SOURCE: Knowles, Jack. “Thomas D'Urfey and Three Centuries of Critical Response.” Restoration 8, no. 2 (fall 1984): 72-80.

[In the following essay, Knowles describes the critical reception to Durfey's work from his own lifetime to the twentieth century.]

In his own day, Thomas D'Urfey (or Durfey) was compared by Gerard Langbaine to “the Cuckow [who] makes it his business to suck other Birds Eggs.”¹ Roughly two centuries later, even less regard was expressed by A. W. Ward, who claimed that D'Urfey probably represented “the literary nadir of Restoration comedy—and indeed of the Restoration drama in general.”² More recently, however, Robert D. Hume has found elements worthy of praise and study in a wide variety of D'Urfey's productions, comic, tragic, and operatic.³ Such positive attention no doubt signals a rise in D'Urfey's reputation, a rise that has been a long time in coming, as the critical response to D'Urfey in the last three centuries has been predominantly, though not entirely, negative.

During the Restoration D'Urfey was attacked by a host of critics, including Thomas Shadwell, Robert Gould, Jeremy Collier, John Oldmixon, and several anonymous satirists, as well as the previously cited Langbaine. Shadwell is the likely author of The Tory Poets: A Satyr, a piece which identifies the royalist D'Urfey as “A brave Court mixture; for he at once / A Debauchee, Buffoon, a Knave, a Dunce.”⁴ D'Urfey's fondness for low farce is ridiculed by Gould, who warns his contemporaries in 1685:

Think, Ye vain Scribbling Tribe, of Shirley's Fate,
You that Write Farce, and You that Farce Translate;
Shirley! the Scandal of the Ancient Stage,
Shirley! the very Drf-y of his Age:
Think how he lies in Duck-lane Shops forlorn,
And never mention'd but with utmost Scorn.(5)

Of the anonymously penned satires, the most significant is Wit for Money: or, Poet Stutter, a full-blown caricature of D'Urfey published in 1691. Written in dialogue form by “Sir Critick Catcall,” it mocks D'Urfey's fondness for borrowing from other authors. Catcall “commends” him as follows: “your Invention seldom coming so short of your Imagination, but that the supply of a good memory makes you amends. …”⁶ Speakers in the dialogue also make fun of D'Urfey's pride in his singing as well as his lack of religious commitment. Poet Stutter protests, “I never chang'd my Religion,” and Smith replies, “That may well be, because perhaps you never had any …” (p. 7). Later Johnson adds, for “good honest Atheistical Songs, andabusing [sic] the Blackcoat as thou call'st it, thou bear'st away the Lawrel” (p. 22). His efforts at adaptation are blasted:

witness his laying violent hands on Shakespear and Fletcher, whose Plays he hath altered so much for the worse, like the Persecutors of Old, killing their living Beauties by joining them to his dead lameless Deformities.

(p. 10)

Overall, his critics portray him as one who sells “Wit for Money,” adding that such “Mercenary Pens … bring the whole Body Politick of Poetry into disgrace and contempt” (p. 9).

Collier's attack echoes some of these same charges, but it is more heavily moralistic, while Oldmixon simply declares that D'Urfey no longer commands interest. In A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, published in 1698. Collier denounces D'Urfey (and the Don Quixote trilogy in particular) for “His Profaness [sic] with respect to Religion and the Holy Scriptures,” “His Abuse of the Clergy,” and “His Want of Modesty and Regard to the Audience.”⁷ A year later Oldmixon issued his Reflections on the Stage. Noting that “D———had at one time more admirers than Mr. Witcherly,” he claims that D'Urfey's works are now “in a fair way to eternal oblivion.”⁸

Not all Restoration critics, however, are negative in their assessments of D'Urfey. In a letter to the author which was published with The Marriage-Hater Match'd in 1692, Charles Gildon lauds D'Urfey's “surprizing” turns in the plot, his “variety of Humours and characters,” his satire, and his songs. The critic was particularly impressed by the lyrical pieces “in which,” he asserts, “none will (I am sure none ought to) dispute your Title to the Preheminence.”⁹ Gildon's 1699 revision of Langbaine's The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets is also basically complimentary, as the writer asserts, “I have laught heartily at his Plays, which is one end of comedy,” and adds, “if the Criticks will deny him to be a good writer of Comedy, they must allow him a Master of Farce.”¹⁰

