[1] Thus the editor of the Cambridge Pope in his headnote to the prologue; one wonders whether he had read the play or was merely going on hearsay.
[2] MP, XXIV (1926), 91-109.
[3] In The Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre (1952). Sherburn had contended that Phoebe Clinket in the play was aimed at Mrs. Centlivre rather than at Lady Winchilsea as the tradition had it. Bowyer pins the satire to Lady Winchilsea once more and it seems this must be generally correct; the reference in the epilogue to "our well-bred poetess" seems intended for Lady Winchilsea rather than for Mrs. Centlivre.
[4] The report was not far wrong—the amount that Lintot paid Gay, on January 8,was £43, 2s, 6d (Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, VIII (1814), 296).
[5] See the excellent comment on the pair in our Key, p. 212.
[6] To charge him, as one authority has done, with "an arbitrary withdrawal of Three Hours after a far from unsuccessful week ... an invidious, if not unwarrantable, decision on his part" betrays an imperfect understanding of how a theater had to be managed in the early 18th century when the number of patrons upon which it could rely was limited. A play would run as long as it continued to draw; when the house began to fall off a new bill would have to be announced. The intermitting of Three Hours should be most naturally read as suggesting that at least in the judgment of the managers its initial vogue had passed. It would have been brought back when they thought patrons were ready to see it again—say, in a couple of months.
[7] She says that the fracas occurred on the fourth evening of The Rehearsal, and at least this revival did have a fourth performance, five in fact: Emmett L. Avery in The London Stage (1960) gives the dates as February 7, 8, 20, March 21, 28. There is a slight difficulty in assigning Gay's visit to the fourth of these, i.e., March 21: this is that the dates on which the two pamphlets that refer to it were advertised ("just before March 1" for Drub's, and March 30 for Breval's—Sherburn, p. 91) seem to rule out a March 21 fracas in the one case and to fall uncomfortably close in the other. But publication (of course) though announced, may have been delayed, and it is perhaps worth noticing that in each pamphlet Gay's visit is mentioned in an inorganic part of the work that could have been added late: the Dedication in Drub's, and, in Breval's, an ironical "congratulatory poem" printed after the epilogue, on the last two pages of the book.
[8] During the year prior to the première of Three Hours the following had been seen on the London stage twice each or more (selection only: based on Avery, op. cit.): The Comical Revenge, Man of Mode, Country Wife, Plain-Dealer, London Cuckolds, Old Bachelor, Relapse. City Politicks, a play from which our authors took some hints, was revived in the July after the closure of Three Hours; it ran three performances (i.e., successfully). But it should be recalled that the most recent of the eight plays here mentioned—Vanbrugh's—had been in the repertory twenty years.
[9] The quote is from the Short View, pp. 7-8 in the 1698 edition, from "Obscenity in any Company is a rustick and increditable Talent" to "But here a Man can't be a Sinner without being a Clown."
[10] Drub says that the actors left out "a considerable load of Obscenity and Prophaness." Presumably the authors would have to acquiesce in such bowdlerizing.