 
 Shadwell to lavish admiration upon). In this case the deferential lan- 
 guage of the preliminary address hardly compensates for the wrong done 
 to Shakespeare's memory by the villainous character of the adaptation itself. 
 We have also a class of prologues prefixed to revivals of plays, wherein 
 comparisons were likely to be drawn between the then enactors of the 
 principal parts and those who had preceded them ; such as the prologue 
 to the 1641 revival of Bussy d'Ambois (Chapman's play), where Hart -is 
 pointed out as a worthy successor to Field in the title-r61e ; and also that 
 to A Very Woman (by Massinger), and those (above-mentioned) wliich 
 contain allusions to wagers. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 175 
 
 of parody or caricature. Thus in the little three-line 
 prologue to the play-scene in Hamlet we get perhaps a 
 parody of the very curt style of address which was 
 usual when a " dumb show " was to follow, short both in 
 the number and the length of the lines employed. Still 
 more unmistakably are the peculiarities of the simpler 
 sort of players in this matter pointed at in A Midsum- 
 mer Night's Dream (Act iii., sc. i), where Bottom and 
 Quince discuss the question whether their prologue to 
 the play to be performed before Theseus shall be " in 
 eight and six " (that is, in alternate lines of eight and 
 six syllables each), or in "eight and eight." The old 
 and ingenuous prologue which let out confidentially 
 the whole plot of the play is amusingly portrayed 
 in the following dialogue between the mechanics 
 (we may here compare Hamlet's remark in the play- 
 scene : " The players cannot keep counsel, they'll tell 
 all): 
 
 " Bottom. There are things in this comedy of Pyramus and Thisby 
 that will never please. First, Pyramus'must draw a sword to kill himself, 
 which the ladies cannot abide. How answer you that ? 
 
 Snout. By'rlakin, a parlous fear. 
 
 * ^ ie -i^ i& 
 
 Bot. ... I have a device to make all well. Write me a prologue ; 
 and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm with our swords ; and 
 that Pyramus is not killed indeed : and, for the more better assurance, tell 
 them, that I Pyramus am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver. This will 
 put them out of fear. 
 
 Quince. Well, we will have such a prologue ; . . . 
 
 ***** 
 
 Snout. Will not the ladies be afeard of the lion ? 
 Starveling. I fear it, I promise you. 
 
 * * * * It 
 
 Snout, Therefore, another prologue must tell he is not a hon." 
 
175 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 The simplicity with which these honest men went 
 about their work, their efforts to make everything clear 
 to their courtly audience, and their genuine anxiety 
 lest their histrionic power and realistic acting should 
 "fright the ladies," are admirably brought out by 
 Shakespeare in this scene. The actual performance 
 before the Court, of which the above was a rehearsal, 
 takes place in Act v., sc. i. It appears that Bottom and 
 his fellows had reconsidered the " eight and eight " pro- 
 ject, perhaps after taking counsel of some clerkly person 
 about the Court, and had finally determined on the 
 orthodox "ten and ten." To this measure the prologue, 
 as delivered, strictly adheres ; and, though the matter 
 is not much, the form and the intention are excellent. 
 The address, ushered in by the full triple flourish of 
 trumpets, concludes by introducing the " dumb show " 
 in the then usual style : 
 
 " The actors are at hand ; and by their show, 
 You shall know all that you are like to know." 
 
 But there was an amusing incident in the delivery of 
 this prologue, which the good Bottom had not foreseen. 
 The speakei", in his nervousness, misplaces all the stops 
 in the most ridiculous manner, therein proving -himself 
 not unlike those " great clerks " previously mentioned 
 by Theseus, who " make periods in the midst of sen- 
 tences," and "throttle their practis'd accent in their 
 fears.'* After the prologue is over Theseus remarks, 
 " This fellow doth not stand upon points." To which 
 Lysander rejoins, " he hath rid his prologue like a rough 
 colt ; he knows not the stop. A good moral, my lord : 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 177 
 
