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 assistance 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 prologue, 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 sympathetic 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.

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

66

"... 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 not 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."

D

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 actorauthors-" 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-References in prologues and epilogues to excessive scenic embellishments; 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 kinds 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 play, 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."

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 emotional language overhead" which has been described as being of the essence of poetry, as distinct from rhetoric, of which the later prologues soon came to partake so freely. It begins:

* 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 keynote. 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 speak 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.

Here the spectators are completely ignored.† 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, denouncing them, and deriding their taste, or the rival aspirants to their good opinion. These classes of prologues become similarly distinguishable from one another at an early stage of the Roman comedy. Evanthius, the grammarian, has classified them as: (1) ÚTоĺεTIкós, or argumentativus, describing the plot of the

* Cf. the prologue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, which, in like manner, touches only on the matter of the play.

+ In Plautus we frequently, but not always, find this simple introductory 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 Aulularia, 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 expanded in a portion of the prologue, the rest of it being similar to the others in style and allusion.