[Footnote A:  The piece was published and dedicated to George I., who acknowledged his sense of the honour by paying to Cibber the sum of two hundred guineas.  That the good old prejudice against the stage was still in full force, despite the march of liberal ideas, is clearly shown in the author’s address to the King:  “Your comedians, Sir, are an unhappy society, whom some severe heads think wholly useless, and others, dangerous to the young and innocent.  This comedy is, therefore, an attempt to remove that prejudice, and to show what honest and laudable uses may be made of the theatre, when its performances keep close to the true purposes of its institution.”  Cibber also referred to himself as “the lowest of your subjects from the theatre,” and thus mirrored the servility of the golden Georgian era.]

“About this time,” writes Cibber, telling of the play’s presentation, “Jacobitism had lately exerted itself by the most unprovoked rebellion that our histories have handed down to us since the Norman Conquest; I therefore thought that to set the authors and principles of that desperate folly in a fair light, by allowing the mistaken consciences of some their best excuse, and by making the artful Pretenders to Conscience as ridiculous as they were ungratefully wicked, was a subject fit for the honest satire of comedy, and what might, if it succeeded, do honour to the stage by showing the valuable use of it.  And considering what numbers at that time might come to it as prejudiced spectators, it may be allow’d that the undertaking was not less hazardous than laudable.”

And hazardous the project certainly seemed; for, while the uprising in the interests of the Pretender had been ostensibly crushed, the spirit of “divine right” was as strong as ever; there were many worthy gentlemen who drank secret bumpers to the King—­“over the water”—­and the Hanoverian throne had as yet a precarious lodgment on English soil.  It was expected, therefore, that these malcontents would have anything but an appetite for the theatrical feast set before them in the shape of the “Non-Juror,” and would prove none the less disgusted because the play happened to be an adaptation of Moliere’s “Tartuffe.”  As the latter comedy depicts a self-indulgent, crawling hypocrite of the worst type, and is an eloquent sermon against sham, it may be imagined that the Jacobites were not over enthusiastic when they learned that the moral of “Tartuffe” was to be applied to them.[A]

[Footnote A:  Tartuffe, according to French tradition, is a caricature of the famous Pere la Chaise (Confessor to Louis Quatorze), who had a weakness for the pleasures of the table, including truffles (tartuffes).  After Cibber’s day, Moliere’s play was again adapted into English, under the title of “The Hypocrite.”]