the same year.[6] Again the title page of the Macklin afterpiece bears the handwritten request of James Lacy, dated March 17, 1747, for the Lord Chamberlain's permission to perform the play for Macklin's benefit at Drury Lane on March 24. Both performances, then, of Macklin's closely related afterpiece, THE NEW PLAY CRITICIZ'D, were given at Drury Lane on nights when Hoadly's The Suspicious Husband was also being performed at the rival theatre, March 24 and April 30, 1747. It was even possible for a spectator to see Hoadly's play at Covent Garden and then catch Macklin's related farcical afterpiece at the Drury Lane Theatre on the same night. Or if that required too difficult a change of locus, it was still possible to see The Suspicious Husband on March 21 or April 28 and THE SUSPICIOUS HUSBAND CRITICIZ'D (as Macklin's play is entitled in James T. Kirkman's Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin, Esq., II, 443) a few days later on March 24 or April 30; such was the immediacy of the appeal of Macklin's afterpiece.

While Macklin was capitalizing on the popularity of a new play, he also, in THE NEW PLAY CRITICIZ'D, gave ironic portraits of rival playwrights who damned a play out of envy (note the subtitle, THE PLAGUE OF ENVY) for such trivial faults as the use of suspicious instead of jealous in the title, or for the lacing of Ranger's hat. Macklin's satiric portraits of such envious scribblers who were ready to attack any new author in Journals, Epigrams, and Pamphlets are lively records of mid-eighteenth century subjective criticism. Canker, the envious playwright in the afterpiece, calls Ranger "a Harlequin" and Mr. Strickland, "Columbine's husband." Canker objects to the escapes, scenes in the dark, and the rope ladder, though the young lovers, Heartly and Harriet in Macklin's afterpiece, vow the ladder is a device they themselves will use if Harriet is forced by her aunt to marry Canker. Again an Irishman, Sir Patrick Bashfull, enlivens the farce by his pretense of being a Frenchman, Fitzbashfull, "of Irish distraction." Bashfull's literal criticism of Hoadly's play serves as a good foil for the carping criticism of the envious playwrights: Plagiary, Grubwit, and Canker; or the nonsense of the foolish critics: Nibble and Trifle. The farce ends with Canker completely routed and Heartly's suggestion that their hour's conversation would make a petit piece in itself if Lady Critick would only write it down.

The limited appeal of this kind of related, topical afterpiece probably explains why it was performed only twice, following a performance of Hamlet on March 24, 1747, for Macklin's benefit, and following Julius Caesar on April 30, 1747, for the benefit of Garrick who had appeared as Ranger in the original cast of Hoadly's play. The separate Prologue to Macklin's afterpiece is addressed to Mr. Macklin in Bow Street, Covent Garden, and attributed to Hely Hutcheson, Provost of Trinity College by William Cooke's Memoirs of Charles Macklin, Comedian (1804), p. 152.

These two afterpieces, A WILL AND NO WILL (1746) and THE NEW PLAY CRITICIZ'D (1747) along with Covent Garden Theatre (1752), ARS 116, bring up to date the publication of Charles Macklin's unpublished work. It is to be hoped that a definitive critical edition of his writing for the eighteenth-century stage will soon follow.

A word should be added about the editor's changes of these two plays in the typescript. From the facsimile edition of Macklin's Covent Garden Theatre (ARS 116) it should already be evident that Macklin's scribes in these three plays in the Larpent Collection were inconsistent both in spelling and punctuation. The Covent Garden Theatre appeared in facsimile in response to requests for an eighteenth-century facsimile for use in graduate seminars, because of the clarity of its handwriting. The other two plays are here reproduced in typescript since the condition of the manuscripts made facsimile reproduction unfeasible. In the preparation of the typescript for these remaining two plays, certain problems had of necessity to be decided arbitrarily. Wherever it was possible, the manuscript spelling has been preserved. Punctuation and capitals had to be altered where sentences were run together or new sentences began with small letters. The number of capital letters was reduced since these followed no consistent pattern for emphasis and varied between the scribes of the manuscripts. Nouns were left capitalized to preserve the eighteenth-century flavor. Proper names have been corrected to a recognizable form (Ranelagh for Renelagh, Zoilus for Ziolus, for example); French phrases have been left in the manuscript spelling for those characters who misuse French, such as Sir Patrick Bashfull in THE NEW PLAY CRITICIZ'D. The occasional confusions of characters or speakers have been corrected, with separate notes explaining each change. All marks of the Licenser are in italics; all words or letters interpolated by the editor are in brackets; all stage directions are in parentheses. Applications by the Theatre Manager, James Lacy, for permission to perform the plays, appear in notes.

Coe College

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

  [1]  As indicated in the Introduction to The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir, Number 116, Augustan Reprint Society, the author is indebted to the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, both for a Research Fellowship in the summer of 1963 and for permission to reproduce the three Macklin plays in the Larpent Collection (Larpent 58, 64 and 96) which had not previously been printed.

  [2]  Arthur H. Scouten, The London Stage (Carbondale, Ill., 1961), Part 3, II, 1235.

  [3]  James T. Kirkman, Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin, Esq. (London, 1799), II, 443, lists this subtitle in an appendix of Macklin's unprinted plays.

  [4]  George Winchester Stone, The London Stage (Carbondale, Ill., 1962), Part 4, 1, 38, 40, 41, 43, 47, 48.

  [5]  Cf. Alexandre Calame, Regnard sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1960), pp. 323-333.

  [6]  See The London Stage, Part 3, II, 1287-90, 1297, 1298, 1308, 1309 for the dates when Hoadly's The Suspicious Husband and Macklin's THE NEW PLAY CRITICIZ'D were performed close together.

A WILL AND NO WILL:

OR

A BONE FOR THE LAWYERS[1]