A Will and No Will; or, A Bone for the Lawyers. (1746) The New Play Criticiz'd, or the Plague of Envy. (1747)

The Augustan Reprint Society
CHARLES MACKLIN
Introduction by Jean B. Kern
PUBLICATION NUMBERS 127-128 WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY University of California, Los Angeles 1967
GENERAL EDITORS
ADVISORY EDITORS
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY
Edna C. Davis, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
INTRODUCTION
The rather long Prologue to A WILL AND NO WILL (11 pages of manuscript) makes fun of the convention of the eighteenth century prologues by the familiar dodge of having two actors chatting as though they were in the Pit waiting for the actors in the main play to dress for the afterpiece. The conversation of the Prologue is enlivened by the appearance of an Irish lawyer come to see the play about lawyers. His impossibly long name, Laughlinbulhuderry-Mackshoughlinbulldowny, contains hints of Macklin's own name, and this is also one of Macklin's wonderful Irishmen who never acted except in school where he spoke the Prologue, he says, of one of Terence's tragedies when the play was over. His mispronunciations and inaccuracies put him at the head of the list of stage Irishmen whom Macklin, an Irishman himself, could portray with delight and authority.
Another feature of the long Prologue to this farce is Macklin's reference to the failure of his own tragedy Henry VII (1745), for Snarlewit proclaims that he never had so much fun in his life as at Macklin's merry Tragedy. The ability to laugh at his own failure to construct a tragedy hastily in time to capitalize on the invasion attempt of 1745, together with his reference to his own name in his caricature of the Irish lawyer undoubtedly help explain the success of this farcical afterpiece.
Occasional marks of the Licenser on the manuscript, most notably opposite Shark's lines about statesmen at the end of Act I, are all underscored in the typescript of the play.