 it is not enough to speak, but to speak true " — a moral 
 which several " great clerks " of the present day, on the 
 stage and elsewhere, might with advantage take to heart. 
 Next comes the "dumb show," to which the Prologue 
 acts as " Presenter,'' and explains in the most ingenuous 
 manner who all the characters are, and what they are 
 about to enact ; so fully, indeed, that there seems no 
 need of further dialogue, or of a play at all, which, how- 
 ever, the players go through with, valiantly killing off 
 every character in the proper mode ; so that Theseus 
 when asked by Bottom whether he will have an epilogue 
 or a Bergomask dance to wind up with, pronounces 
 decisively for the latter. " No epilogue, I pray you ; 
 for your play needs no excuse. Never excuse ; for 
 when the players are all dead, there need none to be 
 blamed . . . come, your Bergomask : let your epilogue 
 alone." 
 
 We get, in this latter scene, a capital picture of the 
 manner in which prologues were delivered by unskilled 
 actors ; and many casual references, eloquent of Shake- 
 speare's practical experiences in this matter at the Globe 
 or the Blackfriars, are scattered up and down his plays. 
 Reminiscences, we may imagine, of many a manvais 
 quart d'heure in the representation of some of his own 
 plays, when the " black cloak " may have come on after 
 the three soundings, "out" in his words, unprepared, 
 and nervous, suggested that allusion in Romeo and Juliet 
 (Act i., sc. 4) to a " without-book prologue, faintly spoke 
 after the prompter." Similarly the traditional grave 
 demeanour of the prologue-speaker is hinted at, perhaps 
 
 N 
 
178 THE PROLOGUE AND EP2L0GVE 
 
 ridiculed, in Mayne's City Match (Act v., sc. 2), where 
 Warehouse promises Dorcas that she " shall have her 
 usher to slaik before her, like a buskin'd Prologue, in a 
 stately, high, majestic motion." 
 
 The above-mentioned practice of the prologue usher- 
 ing in one or more dumb shows, so that between them 
 there was not much matter left' for the play itself, 
 seems to be burlesqued in a little play-scene, which 
 forms an episode in Middleton's drama, A Mad World, 
 My Masters (Act v.). There Folly-Wit, who, as 
 directed, " enters for a Prologue," concludes his address 
 thus : 
 
 " The play, which we present, no fault shall meet 
 But one, you'll say 'tis short, we'll say 'tis sweet : 
 'Tis given much to dumb shows, which some praise ; 
 And, like the term, delights much in delays. 
 So to conclude, and give the name her due. 
 The play being called the Slip, I vanish too.'' 
 
 At the end of the induction to The Malcontent, the 
 stereotyped airs and attitudes then considered proper 
 for the delivery of a prologue, are ridiculed. "Come, 
 cuz," says Sly to Lowin, " have you never a prologue .' " 
 And he adds, " let me see, I will make one extempore ; 
 come to them, and fencing of a congey with arms and 
 legs, be round with them." Then he delivers a few prose 
 lines, palpably intended for a burlesque on the prose 
 epilogue to ^j- Yoii Like It. 
 
 Even the prince of prologue-writers, John Dryden 
 himself, did not escape the irreverent hand of burlesque. 
 The Duke of Buckingham and his collabprateurs, in The 
 Rehearsal, attacked the prologues, as they attacked 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 179 
 
 everything else, issuing from the pen of their principal 
 victim. We have already referred to some of the pas- 
 sages in which Poet Bayes is made to explain the 
 principles by which he was usually guided in composing 
 his masterpieces in this line. Besides these, however, 
 there is a passage at the end of the first act, in which 
 specific types of Dryden-prologues are more exactly 
 parodied. Here Bayes tells Smith and Johnson that he 
 has two prologues for his play, to be delivered one after 
 the other (a not uncommon practice with Dryden, as I 
 have already pointed out), the first of them being (to use 
 his own words), " That I come out in a long black veil, 
 and a great huge hangman behind me, with a furr'd cap, 
 and his sword drawn ; and there tell them plainly, that 
 if, out of good nature, they will not like my play, 'egad, 
 I'll e'en kneel down, and he shall cut my head off." This 
 is an obvious burlesque on the poet's numerous character 
 prologues. The prologue which was to succeed this is 
 intended to parody another very common type of Dry- 
 denian prologue, namely that which we have christened 
 the prodialogue. Thus does Bayes expound its merits : 
 " Though there have been many witty prologues of late, 
 yet I think you will say this is a non pareillo : I'm sure 
 nobody has hit upon it yet. For here, sir, I make my 
 prologue to be a dialogue ; and as, in my first, you see 
 I strive to oblige my auditors by civility, by good nature, 
 good language, and all that ; so, in this, by the other 
 way, in terrorem, I chuse for the persons Thunder and 
 Lightning. . . . Come out, Thunder and Lightning." 
 Then " Thunder and Lightning enter," and we have 
 
