Momus Triumphans:
OR,
THE PLAGIARIES
OF THE ENGLISH STAGE

GENERAL EDITORS

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

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

David S. Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles

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
Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
Curt A. Zimansky, State University of Iowa

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Edna C. Davis, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Jean T. Shebanek, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

INTRODUCTION

Gerard Langbaine's Momus Triumphans, Or the Plagiaries of the English Stage (1687) is significant for a number of reasons. It is, first of all, the most comprehensive catalogue of the English theatre to its time, a list of surprising bibliographical competence and extent for its subject and period and a source study which is still of some use today. Secondly, it serves as the strong and carefully articulated skeleton for Langbaine's elaborately expanded Account of the English Dramatick Poets published some three years later in 1691, and itself a catalogue which remains "a major work of literary scholarship that is immune from obsolescence."[1] Thirdly, and more privately, Momus stands as both a partial record and efficient cause of a quarrel whose claim to our attention is its connection with Dryden. It is a quarrel minor in itself and of which few details are known. Indeed, to call it a quarrel at all is to give a corporeality to Langbaine's adversaries which facts will not directly support, but Langbaine's prejudices against Dryden in Momus and their resulting intensification in the Account suggest a matrix of literature, alliances of taste, politics and religion interestingly characteristic of late seventeenth-century England.

Momus Triumphans is based on four prior literary catalogues:[2]

In his Preface to Momus Langbaine acknowledges his indebtedness to these four earlier lists and asserts "the general Use of Catalogues, and the esteem they are in at present" (A2r). But he argues that a new catalogue is needed because the former ones are out of print, "they were all of them full of gross Errours," and they are not "so Methodical as this which I have now made." Further, he proposes to add "all the Plays which have been Printed since 1680" ([A2v]).

The catalogues of Phillips and Winstanley are, as their titles state, not primarily play lists, and their importance to a discussion of dramatic bibliographies resides solely in the use made of them by Langbaine. Two hundred and fifty-two British poets are named in Phillips' Theatrum Poetarum. Of these some one hundred and sixty-nine were authors of plays. The titlepage of Winstanley's Lives advertises an account "of above Two Hundred" poets, but "147 are actually listed in the catalogue, and only 168 are noted throughout."[3] Four hundred and sixty-seven plays by sixty authors are included. From Phillips' collection Winstanley omits the thirty-three Scottish poets and sixty-eight English poets. William Riley Parker believes that most of Winstanley's omissions were deliberate and that his "endeavor, unlike Phillips', was to give a chronological survey of English poetry from Robert of Gloucester down to Sir Roger L'Estrange."[4] Parker defines the differing contributions of the two men in the following manner:

As a bibliographer Phillips was exceedingly inaccurate and "the Theatrum was a hasty, careless piece of hack work," whose convenience was seriously damaged by a poor organization which alphabetizes the poets in four sections by their first names, with no last name index. His source materials were of the easiest and most superficial kind.[6] Both Phillips and Winstanley misunderstood Kirkman's method of listing anonymous plays and this, as Langbaine notes in the Preface to Momus, led "both these charitable kind Gentlemen" to find "Fathers for them, by ranking each under the Authors Name that preceded them in the former Catalogues"([A3r]).