There were no other issues.
The Carnival of Venice opened on 13 December 1781 and played twenty-three times during the season but was never revived. It was written to suit what Tickell himself, in a letter to an aspiring playwright, called “the present taste for complicated plot and perplexed incidents” (unpublished letter to A. Becket, August 1781, in the Widener Collection, Harvard College Library); for the plot, see the review in The Universal Magazine, LXIX, 1781, 328. The music was provided by Linley, and the elaborate sets and costumes by De Loutherbourg. In particular the songs were admired: Tom Moore and Samuel Rogers remembered and quoted them in the next century (Moore, Sheridan, 2nd ed., 1825, II, 227; Rogers, Table-Talk, p. 72). Mary Young, in her Memoirs of Mrs. Crouch, 1806, said that “Many of the songs in this piece so perfectly resemble, in poetic beauty, those which adorn the Duenna [by Sheridan], that they declare themselves to be the offspring of the same Muse” (I, 127). Sheridan’s biographers have variously ascribed the songs, in part or entirely, to him and Mrs. Sheridan, but on what grounds save their excellence does not appear (Sichel, Sheridan, I, 443, and II, 459; Rae, article on Tickell in the DNB).
xi
[Prologue to] Variety; A Comedy, in Five Acts: as it is performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane. London: Printed for T. Becket, Adelphi, Strand, Bookseller to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, and Their Royal Highnesses the Princes. MDCCLXXXII.
Copies: BM, C.
8vo. P. , half-title, verso blank; p. [iii], title, verso blank; pp. [v-vi], “Prologue, by Richard Tickell, Esq;”; p. [vii], “Epilogue”; p. [viii], “Epilogue,” continued, and “Dramatis Personæ”; pp. [1]-71, text; p. [72], publisher’s advertisements.
Subsequent issues disregarded here.
Variety was written by Richard Griffith (d. 1788), and was first performed 25 February 1782.
xii
Remarks on the Commutation Act. Addressed to the People of England. London: Printed for T. Becket, in Pall-Mall. M DCC LXXXV. [Price One Shilling and Six-pence.]