l8o THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 surely the most funny and pronounced prodialogue ever 
 penned : 
 
 Thunder. I am the bold Thunder. 
 
 Bayes. Mr. Cartwright, prythee, speak that a little louder, and with a 
 hoarse voice. I am the bold Thunder. Pshaw ! Speak it in a voice that 
 thunders it out indeed. I am the bold Thunder. 
 
 Than. I am the bold Thunder. 
 
 Lightning. The brisk Lightning, I. 
 
 Bayes. Nay, but you must be quick and nimble. The brisk Light- 
 ning, I. That's my meaning. 
 
 Thun. I am the bravest Hector of the sky. 
 
 Light. And I, fair Helen, that made Hector die. 
 
 Thun. I strike men down. 
 
 Light, I fire the town. 
 
 Thun. Let critics take heed how they grumble. 
 For then I begin for to rumble. 
 
 Light. Let the ladies allow us their graces, 
 Or I'll blast all the paint on their faces, 
 And dry up their Peter to soot. 
 
 Than. Let the critics look to't. 
 
 Light. Let the ladies look to't. 
 
 Thun. For Thunder will do't. 
 
 Light. For Lightning will shoot. 
 
 Thun. I'll give you dash for dash. 
 
 Light. I'll give you flash for flash. 
 Gallants, I'll singe your feather. 
 
 Thun. I'll thunder you together. 
 
 Both. Look to't, look to't ; we'll do't, we'll do't ; look to't, we'll do't. 
 ( Twice or thrice repeated). 
 
 Nearly every peculiarity of Dryden, as manifested in 
 bis prologues, is most happily though broadly parodied 
 here. His bellicose attitude towards the critics, his 
 habit of throwing himself at the mercy of the ladies, 
 and his love of smart dialogue and startling effects, all 
 find a place here. No wonder that, when Bayes tells 
 Smith with mock-modesty that " 'Tis but a flash of 
 a prologue : a droll," Smith replies, " Yes, 'tis short, 
 indeed ; but very terrible!' 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. iSi 
 
 It will have been noticed that the materials for a 
 study of the English Prologue and Epilogue, during 
 the period which we have selected, have been principally- 
 derived from the writings of John Dryden. And the 
 reason is obvious. As Dryden was the last, so he was 
 incomparably the best prologue-writer of the sixteenth 
 and seventeenth centuries. As he was the most volumin- 
 ous, so was he the neatest and most precise of all who 
 worked in this field. His prologues and epilogues have 
 been better preserved than those of any other dramatist 
 from the time of Shakespeare ; and — rare coincidence ! 
 — they have been better worth preserving. The large ex- 
 tent of ground which they covered, and of contemporary 
 life which they illustrated — valuable as these are to the 
 general historian as well as to the stage-chronicler — 
 have been more than equalled by the matchless pellu- 
 cidity and terseness of the couplets in which the poet's 
 thought was expressed. In point of clear-cut form, 
 Pope himself in his happiest moments could not rival 
 one of Dryden's best prologues. Nothing can be neater 
 or more brilliant than the parallels, metaphors, and 
 comparisons with which these addresses to the audience 
 are studded. In longer effusions — in heroic poems, and 
 still more in heroic plays — Dryden's genius may appear 
 diluted ; but in these brief masterpieces, where circum- 
 stances compelled him to concentrate himself, he is in- 
 imitable. It is natural that among the curious parallels 
 employed (some of which have already been noticed) 
 Dryden should have occasionally illustrated his views of 
 the proper function and nature of the things he was 
 
