Advertisement, printed exactly as it is acted. In 1717 Gay continued, "for, tho' the Players in Compliance with the Taste of the Town, broke it into five Parts in the Representation; yet, as the Action pauses, and the Stage is left vacant but three times, so it properly consists but of three Acts, like the Spanish Comedies." There are several puzzles here. In the first place for a three-act play the stage should be left vacant twice rather than three times. But setting this aside there is a contradiction which must have puzzled any reader who has used the 1717 edition, namely that if the players broke it into five parts and the play is printed exactly as it is acted, the play that follows should be in five acts but actually is in three. The London 1757 Supplement to Pope merely reprints Advertisement and play as they are in 1717 and it is not until the Dublin printings that the play appears in the five acts in which Gay says it was acted. I suggest that Lintot in 1717 had two scripts of the play, one in three acts, one in five, and that Gay wrote the Advertisement under the impression that Lintot would discard the former. I judge that when W. Whitestone undertook his Dublin Supplement of 1757 he took the Advertisement from the London book that had just been published (see the title-page of the volume) but that when he re-issued his book in 1758 he deleted the lines quoted above, perceiving that they were not to the point so far as his text of the play was concerned. Unless we imagine Whitestone revising the play into five acts himself we must suppose that he had got his hands on an authentic acting MS of the play, and it seems not one from a late revival. I suspect that Whitestone in fact had got the very MS of the play that Gay thought Lintot was going to print; one cannot guess from where, but presumably from the same source that supplied the Key and Letter. Besides the act divisions the most interesting variant is a speech of a dozen words added to Dublin; see the note to p. 183. Cibber may have put this in, or Gay, at Cibber's request. But in either case it seems that the text that has it is the one that Gay authorized for printing. By the same token, the cast as given in the present reprint (no actors' names are given in Dublin 1757 but they must have been in the script and in the reprint of 1758 Whitestone decided to put them in) is more probably correct than that printed in 1717. The only differences between the two are in five very minor roles, where, as rehearsals went on, substitutions would be easy. All the principals are the same. Prologue. Nothing to add to the Twickenham Pope, VI, 179-180. Dramatis Personae. Five minor roles differ from 1717, as stated above. Mrs. Bicknet. A misreading by the typesetter—he had never heard of Mrs. Bicknell. Play. | 140 | Almost three and twenty. Mrs. Oldfield was only 34 in 1717 but no doubt popular enough to draw a laugh by simpering at this line.
The office of the church ... brute beasts. The Book of Common Prayer (1709) says of matrimony that it is not to be taken in hand "wantonly ... like brute beasts." The fashion of alluding to the Prayer Book in a jocose context, if it did not begin in the reign of Charles II, was at least in vogue than; a couple of instances in Dryden's Wild Gallant will be pointed out in the Clark Dryden, VIII (scheduled to appear in 1962). Another touch of "profaneness" that Collieresque critics objected to in Three Hours was the paraphrase of Holy Writ in Sir Tremendous's line about "ten righteous criticks," p. 153; cf. Key, p. 215. | | 141 | pistachoe-porridge. An aphrodisiac concoction? (I apologize for my neglect of the pharmaceutical, medical, and alchemical jargon—J.H.S.) | | 144 | spoils of quarries. Cf. the anecdote of Dr. Woodward in the Key, p. 211; Parker's Key has it also, but in a less complete form. | | 145 | Shock. Mrs. Townley's lapdog—perhaps named after Belinda's in Rape of the Lock. Of course it may have been a common name for such dogs before Pope wrote the poem; see Twickenham Pope, II, 153. | | 147 | my pace and my honour. 1717, "Peace." | | 148 | forgive thee, if thou hadst ... kill'd my lapdog. Parker, with a citation to Rape of the Lock, assigned this speech to Pope, and indeed it smacks of several places in the poem, e.g., III, 157-8, IV, 119-120. | | 150 | some ... that nauseate the smell of a rose. Cf. Essay on Man, I, 200. | | 152 | That injudicious Canaille. In view of her bias Phoebe's strictures on the players are of course to be taken in the directly opposite sense. | | 155 | Parker finds some double-entendres in the dialogue in which Phoebe and Sir Tremendous compliment each other; if such there be, the speakers are unaware of them. | | 156 | if stones were dissolved, as a late philosopher hath proved. In summarizing his thesis in the preface to his Essay Toward a Natural History of the Earth (1695) Dr. Woodward does say that "the whole Terrestrial Globe was taken all to pieces and dissolved at the Deluge, the particles of Stone ..." According to the DNB, Arbuthnot published a criticism of this book in 1697. | | 163 | The "old woman" who brings the letter from Madam Wyburn (a name beyond all praise!): Drub, p. 18, calls her "an Old Woman without a Nose," and objects strenuously. One dislikes siding with Drub on anything, but this was indeed an unsavory touch, perhaps one of the embellishments suggested by Cibber while refining the ore of the play into gold during the rehearsal period. Our authors should have ruled against it but they were in no mood to pull punches at this time, though, as stated above, they had to consent to some bowdlerizing after the first night of the play. | | 168 | a rouge in disguise. 1717, "Rogue." | | 171 | my Mercury. 1717, "by Mercury." | | 173 | s.d. in a chair like a sick man. Idea from Crowne, City Politicks, first acted 1682. | | 178 | fitigue. 1717, "Fatigue."