During the first two decades of the eighteenth century, the mixture of negative and positive criticism continued, as a number of D'Urfey's contemporaries paused to assess his talents as a writer. Swift employs scatological satire in A Tale of a Tub when his persona comments on the fact that at any given time English readers may prefer D'Urfey to Congreve:

I am wonderfully well acquainted with the present relish of courteous readers; and have often observed, with singular pleasure, that a fly, driven from a honey-pot, will immediately, with very good appetite alight and finish his meal on an excrement.¹¹

Somewhat more positive are John Dunton and Alexander Pope. The former declares, “Mr. Durfey has but a low Genius and yet some of his Farces wou'd make a Body laugh … and there are few Authors have been more diverting.”¹² Pope faintly praises D'Urfey in a “Prologue Designed for Mr. D'Urfey's Last Play,” calling him a “persevering, unexhausted Bard” who, though repeatedly condemned by his audiences, continues his quest to please them (and to make money).¹³

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele are more enthusiastic in their praise of D'Urfey. Addison briefly lauds A Fond Husband: Or, The Plotting Sisters, promoting a benefit performance thereof, and declares,

He has made the world merry, and I hope they will make him easie. This I will take upon me to say, they cannot do a kindness to a more diverting companion, or a more chearful, honest, and good-natured man.¹⁴

Earlier, in the first issue of The Tatler, Steele refers to D'Urfey as “my Honoured Friend Mr. Thomas D'Urfey; who, besides his great Abilities in the Dramatick, has a peculiar Talent in the Lyrick Way of Writing. …”¹⁵

Although newspapers described him as “the famous comic poet” at the time of his death in 1723,¹⁶ he was largely ignored by critics throughout the rest of the eighteenth century. Instead of substantive evaluations of his work, one finds only occasional allusions such as Johnson's in his “Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick … 1747” or Pope's coarse witticism in one of his letters, written in 1709 but first published in 1726: “I would as soon write like Durfey, as live like Tydcombe; whose beastly, laughable Life is … not unlike a Fart, at once nasty and diverting.”¹⁷ A brief evaluation does appear in 1761 in A New and General Biographical Dictionary, where the anonymous author terms D'Urfey “an eminent English songster” and indicates he was a better writer of songs than of plays¹⁸—a judgement shared by many other critics both during and after D'Urfey's lifetime. Late in the century another analyst, in his comments on Madam Fickle, restates Langbaine's century-old charges: “This author as regards both of plot and character, was certainly one of the greatest plagiaries that ever existed.¹⁹

Criticism of D'Urfey in the nineteenth century also consists largely of brief remarks, most of them negative. Thomas Gilliland expresses the widely held opinion that his plays are full of “licentiousness of intrigue, looseness of sentiment, and indelicacy of wit.”²⁰ Samuel Astley Dunham notes that D'Urfey's plays have disappeared and adds bluntly, “nor is there one of them that is worthy of being resuscitated.”²¹ Thomas Babington Macaulay and A. W. Ward join the hooting chorus, the sentiments of which are reflected in Edmund Gosse's dismissal of D'Urfey as “a scurrilous and witless buffoon … needless to discuss in any grave examination of British dramatic literature.”²² Yet not all the critics of the nineteenth century are so condemnatory. John Genest, in the century's most extensive treatment of D'Urfey's plays, finds many, though by no means all, to be worthy of praise.²³ The author (probably Dickens) of an article in Household Words declares that D'Urfey would have made a good poet laureate, “for Tom knew the humour of the town”; he adds that even his “low” plays “would outdistance many competitors by a length and more” today.²⁴ Three of those plays (the three parts of Don Quixote) were reprinted in Brooklyn in 1889,²⁵ the first reprints of his plays in over 150 years.

Early in this century, though negative assessments of D'Urfey's dramatic skills continue to appear, two significant critics draw favorable conclusions of note. F. S. Boas, analyzing the 1691 adaptation of Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois, declares, “D'Urfey deserves credit for having done his work with considerable skill and taste.”²⁶ Montague Summers' praise is much broader: “He had the merriest comic gifts” and is worthy of “a higher position in our theatrical libraries.”²⁷

Interestingly enough, in the year following this assessment there appeared the first book-length treatment of D'Urfey's dramatic production, Robert Forsythe's A Study of the Plays of Thomas D'Urfey, followed in 1917 by his reprint of A Fool's Preferment. Forsythe's appraisal of D'Urfey is hardly glowing:

He was distinctly a third-rate writer. … However, in spite of his general mediocrity, D'Urfey has some claims on our consideration: as a hitherto neglected early writer of sentimental comedy, and as a member of that group of Restoration dramatists who looked frequently back to the Elizabethans for their inspiration.²⁸

He goes on to give a brief biography of D'Urfey and then a more extended general criticism which characterizes the comedies as largely farcical, often sentimental, overly complicated, and weakly concluded. They are, however, superior to both his tragedies and his operas. Addressing the issue of plagiarism, Forsythe avers that D'Urfey was no worse than others of his day in this respect and was in fact unusual in that “he never borrowed from Molière.”²⁹ All thirty-two extant plays are then examined briefly, the examination including title page information, dramatis personae, short critical assessments, and plot summaries.

The next critic to give significant attention to D'Urfey is Allardyce Nicoll, and he is followed by a trio of authors who include D'Urfey in their consideration of the Restoration's handling of Renaissance dramas. Nicoll treats a number of D'Urfey's plays individually, though not in detail, and stresses, as does Forsythe, the farce and sentiment found therein. He senses much undeveloped potential in D'Urfey: “Endowed with considerable ability, he eschewed the wit of Congreve for external farce. Gifted with originality, he based nearly all of his works on other plays. …”³⁰ Arthur Colby Sprague and John Harold Wilson each analyze D'Urfey's three adaptations from Beaumont and Fletcher and reach similar conclusions. Sprague sees a consistent move towards “unity of action” in the Restoration versions, and both note the addition of farce and licentiousness. Wilson, though often critical of D'Urfey, considers him to be one of “the most important dramatists of the period.”³¹ Hazelton Spencer devotes a few pages to The Injured Princess, D'Urfey's reworking of Shakespeare's Cymbeline. He is not much impressed by the later rendering of the story but notes that flaws in Cymbeline keep us from being “outraged” by The Injured Princess.³²

Two important commentaries on D'Urfey's writings appear in the thirties. Kathleen Lynch—who only briefly mentions him in The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy, calling him “one of the most indefatigable pilferers of the age”³³—discusses four of his plays in “Thomas D'Urfey's Contribution to Sentimental Comedy,” one of the most highly regarded articles on D'Urfey. Lynch's opinion of him is still relatively low, for she declares, “As a dramatist, D'Urfey was very little of an artist,” but she adds that before Cibber or Steele he “developed in this ‘fair forlorn’ [specifically, Mirtilla of Love for Money] the type of comic heroine that was to supersede the type perfected by Congreve.”³⁴ Three years later Cyrus Day published The Songs of Thomas D'Urfey, a volume that includes the fullest biographical treatment of D'Urfey yet produced in print. Day has little good to say about his plays, asserting, “Most of D'Urfey's writings deserve the oblivion into which they have fallen.” With “his best songs and ballads,” however, it is another story. He notes D'Urfey's tremendous versatility and productivity in lyric forms and points out that his songs were very popular in his day (though not among the learned) and throughout most of the eighteenth century.³⁵

Extended analyses of D'Urfey's plays are scarce in the next two decades, the two most notable occurring in the late forties. Cary B. Graham, in “The Jonsonian Tradition in the Comedies of Thomas D'Urfey,” notes that D'Urfey, like many of his contemporaries, alludes to Jonson's works in a number of his comedies. He also utilizes extensively the Jonsonian devices of gulling and “episodic humour-study”; the latter Graham defines as “the development of scenes offered solely for the display of humours, and not to advance the plot.” Graham concludes that D'Urfey was certainly not “a slavish imitator of Jonson” but was unquestionably influenced by him.³⁶ John Harrington Smith describes D'Urfey as contributing to the “Forces in Opposition [to gay couple comedy] Before 1690.” In illustrating his point he notes that Madam Fickle is an adaptation of Rowley's Match at Midnight, and he is, it appears, the first to point out that fact. Love for Money is also discussed by Smith, as it synthesizes “the two varieties of threat to the gay couple”—“‘sympathetic’ drama and the conscious opposition of the moralists led by Shadwell.”³⁷ This same play was edited and reprinted by Donald W. Sanville two years after Smith's study as part of a University of Pennsylvania dissertation.

The sixties saw the reappearance of several more D'Urfey plays when The Augustan Reprint Society published Wonders in the Sun: or, the Kingdom of the Birds with an introduction by William A. Appleton (Los Angeles: ARS, 1964) and Benjamin Blom reprinted (in 1968) New Operas … of 1721, a collection which includes D'Urfey's three unacted plays.³⁸ Shortly after the publication of Wonders, Gunnar Sorelius brought forth The Giant Race Before the Flood: Pre-Restoration Drama on the Stage and in the Criticism of the Restoration, in which one might expect to find copious comments on D'Urfey. Sorelius does mention several of D'Urfey's adaptations, but his remarks thereon are disappointingly brief.³⁹ The most significant analysis of D'Urfey's work to appear in this decade, part of a much larger study, concentrates on his unsuccessful tragedy, Massaniello. Eric Rothstein convincingly argues: “What D'Urfey has done, and done handsomely for the most part, is to accommodate the serious and the comical without violating either social or dramatic decorum.” He goes on to call the play “a peculiarly social tragedy, a play of frequent excellence and great originality.”⁴⁰

In 1970 the Cornmarket Press published a facsimile edition of The Injured Princess, which is introduced by T. P. Matheson, and four years later A. N. Jeffares included Madam Fickle in Volume Two of Restoration Comedy (London: Folio Press and Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield). The year 1975 saw the appearance of Jack Vaughn's edition of Two Comedies by Thomas D'Urfey, which also includes Madam Fickle, as well as A Fond Husband, a general introduction, and a separate introduction for each play. Vaughn notes D'Urfey's productivity as a dramatist and points out that many of his plays were popular during the Restoration. Like Forsythe, he concentrates on D'Urfey's comedies:

His chief accomplishment was as a writer of comedies, especially of the sexual-intrigue variety. Certainly his five tragedies and four operas may be cursorily dismissed, as most critics have readily agreed.

These comedies, he asserts, “reveal, more accurately than the highly polished works of the well-known dramatists, the tastes and preferences of the Restoration audience.”⁴¹ His introduction to Madam Fickle contains a helpful source study, and both the play introductions include thoughtful, though brief, criticisms.

Since 1975 a greater amount of noteworthy commentary on D'Urfey has been published than during any previous ten-year period. After Vaughn's Two Comedies came Frederick Link's English Drama, 1660-1800 (1976), which includes a two-page entry on D'Urfey (see n. 25). A helpful guide to the researcher, this text includes the titles of all thirty-three of D'Urfey's plays (counting Don Quixote as three plays and Massaniello as two), lists some of the plays which have appeared in modern editions, and briefly comments on major works of D'Urfey scholarship and criticism. A. H. Scouten's “Plays and Playwrights” in The Revels History of Drama in English, Volume Five, appeared in the same year. Though Scouten believes D'Urfey's chief concern was with “composing, collecting, and singing songs” and admits that he was often imitative in his plays, he sees him as a dramatic pioneer “in introducing elements of exemplary comedy,” “local colour,” and the “serious treatment of marriage” to the English stage. He thus concludes:

Despite D'Urfey's bad reputation as a dismal hack, he was a thoroughly professional playwright, and he made successful and historically significant contributions to the drama of the age.⁴²

A third work important to the student of D'Urfey appeared in 1976: Robert D. Hume's monumental The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Among the myriad of works which he studies are a number by D'Urfey, and he has praise for A Fond Husband, the three parts of Don Quixote, The Marriage-Hater Match'd, the two parts of Massaniello, Wonders in the Sun, and his songs. He notes that Fond Husband was especially influential—the court, and Charles II in particular, loved the play, and that fact contributed to the boom in sex-comedies which occurred in the late seventies. Hume portrays D'Urfey as continually “trying to sniff out popular taste,” uninhibited by “any special personal convictions.”⁴³ D'Urfey's work is thus an excellent source for determining what attitudes were current during the Restoration. Hume examines some of those attitudes in a more recent discussion of Restoration plays, a study in which he further considers several comedies by D'Urfey.⁴⁴

