SOURCE: Baker, Sheridan. “Buckingham's Permanent Rehearsal.” Michigan Quarterly Review 12, no. 2 (spring 1973): 160-71.

In the essay that follows, Baker contends that The Rehearsal still speaks to modern audiences three centuries after its composition.

The Rehearsal (1671), the Duke of Buckingham's satire on the heroic play and its chief perpetrator, John Dryden, was a howling success when it appeared at the Theatre Royal in London before an audience that reflected the sophistication of Charles II's court. Everyone knew everything about everyone, and even the slyest hint was not lost. But timely and personal as it was, it nevertheless remained one of London's most popular plays for the next hundred years, a perpetual favorite, until Sheridan's The Critic (1779) supplanted it, and the taste for burlesque and satire began to wane. Directors still revive The Critic from time to time, but they apparently find The Rehearsal too remote to risk. Nevertheless, when we...