Prologue
[p. 121] Great Johnson’s way. cf. what Mrs. Behn says in her ‘Epistle to the Reader’ prefacing The Dutch Lover (Vol. I, p. 224), of the Jonsonian enthusiast: ‘a man the most severe of Johnson’s Sect.’
[p. 121] Nokes and Angel. The two celebrated low comedians. Angel died in the spring of 1673. He was a great farceur, but gagged unmercifully, to the no small annoyance of the poets.
[p. 121] Cataline. Jonson’s tragedy was revived with great splendour at the King’s House, Friday, 18 December, 1668, and remained a stock play until the retirement of Hart (who excelled in Catiline) at the Union in 1682. Michael Mohun was famous in Cethegus, and Mrs. Corey in Sempronia. Pepys found the play itself rather dull as a whole ‘though most fine in clothes, and a fine Scene of the Senate, and of a fight, as ever I saw in my life.’ A year before its actual production his crony, Harry Harris, a member of the rival theatre had ‘talked of Catiline which is to be suddenly acted at the King’s House; and there all agree that it cannot be well done at that house, there not being good actors enough; and Burt acts Cicero, which they all conclude he will not be able to do well. The King gives them £500 for robes, there being, as they say, to be sixteen scarlet robes.’ (11 December, 1667.) In the first quarto (1672), of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal, Bayes refers to Catiline saying that his design in a certain scene is ‘Roman cloaths, guilded Truncheons, forc’d conceipt, smooth Verse, and a Rant.’ The words ‘Roman cloaths’ are omitted in all subsequent editions.
[p. 121] the Comick Hat. In 1670 there was produced at the Theatre Royal, Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada, Part I. The witty prologue was ‘spoken by Mrs. Ellen Gwyn’ (who acted Almahide) ‘in a Broad-Brimm’d Hat, and Waist Belt’. It commences thus:—
This jest was first of t’other house’s making,
And five times tried, has never fail’d of taking;
For ’twere a shame a poet should be kill’d
Under the shelter of so broad a shield.
This is the hat, whose very sight did win ye