 N 3 
 
i82 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 writing by judicious metaphors. Thus in the prologue 
 to The Mistakes, Mr. Bright begins by saying : " Gentle- 
 men, we must beg your pardon ; here's no prologue to 
 be had to-day. Our new play is like to come on with- 
 out a frontispiece, as bold as one of you young beaux with- 
 out your periwig" And not only to a periwig does 
 Dryden liken the prologue (as Chetwood compares an 
 author without a preface to a gentleman at an evening 
 party without full dress), but also to the first charge in 
 a military assault,* and, again, to a peal of church bells 
 ringing for service. The last parallel comes oddly from 
 anti-clerical John, but it is needless to say that the poet 
 manages to screw out of it a neat little scoff at the 
 parson. It is to be found at the beginning of the pro- 
 logue to The Assignation : 
 
 ' ' Prologues, like bells to churches, toll you in 
 With chiming verse till the dull plays begin ; 
 With this sad difference, though, of pit and pew, 
 You damn the poet, but the priest damns you.f 
 
 Similarly the epilogue is elsewhere compared to the 
 benediction at the close of the service, with a similar 
 satirical sensus subanditus. In the commencement of 
 
 * Prologue to The Rival Ladies. The passage has been quoted above. 
 See also the first prologue to I'he Maiden Queen, which, after comparing 
 plays to towns, besieged by the ignoble army of critics, and exposed to 
 their "skilful fury," concludes : 
 
 " Ours " (sc. our poet) ..." humbly would attend your doom, 
 If, soldierlike, he may have terms to come. 
 With flying colours and with beat of drum. " 
 
 t In the epilogue to his son's The Husband His Own Cuckold, Dryden 
 gives us companion portraits of a "raw sophister mounting a pulpit," and 
 a young poet facing a pit for the first time. 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 183 
 
 the epilogue to I^iyden's version of The Tempest we 
 read : 
 
 " As country vicars when the sermon's done, 
 Run headlong to the Benediction, 
 Well knowing, though the better sort may stay, 
 The vulgar rout will stay unblest away ; 
 So we, when once our play is done, make haste 
 With a short epilogue to close your taste. 
 
 Rosalind (epilogue to As You Like If) likens, in a 
 quaint conceit, the prologue and epilogue to a rriarried 
 couple, or, at any rate, appear to regard the epilogue as 
 the feminine of the genus of which the prologue is the 
 masculine. 
 
 Prologue-writing as an art culminated in Dryden, 
 and with him it expired. In the eighteenth and nine- 
 teenth centuries the efforts of dramatists in this direc- 
 tion — notwithstanding an occasional happy prologue 
 from Garrick or Fielding — became feebler and heavier. 
 Less pains were taken with them, because the audiences 
 grew less interested ; and the audiences grew less 
 interested because less pains were taken with them. 
 But, while Dryden was dictator of wit, an elegant 
 prologue pointed and polished to the utmost nicety, and 
 smacking of demorsi ungues, would of itself, like an 
 advanced guard, take the public by storm, and win 
 admittance for the play. Dryden himself attributes to 
 others that which could occasionally be laid at his 
 own door — the wasting of " poetic rage " on this " first 
 charge " — where so much wit was spent on the pro- 
 logue that there was none left for the drama. So full 
 
184 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 of matter, indeed, were this poet's prologues that in one 
 case he enlarged one of these preludes into a substantial 
 play, or rather, perhaps, opera ; erecting what was 
 originally intended to be a mere provocative of appe- 
 tite into a piece de resistance. We allude to Albion and 
 Albanius, the genesis of whiph play is thus described by 
 its author, in the preface : 
 
 " I am now to acquaint my reader with somewhat more particular con- 
 cerning this opera, after having begged his pardon for so long a preface to 
 so short a work. It was originally intended only for a prologue to a play 
 of the nature of The Tempest . . . But some intervening accidents having 
 hitherto deferred the performance of the main design, I proposed to the 
 actors to turn the intended prologue into an entertainment by itself, as you 
 now see it, by adding two acts more to what I had already written." 
 
