A WILL AND NO WILL,
OR A Bone for the Lawyers.
(1746)

THE NEW PLAY CRITICIZ'D,
OR The Plague of Envy.
(1747)

Introduction by
Jean B. Kern

PUBLICATION NUMBERS 127-128
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles
1967

GENERAL EDITORS

• George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles
• Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
• Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

ADVISORY EDITORS

• Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
• James L. Clifford, Columbia University
• Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia
• Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles
• Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
• Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
• Earl Miner, University of California, Los Angeles
• Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
• Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles
• Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
• James Sutherland, University College, London
• H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Edna C. Davis, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

INTRODUCTION

The manuscript copies of these two plays by Charles Macklin, A WILL AND NO WILL, OR A BONE FOR THE LAWYERS (1746) and THE NEW PLAY CRITICIZ'D, OR THE PLAGUE OF ENVY (1747), are in the Larpent Collection of the Huntington Library along with a third afterpiece The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir (1752) already reproduced in facsimile as Number 116 of the Augustan Reprint Society.[1] Since the introduction to Covent Garden Theatre (ARS 116) already gives general biographical information on this actor-playwright, Charles Macklin, as well as an indication of the revived interest in his plays, this introduction will be limited to the two afterpieces here reproduced.

A WILL AND NO WILL, OR A BONE FOR THE LAWYERS (Larpent 58) was first produced in 1746 and revived many times up to March 29, 1756, unlike The Covent Garden Theatre which was given only one performance in 1752. The Larpent manuscript 58 copy of A WILL AND NO WILL bears the handwritten application of James Lacy to the Lord Chamberlain for permission to perform the farce for Mrs. Macklin's benefit. It was first performed at the Drury Lane Theatre April 23, 1746, following Humours of the Army.[2] Sometimes advertised with a different subtitle as A WILL AND NO WILL, OR A NEW CASE FOR THE LAWYERS,[3] it was revived March 22, 1748, for Macklin's own benefit and apparently was more popular in the revival since it was repeated five more times on March 29, 31 and April 11, 21, 22.[4] The last performance listed in The London Stage, Part 4, II, 535, was for Macklin's daughter's benefit on March 29, 1756.

Macklin's two-act farce, A WILL AND NO WILL, is based on Regnard's five-act comedy le Legetaire Universel (1707), which is itself a composite of Italian comedy with echoes of Molière, moving from scene to scene with little effort at logical consistency or structure but treating each scene autonomously for its own comic value.[5] Macklin condensed and tightened Regnard's five-act plot into a two-act afterpiece; the role of the apothecary is greatly reduced into the stock London-stage Frenchman, du Maigre, who can barely speak English; the servant Lucy is more the English maid than the French bonne of the Regnard play who gave orders to her master; and the satire of Macklin's afterpiece is directed not only at lawyers and physicians, as in the Regnard play, but at Methodist itinerant preachers. Finally Macklin's plot was both complicated and tightened by having the lawyers summoned to draw up the marriage contract, also take down the will of the supposed Skinflint, thus making the marriage a condition of the will.

The rather long Prologue to A WILL AND NO WILL (11 pages of manuscript) makes fun of the convention of the eighteenth century prologues by the familiar dodge of having two actors chatting as though they were in the Pit waiting for the actors in the main play to dress for the afterpiece. The conversation of the Prologue is enlivened by the appearance of an Irish lawyer come to see the play about lawyers. His impossibly long name, Laughlinbulhuderry-Mackshoughlinbulldowny, contains hints of Macklin's own name, and this is also one of Macklin's wonderful Irishmen who never acted except in school where he spoke the Prologue, he says, of one of Terence's tragedies when the play was over. His mispronunciations and inaccuracies put him at the head of the list of stage Irishmen whom Macklin, an Irishman himself, could portray with delight and authority.

Another feature of the long Prologue to this farce is Macklin's reference to the failure of his own tragedy Henry VII (1745), for Snarlewit proclaims that he never had so much fun in his life as at Macklin's "merry Tragedy." The ability to laugh at his own failure to construct a tragedy hastily in time to capitalize on the invasion attempt of 1745, together with his reference to his own name in his caricature of the Irish lawyer undoubtedly help explain the success of this farcical afterpiece.

Occasional marks of the Licenser on the manuscript, most notably opposite Shark's lines about statesmen at the end of Act I, are all underscored in the typescript of the play.

The second afterpiece here reproduced, THE NEW PLAY CRITICIZ'D, OR THE PLAGUE OF ENVY (Larpent 64), is an amusing bit of dramatic criticism of Benjamin Hoadly's The Suspicious Husband which had opened at the Covent Garden Theatre on February 12, 1747, and was given many times including performances on March 21, 24 and April 28, 30 of