It is curious that Pepys should have attributed this play to the Duchess. On 30 March, 1667, he wrote in his Diary: “To see the silly play of my Lady Newcastle called ‘The Humorous Lovers’; the most silly thing that ever came upon a stage. I was sick to see it, but yet would not but have seen it, that I might the better understand her.”
Of another play attributed to Newcastle, “Sir Martin Marall,” Pepys wrote on 16 August, 1667: “My wife and I to the Duke’s playhouse, where we saw the new play acted yesterday, ‘The Feign Innocence, or Sir Martin Marall’; a play made by my Lord Duke of Newcastle, but, as everybody says, corrected by Dryden. It is the most entire piece of mirth, a complete farce from one end to the other that certainly ever was writ. I never laughed so in all my life, and at very good wit therein, not fooling.”
After all this high praise, it is painful to a writer of a panegyric on Newcastle, to read in the Encyclopædia Britannica that he “translated Molière’s L’Etourdi under the title ‘Sir Martin Mar-All’”. Almost worse still is it to read, in The Dictionary of National Biography, that Newcastle “translated Molière’s L’Etourdi, which Dryden”—not Newcastle—“converted into a play”.
Whatever may have been the assistance rendered by Dryden in what Pepys calls the making of this play, he certainly wrote its prologue and epilogue, which may be found in his collected works. They are by no means the most brilliant efforts of Dryden’s genius.
The severe critic of Langbaine’s worship of nobility, already quoted, says of Newcastle’s play, “The Triumphant Widow”: “This was esteemed a good Play, and Mr. Shadwell had so good an opinion of it, that he borrowed a great part thereof to compleat his Comedy called Bury Fair”.
In a poem entitled “The Philosopher’s Complaint,” Newcastle professes to watch a philosopher in his study, through a cranny in the wall. He hears him bewailing his fate in being a man and not a beast. The poem is long. Here are a few verses:—
Beasts slander not or falsehoods raise:
But full of truth as Nature taught,