[INTRODUCTION]
Gerard Langbaine's Momus Triumphans, Or the Plagiaries of the English Stage (1687) is significant for a number of reasons. It is, first of all, the most comprehensive catalogue of the English theatre to its time, a list of surprising bibliographical competence and extent for its subject and period and a source study which is still of some use today. Secondly, it serves as the strong and carefully articulated skeleton for Langbaine's elaborately expanded Account of the English Dramatick Poets published some three years later in 1691, and itself a catalogue which remains "a major work of literary scholarship that is immune from obsolescence."[1] Thirdly, and more privately, Momus stands as both a partial record and efficient cause of a quarrel whose claim to our attention is its connection with Dryden. It is a quarrel minor in itself and of which few details are known. Indeed, to call it a quarrel at all is to give a corporeality to Langbaine's adversaries which facts will not directly support, but Langbaine's prejudices against Dryden in Momus and their resulting intensification in the Account suggest a matrix of literature, alliances of taste, politics and religion interestingly characteristic of late seventeenth-century England.
Momus Triumphans is based on four prior literary catalogues:[2]
[Francis Kirkman,] A True, perfect and exact Catalogue of all the Comedies, Tragedies, Tragi-Comedies, Pastorals, Masques and Interludes, that were ever yet Printed and Published, till this present year 1671 (London, 1671);
Edward Phillips, Theatrum Poetarum, Or A Compleat Collection of the Poets, Especially The most-Eminent, of all Ages (London, 1675);
[Gerard Langbaine,] An Exact Catalogue of All All the Comedies, Tragedies, Tragi-Comedies, Operas, Masks, Pastorals, and Interludes That were ever yet Printed and Published, till this present year 1680 (Oxford, 1680); and William Winstanley, The Lives Of the most Famous English Poets, Or The Honour of Parnassus (London, 1687).
In his Preface to Momus Langbaine acknowledges his indebtedness to these four earlier lists and asserts "the general Use of Catalogues, and the esteem they are in at present" (A2r). But he argues that a new catalogue is needed because the former ones are out of print, "they were all of them full of gross Errours," and they are not "so Methodical as this which I have now made." Further, he proposes to add "all the Plays which have been Printed since 1680" ([A2v]).