Among critics to make significant comments on D'Urfey since Hume's Development are Susan Staves, Peter Holland, Curtis Price, Laura Brown, Arthur Gewirtz, and Jack Knowles. Staves is much less impressed than Hume is by Fond Husband, terming it one of the “more tedious cuckolding plays.” Her other brief comments on D'Urfey pertain to religious perspectives in Trick for Trick, views of marriage in Marriage-Hater Match'd, the nature of the heroine in The Virtuous Wife, and political attitudes evidenced in D'Urfey's plays and satires.⁴⁵ Holland discusses D'Urfey's practice of crossing audience expectations in order to achieve his satirical purposes, a device seen in Marriage-Hater and Richmond Heiress. He also notes that the Union of the acting companies (1682-1695) led to larger casts, and he uses D'Urfey's Commonwealth of Women to illustrate.⁴⁶ Citing the fact that “recent criticism has discovered in his large dramatic output unnoticed genius,” Price calls D'Urfey “the most underrated playwright of his era.” He is by no means uniformly laudatory, for he holds D'Urfey “as responsible as anyone for the rot of interpolated music and dance attacking the dramatic substance of late Restoration plays.” Nonetheless, he remarks that these devices, though harmful to spoken drama because of their overuse, were employed masterfully by D'Urfey in such works as Massaniello.⁴⁷ Support for the claim that D'Urfey is an important playwright is provided by Brown, who discusses his pioneering efforts in “moralized or partially moralized drama,” calling him “the most precocious practitioner of moral comedy.”⁴⁸ Gewirtz's treatment of D'Urfey concentrates on three of his adaptations and notes his use of music and farce, as well as “the broad and flamboyant strokes with which he paints the conflict between the sexes.”⁴⁹ Knowles provides detailed analyses of the six revisions which D'Urfey based on Renaissance plays. His study makes possible a better understanding of D'Urfey and identifies salient differences between Renaissance and Restoration drama.⁵⁰

Perhaps as a reflection of the growing interest in D'Urfey, two more of his plays have been reprinted in recent years. Edward Langhans includes Bussy D'Ambois in his 1980 edition of Five Restoration Theatrical Adaptations (New York: Garland) and introduces the play with comments on its source, staging, and reception. Also dated 1980 is Nancy G. Holmes's University of Tennessee dissertation entitled “A Critical Edition of Thomas D'Urfey's The Famous History of the Rise and Fall of Massaniello.” Her lengthy introduction notes D'Urfey's contemporary reputation as a writer of songs and of low comedy and depicts him, consistent with Hume's view, as one who “pandered much more unabashedly to audience whims than did Dryden or Shadwell.” Holmes points out the importance of female protagonists in D'Urfey's work and briefly evaluates several of his plays. After remarking that critics have been particularly concerned with his “influence on sentimental drama, … heavy reliance on farce, … [and] constant use of humours characterization,” she provides a plot summary, source study, and critique of Massaniello.⁵¹

After a long period in which he generated only flickering interest, then, D'Urfey is attracting more and more attention, much of it favorable. Because he was an occasional pioneer who was capable of effective dramatic writing in a variety of modes, he is surely deserving of closer study. Such analysis will almost certainly lift his reputation above the dismal level to which critics like Gerard Langbaine, A. W. Ward, and Edmund Gosse had condemned it.⁵²

Notes

1. An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.), p. 179.

2. Ward, A History of English Dramatic Literature (1899; rpt. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), III, 454.

3. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 384-385, 456-457, and 479.

4. (London: R. Johnson, 1682), p. 10.

5. The Play-House, A Satyr, in Montague Summers, The Restoration Theatre (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 310. Gould took some more jabs at D'Urfey four years later in “To Julian Secretary to the Muses, a Consolatory Epistle in his Confinement.” See Poems Chiefly Consisting of Satyrs and Satyrical Epistles (London: n.p., 1689), p. 280.

6. Wit for Money (London: S. Burgis, 1691), sig. [A2^r]. All future references to this work will be to this text and will be made parenthetically by page. Other notable satires on D'Urfey include a 1686 effort, “The Court Diversion,” which can be found in Court Satires of the Restoration, ed. John Harold Wilson (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 149-153 and Poeta Infamis: Or, a Poet Not Worth Hanging (London: B. C., 1692).

7. (1698; rpt. New York: Garland, 1972), p. 196.

8. Ed. Arthur Freeman (1699: rpt. New York: Garland, 1972), p. 97.

9. In The Marriage-Hater Match'd: A Comedy (London: Parker and Briscoe, 1692), n. pag.

10. Ed. Arthur Freeman (rpt. New York: Garland, 1973), p. 48.

11. In Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings, ed. Louis A. Landa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 351-352.

12. The Life and Errors of John Dunton (London: S. Malthus, 1705), p. 239.

13. In The Works of Alexander Pope (London: John Murray, 1882), IV, 416.

14. The Guardian, No. 67, in The Works of the Right Honorable Joseph Addison (London: Jacob Tonson, 1721), IV, 130-131.

15. Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, Introd. and Notes by Robert J. Allen, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 7. Steele makes further comments on D'Urfey in The Tatler, Nos. 11 and 43, and in The Guardian, No. 82.

