Critical Strictures on the New Tragedy of Elvira, Written by Mr. David Malloch

H. RICHARD ARCHER, Clark Memorial Library RICHARD C. BOYS, University of Michigan ROBERT S. KINSMAN, University of California, Los Angeles JOHN LOFTIS, University of California, Los Angeles
W. EARL BRITTON, University of Michigan
EMMETT L. AVERY, State College of Washington BENJAMIN BOYCE, Duke University LOUIS BREDVOLD, University of Michigan JAMES L. CLIFFORD, Columbia University ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago EDWARD NILES HOOKER, University of California, Los Angeles LOUIS A. LANDA, Princeton University SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota ERNEST MOSSNER, University of Texas JAMES SUTHERLAND, University College, London H.T. SWEDENBERG, JR., University of California, Los Angeles
EDNA C. DAVIS, Clark Memorial Library
Boswell, at least, had meditated an attack on Mallet before Critical Strictures was written. In the large manuscript collection of his verses preserved in the Bodleian Library are two scraps of an unpublished satire imitating Churchill's Rosciad (1761), to be entitled The Turnspitiad , a canine contest of which Mallet is the hero:
And the decision to damn Elvira was made in advance of the performance, as we have seen.
Elvira was essentially a translation or adaptation of Lamotte-Houdar's French tragedy Inès de Castro , a piece published forty years before, but the English audience of 1763 saw in it a compliment to the King of Portugal, whose cause against Spain Great Britain had espoused towards the end of the Seven Years' War. The preliminaries of peace had already been signed, but the spirit of belligerency had not subsided; so that the making of the only odious person in the play (the Queen) a Spaniard, and having it end with a declaration of war against Spain, could not fail to please a patriotic audience. Since nobody reads Elvira any more, I shall venture to give an expanded version of Genest's outline of the plot, in order to make the comments in Critical Strictures more intelligible:
The play had a respectable run, in spite of its colliding with the Half-Price Riots, but contemporary accounts appear to indicate that it was not highly thought of by the judicious. I extract the following terse criticism from a letter in the St. James's Chronicle for 20 January, the day after the play opened: