The Gamester (1753)

Series Five: Drama No. 1 Edward Moore, The Gamester (1753) With an Introduction by Charles H. Peake and a Bibliographical Note by Philip R. Wikelund The Augustan Reprint Society July, 1948 Price: 75 cents
GENERAL EDITORS Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan Edward Niles Hooker, University of California, Los Angeles H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles ASSISTANT EDITOR W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan 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
This reprint of Edward Moore's The Gamester makes available to students of eighteenth century literature a play which, whatever its intrinsic merits, is historically important both as a vehicle for a century of great actors and as a contribution to the development of middle-class tragedy which had considerable influence on the Continent. The Gamester was first presented at the Drury Lane Theatre February 7, 1753 with Garrick in the leading role, and ran for ten successive nights. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century it remained a popular stock piece--John Philip Kemble, Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Barry, the Keans, Macready, and others having distinguished themselves in it--and in America from 1754 to 1875 it enjoyed even more performances than in England. (J.H. Caskey, The Life and Works of Edward Moore, 96-99). Moore's middle-class tragedy is the only really successful attempt to follow Lillo's decisive break with tradition in England in the eighteenth century. His background, like Lillo's, was humble, religious, and mercantile. The son of a dissenting pastor, Moore received his early education in dissenters' academies, and then served an apprenticeship to a London linen-draper. After a few years in Ireland as an agent for a merchant, Moore returned to London to join a partnership in the linen trade. The partnership was soon dissolved, and Moore turned to letters for a livelihood. Among his works are Fables for the Female Sex (1744) which went through three editions, The Foundling (1748), a successful comedy, and Gil Blas (1751), an unsuccessful comedy. In 1753, with encouragement and some assistance from Garrick, he produced The Gamester, upon which his reputation as a writer depends.