16. Cyrus Lawrence Day, The Songs of Thomas D'Urfey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1933), p. v.

17. Johnson, “Prologue,” in Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1958), p. 46. Pope, Letter from Pope to Cromwell, 29 Aug. 1709, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, I: 1704-1718 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 71.

18. III (London: T. Osborne et al., 1761), 278.

19. [Richard Johnson?], A New Theatrical Dictionary (London: n.p., 1792), p. 164.

20. The Dramatic Mirror (London: C. Chapple, 1808), I, 333.

21. Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Great Britain, in Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (London: Longman et al., 1838), III, 181.

22. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II, I (London: Longman et al., 1849), 480; Ward, III, 454; Gosse, Life of William Congreve (London: Walter Scott, 1888), p. 110.

23. Some Account of the English Stage (1832; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin [1965]), I and II, passim.

24. “Tom D'Urfey,” Household Words, 4 March 1855, pp. 187-188.

25. Frederick M. Link, English Drama, 1660-1800 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1976), p. 166.

26. Introd., Bussy D'Ambois and the Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, ed. Boas (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1905), pp. xxviii-xxix.

27. Introd., The Younger Brother, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Summers (1915; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), IV, 314. Summers also considers D'Urfey's efforts in “D'Urfey's ‘Don Quixote,’” TLS, 18 May 1916. p. 238; in his “Explanatory Notes,” in Roscius Anglicanus, by John Downes (London: Fortune, [1928]), pp. 225, 245, 248, and 255; in The Restoration Theatre (New York: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 76, 85, 89, 99, 108, 113, 118-119, 130, 133, 145, 175, 179, 207, 217, 224-226, 236, 241, 246, 275, 306, and 310; and in The Playhouse of Pepys (New York: Macmillan, 1935), p. 403.

28. Forsythe, A Study, Western Reserve Univ. Bulletins, ns 19 (May 1916), n. pag. See also NS 20 (May 1917).

29. Forsythe (1916), p. 8.

30. A History of Restoration Drama 1660-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1923), p. 260. See also pp. 11, 20, 55, 63, 108-109, 150, 158, 252-253, and 261-265.

31. Sprague, Beaumont and Fletcher on the Restoration Stage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1926), pp. 228-238. Wilson, The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Restoration Drama (1928; rpt. [New York]: Benjamin Blom, 1968), pp. 48-56 and 74.

32. Shakespeare Improved: The Restoration Versions in Quarto and on the Stage (1927; rpt. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1963), pp. 316-318.

33. (New York: Macmillan, 1926), p. 175.

34. PQ, 9 (1930), 259.

35. Day, pp. v and 28-34. See also Day's “The Life and Nondramatic Works of Thomas D'Urfey,” Diss. Harvard 1930; “A Lost Play by D'Urfey,” MLN, 49 (1934), 332-334; and Dates and Performances of D'Urfey's Plays (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the Univ. of Virginia, 1950).

36. MLQ, 8 (1947), 47-52.

37. The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948), pp. 110-113 and 131. See also pp. 92-93, 97-98, 117, 152, and 155.

38. Link, p. 166.

39. (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksells, 1966), pp. 57, 71n, 81, 83n, 84, 148, 174-175, and 178.

40. Restoration Tragedy (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967), pp. 171-172.

41. (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press), pp. 21-22.

42. (London: Methuen), pp. 206-209 and 223.

43. Hume, passim, but especially pp. 309-310 and 385.

44. “‘The Change in Comedy’: Cynical Versus Exemplary Comedy on the London Stage, 1678-1693,” Essays in Theatre, 1 (1983), 105 and 109-112. See also Hume, “The Myth of the Rake in ‘Restoration’ Comedy,” SLitl, 10 (Spring 1977), 34, 36, 44, and 50-51 and “Marital Discord in English Comedy from Dryden to Fielding,” MP, 74 (1977), 255.

45. Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp. 45-49, 79, 137, 168, and 178.

46. The Ornament of Action (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 78, 141, and 149-157. Holland also treats D'Urfey in “D'Urfey's Revisions of The Richmond Heiress (1693),” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 216 (1979), 116-120.

