A VOLUME OF OLD PLAYS

In his Ballad of the Book-Hunter, Andrew Lang describes how, in breeches baggy at the knees, the bibliophile hunts in all weathers: 

  No dismal stall escapes his eye;
    He turns o’er tomes of low degrees;
  There soiled romanticists may lie,
    Or Restoration comedies.

That speaks straight to my heart; for of all my weaknesses the weakest is that weakness of mine for Restoration plays.  From 1660 down to 1710 nothing in dramatic form comes amiss, and I have great schemes, like the boards on which people play the game of solitaire, in which space is left for every drama needed to make this portion of my library complete.  It is scarcely literature, I confess; it is a sport, a long game which I shall probably be still playing at, with three mouldy old tragedies and one opera yet needed to complete my set, when the Reaper comes to carry me where there is no amassing nor collecting.  It would hardly be credited how much pleasure I have drained out of these dramas since I began to collect them judiciously in my still callow youth.  I admit only first editions; but that is not so rigorous as it sounds, since at least half of the poor old things never went into a second.

As long as it is Congreve and Dryden and Otway, of course it is literature, and of a very high order; even Shadwell and Mrs. Behn and Southerne are literature; Settle and Ravenscroft may pass as legitimate literary curiosity.  But there are depths below this where there is no excuse but sheer collectaneomania.  Plays by people who never got into any schedule of English letters that ever was planned, dramatic nonentities, stage innocents massacred in their cradles, if only they were published in quarto I find room for them.  I am not quite so pleased to get these anonymities, I must confess, as I am to get a clean, tall editio princeps of The Orphan or of Love for Love.  But I neither reject nor despise them; each of them counts one; each serves to fill a place on my solitaire board, each hurries on that dreadful possible time coming when my collection shall be complete, and I shall have nothing to do but break my collecting rod and bury it fathoms deep.

A volume has just come in which happens to have nothing in it but those forgotten plays, whose very names are unknown to the historians of literature.  First comes The Roman Empress, by William Joyner, printed in 1671.  Joyner was an Oxford man, a fellow of Magdalen College.  The little that has been recorded about him makes one wish to know more.  He became persuaded of the truth of the Catholic faith, and made a voluntary resignation of his Oxford fellowship.  He had to do something, and so he wrote this tragedy, which he dedicated to Sir Charles Sedley, the poet, and got acted at the Theatre Royal.  The cast contains two good actors’ names, Mohun and Kynaston, and it seems that it enjoyed a considerable success.  But doubtless the stage was too rough a field for the gentle Oxford scholar.  He retired into a sequestered country village, where he lingered on till 1706, when he was nearly ninety.  But Joyner was none of the worst of poets.  Here is a fragment of The Royal Empress, which is by no means despicably versed: