[11] Breval, p. 11, and his note.
NOTES
[Advertisement], printed exactly as it is acted. In 1717 Gay continued, "for, tho' the Players in Compliance with the Taste of the Town, broke it into five Parts in the Representation; yet, as the Action pauses, and the Stage is left vacant but three times, so it properly consists but of three Acts, like the Spanish Comedies." There are several puzzles here. In the first place for a three-act play the stage should be left vacant twice rather than three times. But setting this aside there is a contradiction which must have puzzled any reader who has used the 1717 edition, namely that if the players broke it into five parts and the play is printed exactly as it is acted, the play that follows should be in five acts but actually is in three. The London 1757 Supplement to Pope merely reprints Advertisement and play as they are in 1717 and it is not until the Dublin printings that the play appears in the five acts in which Gay says it was acted.
I suggest that Lintot in 1717 had two scripts of the play, one in three acts, one in five, and that Gay wrote the Advertisement under the impression that Lintot would discard the former.
I judge that when W. Whitestone undertook his Dublin Supplement of 1757 he took the Advertisement from the London book that had just been published (see the title-page of the volume) but that when he re-issued his book in 1758 he deleted the lines quoted above, perceiving that they were not to the point so far as his text of the play was concerned.
Unless we imagine Whitestone revising the play into five acts himself we must suppose that he had got his hands on an authentic acting MS of the play, and it seems not one from a late revival. I suspect that Whitestone in fact had got the very MS of the play that Gay thought Lintot was going to print; one cannot guess from where, but presumably from the same source that supplied the Key and Letter. Besides the act divisions the most interesting variant is a speech of a dozen words added to Dublin; see the note to p. 183. Cibber may have put this in, or Gay, at Cibber's request. But in either case it seems that the text that has it is the one that Gay authorized for printing.
By the same token, the cast as given in the present reprint (no actors' names are given in Dublin 1757 but they must have been in the script and in the reprint of 1758 Whitestone decided to put them in) is more probably correct than that printed in 1717. The only differences between the two are in five very minor roles, where, as rehearsals went on, substitutions would be easy. All the principals are the same.
[Prologue.] Nothing to add to the Twickenham Pope, VI, 179-180.
[Dramatis Personae.] Five minor roles differ from 1717, as stated above. Mrs. Bicknet. A misreading by the typesetter—he had never heard of Mrs. Bicknell.