SOURCE: Wilson, John Harold. Introduction to City Politiques, edited by John Harold Wilson, pp.ix-xix. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967.

In this essay, Wilson traces the reception of City Politiques and explicates its thinly masked political satire of various Whigs.

City Politiques, eleventh in the long list of John Crowne's plays but only his second comedy, was published in 1683. Narcissus Luttrell's copy of the first quarto in the Ohio State University Library bears the written date “23. feb,” probably that of issue. A second edition with a different pagination, some careless omissions, and a few additions appeared in 1688. The only modern edition, that by J. Maidment and W. H. Logan (Dramatic Works of John Crowne [Edinburgh, 1873], Vol. II) merely reprints the faulty second quarto. The copy-text for the present modernized edition is the first quarto (Q1), which has been collated with the second (Q2).

A farcical satire on the...