47. “Music as Drama,” in The London Theatre World 1660-1800, ed. Robert D. Hume (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 225-231. Also see Price, “‘… to make amends for One ill Dance’: Conventions for Dancing in Restoration Plays,” Dance Research Journal, 10, No. 1 (1977-1978), 2-3.

48. English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760: An Essay in Generic History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 104 and 109-110.

49. Restoration Adaptations of Early 17th Century Comedies (Washington, D.C.: Univ. Press of America, 1982), pp. 30-31.

50. “Thomas D'Urfey's Adaptations of Renaissance Plays,” Diss. Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville 1984.

51. Holmes, pp. 9, 19, and 24 ff.

52. Other critical comments relating to D'Urfey which a scholar might wish to consult would include the following (in roughly chronological order): John Dryden, “Dryden to Lord [Lattimer],” in The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (1942; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1965), pp. 11-12: [Richard Ames], A Search after Wit: or, a Visitation of the Authors (London: E. Hawkins, 1691), n. pag.: The Session of the Poets, Holden at the Foot of Parnassus Hill, July the 9th, 1696 (London: E. Whitlock, 1696), pp. 11-16; [Samuel Cobb], Poetae Britannici. A Poem (London: A. Roper, 1700), p. 7; “Dialogue I Between Heywood, and Tom Durfey Songster,” in Visits from the Shades, Part II. or, Dialogues Serious Comical and Political, ed. Arthur Freeman (1704; rpt. New York/London: Garland, 1972), pp. 73-82; John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Montague Summers (1708; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1698), pp. 36, 42, 45, 49, and 51; Giles Jacob, The Poetical Register (1719; rpt. New York: Garland, 1970), pp. 88-93; John Dennis, “To Judas Iscariot, Esq; On the Degeneracy of the Publick Taste,” in Original Letters, Familiar, Moral and Critical, I (London: W. Mears, 1721), 70-72; Charles Dibdin, A Complete History of the Stage, IV (London: C. Dibdin [1800]), 189-192; William G. Hutchison, “Tom D'Urfey,” Macmillan's Magazine, Nov. 1901, pp. 61-69; Felix E. Schelling, English Drama (London: J. M. Dent & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1914), pp. 265 and 272; Charles Whibley, “The Restoration Drama II,” Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1920), 166-167 and 174-176; “Thomas D'Urfey,” TLS, 22 Feb. 1923, p. 121; Joseph Wood Krutch, Comedy and Conscience after the Restoration (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1924), pp. 111 and 211; Malcolm Elwin, The Playgoer's Handbook to Restoration Drama (New York: Macmillan, n.d.), pp. 114-116 and 160; Ashley H. Thorndike, English Comedy (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 308; Dane Farnsworth Smith, Plays about the Theatre in England from ‘The Rehearsal’ in 1671 to the Licensing Act in 1737 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936), pp. 49-52, 120-123, and 134-135; Leo Hughes, “Attitudes of Some Restoration Dramatists toward Farce,” PQ, 19 (1940), 280-282 and also A Century of English Farce (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 32, 171-172, and 238; Gellert Spencer Alleman, Matrimonial Law and the Materials of Restoration Comedy (Wallingford, PA: n.p., 1942), pp. 12-13, 21, 27-29, 41-42, 54, 60, 67-68, 82, 84-105, and 116-117; Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon (New York: Macmillan, 1948), pp. 87-88 and 178; Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, “D'Urfey, Thomas,” in British Authors before 1800: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1952), pp. 169-170; John Loftis, The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 23-24 and also The Spanish Plays of Neoclassical England (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 150-157; John Harold Wilson, A Preface to Restoration Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), pp. 57, 137, and 165; Franklin B. Zimmerman, Henry Purcell 1659-1695: His Life and Times (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's, 1967), pp. 88, 129, 155-156, 205, 219, 235-236, 261, and 263; James Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 100 and 137-141; Eugene Haun, But Hark! More Harmony: The Libretti of Restoration Opera in English (Ypsilanti: Eastern Michigan Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 160-164; Harold Love, “Dryden, D'Urfey, and the Standard of Comedy,” SEL, 13 (1973), 422-436; Maximillian E. Novak, “Margery Pinchwife's ‘London Disease’: Restoration Comedy and the Libertine Offensive of the 1670's,” SLitl, 10 (Spring, 1977), 3 and 21; and Paul E. Parnell, “The Etiquette of the Sentimental Repentance Scene, 1688-96,” PLL, 14 (1978), 211-212.