 This development of a genuine prologue into an act of 
 a drama is curiously paralleled by the modern French 
 practice (now being introduced into England) of calling 
 the first or introductory act of a play a prologue, and by 
 this means sometimes extending the length of the per- 
 formance an act beyond the limits assigned by tradition. 
 And this again reminds us of the old Euripidean 
 explanatory wpoXoyog, to which we alluded in our 
 first chapter, and which was always, of course, an 
 integral portion of the play, and not a mere detached 
 prefix ; and it also furnishes an example of how often 
 new fashions reproduce the old. Plays are now nearly 
 always without prologues, except in the modern sense 
 of the word just pointed out, and perhaps it is more 
 consonant with our present habits that they should be so. 
 "A good play needs no epilogue," says Rosalind in As 
 You Like It ; and we may add that good plays, now at 
 
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. i8s 
 
 any rate, need no prologue. Plays without prologues, 
 therefore, may always reasonably, and without any con- 
 tradiction in terms, exist ; but this can hardly be said of 
 a prologue without a play, such as we read of in The 
 Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peek, gentleman, some- 
 times student in Oxford. Wherein is shewed the course 
 of his life, how he lived ; a man very much known in the 
 City of London and elsewhere. With this story of the 
 mad, impecunious, quick-witted Elizabethan dramatist — 
 " The Jest of George Peele at Bristow," as it is called in 
 the book — a jest by which he probably became "very 
 much known" and also very much "wanted" in that 
 town — we will come to a conclusion. 
 
 George Peele, it appears, stayed on one occasion at 
 Bristow, as he had stayed at other places before, " some- 
 what longer than his coine would last him." While he 
 was in these straits " it so fortuned that certaine Players 
 came to the Towne, and lay at that Inne where George 
 Peele was." The out-at-elbows playwright then be- 
 thought him of this stratagem to get back his horse, which 
 the innkeeper had the right of detaining in the stable for 
 his unpaid charges, and put "money in his purse" to 
 pay his way up to London. " He goes directly to the 
 Mayor, tells him he was a Scholar and a Gentleman," 
 then craftily extols the town of Bristow, recounts to the 
 mayor how it was founded, and all about that digni- 
 tary's predecessors in the chair ; and, having made him 
 swell with importance, asks him to grace with his 
 presence the assembly which would meet to hear his 
 (Peele's) play called The History of tlie Knight of the 
 
l86 THE PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE 
 
 Roads. (Was this the same as The Battle of Alcazar by 
 Peele, and was the Knight of the Roads the Stukeley 
 of the latter ?) The mayor replies to this that he will 
 do everything he can for him, and meanwhile gives him 
 an angel, " which George thankfully receives, and about 
 his businesse he goes, got his Stage made, his History 
 cried, and hired the Players' apparell, to flourish out his 
 Show, promising to pay them liberally, and withall 
 desired that they would favour him so much as to gather 
 him his money at the doore (for he thought it was his 
 best course to employ them, lest they should spy out his 
 knavery, for they have perillous heads). They willingly 
 yeeld to do him any kindnesse that lies in them ; in 
 briefe, carry their apparell to the Hall, place themselves 
 at the doore, where George in the meantime with the 
 ten shillings he had of the Mayor delivered his horse 
 out ofPurgatory, and carries him to'the townes end, and 
 there placeth him to be in readiness at his coming. By 
 this time the Audience were come, and so forty shiUings 
 gathered, which money George put in his purse, and 
 putting on one of the Players silk Robes, after the 
 trumpet had sounded thrice, out he comes, makes 
 obeysance, goes forward with his Prologue, which was 
 this: 
 
 " A trifling Toy, a jest of no account, pardie 
 Tlie ICnight perhaps you thinli for to be I. 
 Thinli on so still ; for why you know that thought is free ; 
 Sit still awhile, I'll send the Actors to yee." 
 
 Which being said, after some fire workes that he had 
 made of purpose, threw out among them, and downe 
 
AV ENGLISH LITERATURE. 187 
 
 staires goes he, gets to his horse, and so with fortie 
 shillings to London, and leaves the Players to answer it, 
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