PROLOGUE AND

EPILOGUE TO "ALMANZOR AND

ALMAHIDE, OR THE CONQUEST OF GRANADA.” *

1670.

PROLOGUE.

Spoken by MRS. ELLEN GWYN in a broad-brimmed hat and waist-belt.

THIS jest was first of the other House's 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

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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 out-write each other- with a hat!
The brims still grew with every play they writ;
And grew so large, they covered all the wit.
Hat was the play; 'twas language, wit, and tale:
Like them that find meat, drink, and cloth in ale.
What dulness do these mongrel wits confess,
When all their hope is acting of a dress!
Thus, two the best comedians of the age

Must be worn out with being blocks of the stage:
Like a young girl, who better things has known,
Beneath their poet's impotence they groan.
See now what charity it was to save!

They thought you liked what only you forgave;

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And brought you more dull sense, dull sense much worse 25
Than brisk gay nonsense, and the heavier curse.

They bring old iron and glass upon the stage,

To barter with the Indians of our age.

Still they write on, and like great authors show;
But 'tis as rollers in wet gardens grow

Heavy with dirt, and gathering as they go.

May none, who have so little understood,

To like such trash, presume to praise what's good!

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• The two parts of "Almanzor and Almahide, or the Conquest of Granada," tragedies in heroic verse like "Tyrannic Love," were both performed in 1670. Nell Gwyn, who acted in both, playing Almahide, and spoke the Prologue to the First Part on its first appearance, was confined on May 8, 1670, of a son, the Duke of St. Alban's. The First Part therefore would probably have appeared some little time after. Malone fixed the time of the first representation of these two plays for the winter of 1669 and spring of 1670: but he was probably mistaken. The borrowing of the jest of broad-brimmed hat and waist-belt from Nokes and the other House, mentioned in the opening lines of the Prologue, is said to refer to a caricature of French dress by Nokes at the Duke of York's Theatre, during the visit of the Duchess of Orleans and her suite to England, in May 1670. Both parts were published in 1672.

And may those drudges of the stage, whose fate
Is damned dull farce more dully to translate,
Fall under that excise the state thinks fit

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To set on all French wares, whose worst is wit.
French farce, worn out at home, is sent abroad;
And, patched up here, is made our English mode.
Henceforth, let poets, ere allowed to write,
Be searched, like duellists before they fight,
For wheel-broad hats, dull humour,* all that chaff,

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Which makes you mourn, and makes the vulgar laugh:
For these, in plays, are as unlawful arms

As, in a combat, coats of mail and charms.

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EPILOGUE.

Success, which can no more than beauty last,
Makes our sad poet mourn your favours past:
For, since without desert he got a name,
He fears to lose it now with greater shame.
Fame, like a little mistress of the town,

Is gained with ease, but then she's lost as soon ;
For, as those tawdry misses, soon or late,
Jilt such as keep them at the highest rate,
And oft the lacquey, or the brawny clown,
Gets what is hid in the loose-bodied gown;
So, Fame is false to all that keep her long,
And turns up to the fop that's brisk and young.
Some wiser poet now would leave fame first;
But elder wits are, like old lovers, curst:
Who, when the vigour of their youth is spent,
Still grow more fond as they grow impotent.

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This, some years hence, our poet's case may prove;

But yet, he hopes, he's young enough to love.

When forty comes, if e'er he live to see
That wretched, fumbling age of poetry,
'Twill be high time to bid his Muse adieu:
Well he may please himself, but never you.
Till then, he'll do as well as he began,
And hopes you will not find him less a man.
Think him not duller for this year's delay; +
He was prepared, the women were away;
And men, without their parts, can hardly play.
If they, through sickness, seldom did appear,
Pity the virgins of each theatre : ‡

For at both houses 'twas a sickly year!

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"year's

Scott and Bell have changed humour into honour; an evidently improper change. This line helps to fix the date of the first appearance of the play; there had been a delay" since Tyrannic Love" appeared. The lines which follow refer to Nell Gwyn's preg nancy and confinement; another actress of the King's House, Mrs. James, was absent in 1669, and Mrs. Davis of the Duke's Theatre was "sick" in that year. (Cunningham's "Story of Nell Gwyn," p. 69.)

Theatre was pronounced with the a long. The same rhyme occurs in Epilogue to "Marriagea-la-Mode," line

9.

And pity us, your servants, to whose cost,
In one such sickness, nine whole months are lost.
Their stay, he fears, has ruined what he writ :
Long waiting both disables love and wit.
They thought they gave him leisure to do well;
But, when they forced him to attend, he fell!
Yet, though he much has failed, he begs to-day
You will excuse his unperforming play:
Weakness sometimes great passion does express;
He had pleased better, had he loved you less.

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PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE TO THE SECOND PART OF "ALMANZOR AND ALMAHIDE, OR THE CONQUEST OF GRANADA.”

1670.

PROLOGUE.

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 those 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.
Howe'er, the poet's safe enough to-day;
They cannot censure an unfinished play.
But, as when vizard-mask appears in pit,
Straight every man who thinks himself a wit
Perks up, and, managing his comb with grace,

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With his white wig sets off his nut-brown face;

That done, bears up to the prize, and views each limb,

To know her by her rigging and her trim;

Then, the whole noise of fops to wagers go,

"Pox on her, 't must be she;" and-"Damme, no!"

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Just so, I prophesy, these wits to-day

Will blindly guess at our imperfect play;

With what new plots our Second Part is filled,

Who must be kept alive, and who be killed.

And as those vizard-masks maintain that fashion,

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To soothe and tickle sweet imagination;

So our dull poet keeps you on with masking,

To make you think there's something worth your asking.
But, when 'tis shown, that which does now delight you
Will prove a dowdy, with a face to fright you.

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EPILOGUE.*

*

They who have best succeeded on the stage
Have still conformed their genius to their age.
Thus Jonson did mechanic humour show
When men were dull, and conversation low.
Then comedy was faultless, but 'twas coarse :
Cobb's tankard was a jest, and Otter's horse.+
And as their comedy, their love was mean;
Except by chance in some one laboured scene,
Which must atone for an ill-written play,
They rose, but at their height could seldom stay.
Fame then was cheap, and the first comer sped;
And they have kept it since, by being dead.
But, were they now to write, when critics weigh
Each line, and every word, throughout a play,
None of them, no, not Jonson in his height,
Could pass, without allowing grains for weight.
Think it not envy, that these truths are told;
Our poet's not malicious, though he's bold.
'Tis not to brand them that their faults are shown,
But by their errors to excuse his own.
If love and honour now are higher raised,
'Tis not the poet, but the age is praised.
Wit's now arrived to a more high degree;
Our native language more refined and free;
Our ladies and our men now speak more wit
In conversation, than those poets writ.
Then, one of these is, consequently, true;
That what this poet writes comes short of you
And imitates you ill (which most he fears),
Or else his writing is not worse than theirs.
Yet, though you judge (as sure the critics will)
That some before him writ with greater skill,
In this one praise he has their fame surpast,
To please an age more gallant than the last.

PROLOGUE.

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Spoken on the First Day of the King's House acting after the Fire.‡

1672.

So shipwracked passengers escape to land,

So look they, when on the bare beach they stand,

Dryden was called to account for his criticisms in this Epilogue on Ben Jonson and ether old dramatists; and he prefixed a "Defence of the Epilogue, or an Essay on the Dramatic Poetry of the last Age," when he published the piece.

Cobb, the water-bearer in Ben Jonson's "Every Man in his Humour," and Captain Otter in Jonson's "Epicene, or the Siient Woman," who gave his drinking-cups the names of Horse, Bull, and Bear.

The King's Theatre in Drury Lane was burnt down in January 1672, and the Company took the house in Lincol..'s Inn Fields which had been the Duke of York's Theatre. Lincoln's Inn

Dropping and cold, and their first fear scarce o'er,
Expecting famine on* a desert shore.

From that hard climate we must wait for bread,
Whence even the natives, forced by hunger, fled.
Our stage does human chance present to view,
But ne'er before was seen so sadly true:
You are changed too, and your pretence to see
Is but a nobler name fort charity.

Your own provisions furnish out our feasts,
While you, the founders, make yourselves the guests.
Of all mankind beside Fate had some care,
But for poor wit no portion did prepare;
'Tis left a rent-charge to the brave and fair.
You cherished it, and now its fall you mourn,
Which blind unmannered zealots make their scorn,
Who think that fire a judgment on the stage,
Which spared not temples in its furious rage.
But as our new built city rises higher,
So from old theatres may new aspire,
Since Fate contrives magnificence by fire.+
Our great metropolis 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:

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Your presence here, for which we humbly sue,

Will grace old theatres, and build up new.

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PROLOGUE TO "ARVIRAGUS AND PHILICIA."S

1672.

WITH sickly actors and an old house too,

We're matched with glorious theatres and new ; ||

And with our alehouse scenes and clothes bare worn

Can neither raise old plays nor new adorn.

Fields Theatre was opened by the King's Company on February 26, 1672, the play acted being Beaumont and Fletcher's "Wit without Money:" and Dryden furnished this Prologue. It was printed in the first volume of the "Miscellany Poems:" also imperfectly in "Covent Garden Drollery," and entire in "Westminster Drollery," published in 1672.

* From in "Covent Garden Drollery" version.

Of in "Covent Garden Drollery" version.

1 Compare in "Annus Mirabilis stanza 212,

"Great as the world's, which at the death of time

Must fall and rise a nobler frame by fire.'

"Arviragus and Philicia," a tragi-comedy by Lodovick Carlell, a court officer of Charles I. was originally produced in 1639, and it was revived at the Theatre Royal in 1672, with a Prologue by Dryden, spoken by Hart. It is to be inferred from the beginning of the Prologue that the play was produced in the old house in Lincoln's Inn Fields in which the King's Company took refuge after the fire at Drury Lane Theatre. This Prologue was printed in the first volume of the "Miscellany Poems," 1684.

An allusion to the new and handsomely decorated Duke of York's Theatre in Dorset Gardens. In the "Prologue for the Women" Dryden calls it "the gaudy house with scenes;" and again gay shows with gaudy scenes are spoken of in the Prologue to "Marriage-a-la-Mode.”