Alexander Pope - Delphi Poets Series

by Alexander Pope

  That in all this sweetness and light there should have been a plan to make Cibber ridiculous, and he too stupid to realize this until he had trod the stage as Plotwell and felt the impact of the lines directed at him personally, is unbelievable on the face of it. How could the alleged plotters have been sure that when Colley came to cast the play he would not frustrate their deep-laid plan by assigning Plotwell to some other actor, if only by mere chance?

  The theory has fed on some misreadings of the play that must have an end put to them if this ghost is to be laid. If the reader, then, will pardon the obviousness of the following, it is true that Cibber wrote plays, but the name Plotwell should not be taken in this sense, but merely as suggesting the gallant skilled in the stratagems which, in the older comedies, males of this class had been accustomed to use in their cuckolding operations. Plotwell in the play has never set pen to paper except for notes sent to wives, and he is not an “actor-manager” or the like. He and Underplot are simply gentlemen who spend so much of their time in intrigues in real life that they would have no time for play-writing. In the part of Three Hours that has led scholars down this false path — the scene in which the manuscript is judged by Sir Tremendous and the players — it must be kept in mind that the actual author of the work being dismembered is Phoebe Clinket, not Plotwell, who, since he is merely fronting for her, is enabled to meet such strictures as “Between you and I, this gentleman knows nothing of poetry” with perfect sang-froid; it is Phoebe whose withers are comically wrung. Thus there was nothing in the part to offend Cibber, much less can resentment on his part be deduced from the intermission of the play after the seventh night.

  The squabble involving Pope, Gay, and Cibber must have begun with the latter’s allusion to our play in the revival of The Rehearsal on February 7, a couple of weeks after Three Hours had closed. Cibber’s version of how it happened may be read in the Letter (pp. 217-218 below); our female correspondent sympathized with him and deleted a few expressions indicative of animus on his part, but on the whole the quote as she gives it is a reasonable facsimile of what he had said in the Letter to Pope (1742). His disclaimer of an intent to offend is believable in the light of what we have just seen as to how Plotwell should be read in the play; on the other side, Pope’s anger at the gag — though not any visit by him to Cibber, that is true — is attested both by Breval and by “Timothy Drub” (A Letter to Mr. John Gay, 1717) who agree that Pope was the one principally offended and that it was he who sent Gay with instructions to trounce “that impudent Dog C —— r” (this line from Drub’s pamphlet). Why may not Pope have been angry enough to seek out Cibber himself on the impulse of the moment? It seems feeble to doubt Cibber’s testimony on the grounds that he had not told the story prior to 1742; he had not previously told the tale of the youthful Pope in a bagnio, either, yet the authorities think there might be something to this — if to the one tale, why not to the other? As to the account the lady gives of the scuffle between Gay and Cibber, it was widely known at the time that there had been some sort of angry meeting between them; her story is highly colored but nonetheless may be substantially true.

  This quarrel, whether with both poets involved with Cibber or only one, doubtless cost the play a revival or two that it would otherwise have had; with such evidence of anger in the authors Cibber could well have wished to have done with them and their work. The use of the crocodile costume on April 2 in a dance at Drury Lane entitled The Shipwreck suggests that so far as the management was concerned the play for which it had been devised would not be acted again. Thereafter, Three Hours had only two revivals (Handlist of Plays in Nicoll, Early Eighteenth-Century Drama) — one in 1737 (two performances) the other in 1746 (three).

  A pity! But in any case the play could not have had much of a life on the stage, considering the climate into which the authors chose to introduce it. The type of wit that had flourished in the former age did still hold a place in the theatre in 1717, but only in such comedies as had already won a place in the repertory. The older plays could be “corrected” (that is, the racier lines could be taken out) or the tender-minded could tolerate them as classics or in a pinch stay at home when a play known to be of this sort had been announced. A new play was in a more vulnerable position; it had to conform to what the reformers had for a couple of decades been telling audiences a play should be, or squalls could be expected. Sir Richard Blackmore was continuing the crusade against scapegrace wit — in the Preface to his Essays, 1717, he is explicitly severe upon Three Hours and its authors — and the battle was going his way. Jeremy Collier had published nothing on the theatre for nearly a decade but it is interesting to see his methods applied to the play by Timothy Drub in his Letter to Gay and Drub then clinching his remarks with a quote of two pages from “a very elegant author” whom he does not name but who — not too surprisingly — can be recognized as Collier himself. (Could “Drub” have been, in fact, Collier, thus tempted by Three Hours to return to the fray under this alias?)

  In any event the authors must have known that they were offering to swim against the tide but counted on their combined brilliance to win anyway. What they wrote happens to conform to the current rules in one respect — to paraphrase the epilogue to Love’s Last Shift, no cuckold is made within the limits of its three hours’ time span — but this compliance must have been accidental, for in every other respect the play deliberately flouts the regulations as established by Collier and his school. Obviously the authors were out to create a sensation: shock the stodgy and respectable element, jam the play down the throats of the audience, and win the admiration of the minority with whom libertine wit was still in favor.

