of murder was raised, escaped into the night. Mountfort, fatally wounded, staggered toward his own home in the next street. As Mrs. Mountfort opened the door, her husband fell bleeding into her arms; at one o'clock in the afternoon of the next day, he died. According to the "Account," he was to have played Bussy D'Ambois that night—Marlowe's tragedy of a young man who meets his death through assassination.

Although Hill made good his escape, Lord Mohun stood trial in Westminster before his peers. Mohun's defense was simply that he was not privy to Hill's design and did not assist and encourage him in it. The lords, having heard the evidence, retired, and the next day, Saturday, 5 February, acquitted Mohun of wrongdoing by a vote of 69-14. The prisoner was discharged.

The United Company found themselves seriously hampered by the death of Mountfort, and even more so when fifteen days later the great comedian Anthony Leigh died. The "Account" says that Mountfort's death "had so great an Affect on his Dear Companion, Mr. LEE the Comedian, that he did not survive him above the space of a Week." The Company delayed the opening of a new play by one William Congreve, The Old Bachelor. But when that smash hit finally came on the boards in March 1693, Susanna Mountfort played the gay évaporée, Belinda, to great applause. And on 31 January 1694, she married the actor John Verbruggen. The rather mysterious Anne Bracegirdle, for whom Mountfort had been killed, played female leads in all of Congreve's plays, and just as the public had once speculated on her relationship to Mountfort, they now speculated on her relationship to Congreve.

Although farce was popular with London audiences during the Restoration, there was considerable controversy as to what it was and what it was worth. In a period in which the canon of English literary criticism was being formed, farce illustrates the disparity between received classical principles and the playwright's actual craft. Dryden, who himself "stooped" to writing farce, nonetheless sneers in his preface to An Evening's Love, or The Mock-Astrologer [1671]:

Farce ... consists principally of grimaces ... Comedy consists, though of low persons, yet of natural actions and characters; I mean such humours, adventures, and designs, as are to be found and met with in the world. Farce, on the other side, consists of forced humours, and unnatural events. Comedy presents us with the imperfections of human nature: Farce entertains us with what is monstrous and chimerical.[6]

Farce was theoretically unpopular because it relied on the extravagant and unnatural, as opposed to the play of real character found in comedy. And whereas in seventeenth-century comedy the avowed intention is usually to expose and thus to reform the vices and follies of the age, farce uses the grossly physical to draw a laugh; there is nothing to be learned from the slapstick and pigsbladder.

Though sneered at by theorists and subject to endless abuse in the prologues and epilogues of the day, farce continued as pleasing to Restoration audiences as it is today. James Sutherland notes that shrewd actor-playwrights such as Mountfort, Betterton, Underhill, Jevon, Dogget, Powell—men who knew intimately the tastes of the town, chose to write farce.[7] Tate's A Duke and No Duke, Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, and Jevon's The Devil of a Wife, were among the most popular offerings, and although the Restoration wit may have gone to "Dr. Faustus" with a certain sense of intellectual slumming, he did continue to support quite generously the farceurs of that time. Moreover, farcical elements appear regularly in the supposedly elegant and artificial Restoration comedy of manners.

"Dr. Faustus" is a highly competent putting-together of those components which the experienced actor-playwright knew to be surefire. The date of its premier production is not known and has been assigned to a date as early as 1684 and as late as 1688. The farce was not published until the quarto of 1697, which appeared without cast-list, prologue, or epilogue.[8] The title page, however, states that the farce was acted at Dorset Garden "several times," by "Lee" (Anthony Leigh) and Jevon, and, as the editor of The London Stage points out, since Jevon died in December of 1688, the premiere was probably no later than the season of 1687-1688.[9] Borgman maintains that "Dr. Faustus" is Mountfort's second work, after The Injured Lovers of February, 1688, noting that the epilogue to that play, spoken by Jevon, suggests that Mountfort was planning, or had written, a farce:

Pardon but this, and I will pawn my life,
His next shall match my Devil of a Wife,
We'll grace it with the Imbellishment of Song and Dance;
We'll have the Monsieur once again from France,
With's Hoop and Glasses, and when that is done,
He shall divert you with his Riggadoon.

We might guess, then, that if the epilogue does refer to "Dr. Faustus," the date of that play is as late as the Spring of 1688.

Mountfort took as his raw material Marlowe's great tragedy and for that reason "Dr. Faustus" may be to some extent thought of as a burlesque. The Restoration audience delighted in Marlowe's Faustus; the Elizabethan tragedy had been played in 1662, and there was a performance at the Duke's Theater in September, 1675. Edward Phillips wrote in his Theatrum Poetarum, that "of all that [Marlowe] hath written to the Stage his Dr. Faustus hath made the greatest noise with its Devils and such like Tragical sport."[10] Here lies the suggestion that Mountfort was to take up, for as Borgman notes, Marlowe's tragedy has two distinct lines: the mighty verse which makes up the tragedy of an heroic overreacher, and a comic line of farcical lazzi. Mountfort has trimmed away the poetry of Marlowe and, for the most part, retained the farcical elements of the earlier play.[11]

Mountfort keeps the compact with Mephostopholis, the appearance of good and bad angels, the visit of Lucifer and Beelzebub, the pageant of the seven deadly sins, the cheating of the horse-courser, the admonitions of the Old Man, the summoning of the spirits of Alexander and Darius, the tricking of Benvolio, the final moments of remorse before Faustus is dragged down to hell, and finally, the discovery of Faustus's limbs in his study. Mountfort's purpose, as Borgman notes, was not to convert an Elizabethan tragedy into a Restoration one, but to affix additional farcical materials to a work that already contained scenes of slapstick.

Mountfort's unique contribution to his source was the introduction of the commedia dell'arte figures which had become