ADVISORY EDITORS

Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington
Benjamin Boyce, University of Nebraska
Louis I. BREDVOLD, University of Michigan
CLEANTH Brooks, Yale University
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
Ernest MOSSNER, University of Texas
James Sutherland, Queen Mary College, London

Lithoprinted from copy supplied by author
by
Edwards Brothers, Inc. 
Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A.
1948

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Introduction

The three parts of D’Urfey’s “The Comical History of Don Quixote” were performed between 1694 and (probably) the end of 1696.  Some of the songs included were conspicuously “smutty”—­to use a word which D’Urfey ridiculed—­but the fact that the plays were fresh in the public mind was probably the most effective reason for Jeremy Collier’s decision to include the not very highly respected author among the still living playwrights to be singled out for attack in “A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage”, which appeared at Easter time 1698.  In July of the same year D’Urfey replied with the preface to his “smutty” play “The Campaigners”.  It is this preface which is given as the first item of the present reprint.

Pope’s contemptuous prologue, written many years later and apparently for a benefit performance of one of D’Urfey’s plays, is sufficient evidence that the playwright was not highly regarded; but he was reputed to be a good natured man and, by the standards of the time, his twitting of Collier—­whom he accused of having a better nose for smut than a clergyman should have—­is not conspicuously vituperative.  Even his attack on the political character of the notorious Non-Juror is bitter without being really scurrilous.  But like his betters Congreve and Vanbrugh, D’Urfey both missed the opportunity to grapple with the real issues of the controversy and misjudged the temper of the public.  Had that public been, as all the playwrights seem to have assumed, ready to side with them against Collier, there might have been some justification in resting content as he and Congreve did with the scoring of a few debater’s points.  But the public, even “the town”, was less interested in mere sally and rejoinder than it was in the serious question of the relation of comedy to morality, and hence Collier was allowed to win the victory almost by default.