s.d. powers some drops in. 1717, "pours." | | 180 | have the any power. 1717, "they." | | 182 | Townley's concealing Plotwell under the petticoat owes to Mrs. Behn's The Younger Brother (acted 1696, not revived), Mirtilla's hiding "Endimion" under the train of her gown in IV.ii.
invisible i th is very. Typo for "in this very"; 1717 has "on this very." Gay (or Cibber) might have changed "on" to "in" when adding the sentence at the end of Act IV; see next note. | | 183 | But prithee ... rarities. This sentence is not in 1717, but seems an improvement, as it hints at developments to come and raises the expectations of the audience. | | 186 | desarts. 1717, "Disserts."
Macedonian queen. Olympias: Underplot in his verses alludes, mock-heroically, to the fabled begetting of Alexander the Great.
mantygers. This spelling may have come from the London 1757 Supplement. 1717, "Mantegers" (OED, mantegar, a kind of baboon). | | 191 | s.d. leap from their places. Idea from Ravenscroft's The Anatomist: cf. n. to 215. | | 199 | Come we may (5th line on page). 1717, "Come we now"—perhaps "may" is a misreading. | Epilogue.sound in living. Perhaps another misreading: 1717, "and" for "in."viol. 1717, "vial." Perhaps another misreading. Key. | 212 | knights of the shires, who represent them all. Paraphrase of a line in Dryden's epilogue to The Man of Mode: a mark of literacy in the anonymous writer of our Key.
Heautontimerumenos. Self-tormentor—title of a play by Terence. | | 213 | another eminent physician's wife ... shall be nameless. Contemporary gossip said that the wife of Dr. Richard Mead was meant: Parker, less considerate than the gentlemanly author of our Key, uses her name, and in Breval (p. 15) Mrs. Oldfield is made to wish that she had not "mimick'd Mrs. M—d" in her role as Mrs. Townley. But it seems likely that any mimicry would be in the mind of the audience rather than in Mrs. Oldfield's performance, or for that matter, the intention of the authors. | | 214 | Marriage not to be undertaken wantonly. The Key is incorrect in citing the Jonson play; see note to p. 140, above. | | 215 | letters ... Cocu imaginaire. None of our Key-writer's adducings of MoliÈre is really in point. The hint for the letters came from Act V of anon., The Apparition, acted twice in 1713. The same play has an intriguing valet named Plotwell; here our authors found the name for one of their gallants—Underplot was a happy invention of their own.
Lubomirski ... in Lopez de Vega. Parker (p. 9) is correct in tracing this impersonation of Plotwell's to Ravenscroft's The Anatomist, or the Sham Doctor; the same farce suggested the anxiety of the disguised gallants at the proposals to dissect them in Act V. Ravenscroft's play, first acted in 1696, was popular well into the 18th century and would be well known to the audience. No doubt our authors expected their play to be found infinitely funnier than Ravenscroft's in the comparable parts. It is.
Theatre Italien. Parker (p. 14) says more explicitly that the mummy-crocodile scene is "all stole from a farce" in this collection. Gherardi, vol. VI, does have a farce of the title cited but the only trace of it in Three Hours occurs in the brief joke on Antony and Cleopatra that Townley and Plotwell share on p. 185. |
A
SUPPLEMENT
TO THE
WORKS
OF
Alexander Pope, Esq;
Containing,
Such POEMS, LETTERS, &c. As are omitted in the Edition published
by the Reverend Doctor Warburton: With the Comedy of the
Three Hours after Marriage;
And a Key to the Letters:
To which is added, (not in the London Edition)
A Key to the Three Hours after
Marriage, And a Letter giving an Account of the
Origin of the Quarrel between Cibber,
Pope, and Gay. |
DUBLIN:
Printed for W. Whitestone, opposite Dick's
Coffee-House, in Skinner-Row.
M.DCC.LVIII.
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