  These aims, which even a friend and well-wisher has to view as a bit on the juvenile side, were far from fully achieved. The description that Breval gives of the behavior of the crowd on the first night (Sherburn quotes it, if the reader can not readily get hold of The Confederates) is suggestive, not of a house packed with enemies of the authors, friends of Dr. Woodward and John Dennis out to damn the play, but of a crowd that had come predisposed to approve—”Silent a while th’attentive Many sate” — but found themselves simply unable to endure the dramatic fare set before them. The murmur that began and then grew to a hiss must have surprised and alarmed the authors: Breval’s version of how they reacted must have a grain or two of truth in it. In the account of the second and third nights furnished by our Key one can see matters improving, but it is clear that to quiet the audience took heroic efforts by the cast and there was probably some deletion of offending lines, perhaps some resort to “packing” the house. This last was a measure not infrequently taken in those days — Dr. Johnson’s story of Steele’s efforts in behalf of Cato will be recalled — but this was not what the authors had anticipated. In the upshot they had dared the unpastured dragon of reform in his den and had got away with it — but barely. They were all right financially — the run should have brought them two “benefits” — and there was the fee from Lintot and an added present of guineas from those three court ladies who wanted the world to know that they were sophisticated enough to take the play in stride. (Pope paid them with “A Court Ballad.”) Still, the pride of the authors must have received some damage; perhaps some sensitiveness on Pope’s part is understandable.

  But what the collaboration produced is truly remarkable; if there is something of a show-off air about it the authors can be forgiven, in view of what they had to exhibit. Though its fast pace (which flags only toward the last) and its emphasis on intrigue may slant it toward farce, Three Hours has the vitality and verve that one finds only in the very best English comic writing. Phoebe Clinket and Sir Tremendous are, to me, endlessly enjoyable, and Dr. Fossile more than merely a caricature of a now forgotten virtuoso or a lifeless counter in an intrigue plot (though in both these respects he meets the requirements of the part beautifully); even he has moments when the humanity shows through — as in his plaintive line to his friends when the mummy and the crocodile s
pring into movement and speech, “Gentlemen, wonder at nothing within these walls; for ever since I was married, nothing has happened to me in the common course of human life.” Of the trio composed of Mrs. Townley and her followers I like them all, for various reasons, but the lady best. Once she shrieks (p. 186) but considering the circumstances anyone would consider this justifiable; otherwise she moves through the incredible crises of her role with a self-possession and an easy charm and good humor that one can only admire: as if she knew it was all nonsense but condescended to cooperate for the sake of the joke.

  Among the minor characters one deserves especial mention. It was probably heartless of the authors to make fun of an aging and unfortunate (if rather eccentric) lady in “poor Lady Hyppokekoana” (as her compassionate, but, perforce, ever neglectful physician calls her) but at least the result was esthetically satisfactory, and I beg leave to nominate her for listing with that class of comic characters who, though kept behind the scenes throughout, still come through unforgettably in the reports we have of them: Mrs. Grundy in Speed the Plough; Mrs. Harris in Martin Chuzzlewit; Dashenka in The Cherry Orchard.

  John Harrington Smith

  University of California

  Los Angeles

  Thus the editor of the Cambridge Pope in his headnote to the prologue; one wonders whether he had read the play or was merely going on hearsay.

  MP, XXIV (1926), 91-109.

  In The Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre (1952). Sherburn had contended that Phoebe Clinket in the play was aimed at Mrs. Centlivre rather than at Lady Winchilsea as the tradition had it. Bowyer pins the satire to Lady Winchilsea once more and it seems this must be generally correct; the reference in the epilogue to “our well-bred poetess” seems intended for Lady Winchilsea rather than for Mrs. Centlivre.

  The report was not far wrong — the amount that Lintot paid Gay, on January 8,was £43, 2s, 6d (Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, VIII (1814), 296).

  See the excellent comment on the pair in our Key, p. 212.

  To charge him, as one authority has done, with “an arbitrary withdrawal of Three Hours after a far from unsuccessful week ... an invidious, if not unwarrantable, decision on his part” betrays an imperfect understanding of how a theater had to be managed in the early 18th century when the number of patrons upon which it could rely was limited. A play would run as long as it continued to draw; when the house began to fall off a new bill would have to be announced. The intermitting of Three Hours should be most naturally read as suggesting that at least in the judgment of the managers its initial vogue had passed. It would have been brought back when they thought patrons were ready to see it again — say, in a couple of months.

  She says that the fracas occurred on the fourth evening of The Rehearsal, and at least this revival did have a fourth performance, five in fact: Emmett L. Avery in The London Stage (1960) gives the dates as February 7, 8, 20, March 21, 28. There is a slight difficulty in assigning Gay’s visit to the fourth of these, i.e., March 21: this is that the dates on which the two pamphlets that refer to it were advertised (“just before March 1” for Drub’s, and March 30 for Breval’s — Sherburn, p. 91) seem to rule out a March 21 fracas in the one case and to fall uncomfortably close in the other. But publication (of course) though announced, may have been delayed, and it is perhaps worth noticing that in each pamphlet Gay’s visit is mentioned in an inorganic part of the work that could have been added late: the Dedication in Drub’s, and, in Breval’s, an ironical “congratulatory poem” printed after the epilogue, on the last two pages of the book.

  During the year prior to the première of Three Hours the following had been seen on the London stage twice each or more (selection only: based on Avery, op. cit.): The Comical Revenge, Man of Mode, Country Wife, Plain-Dealer, London Cuckolds, Old Bachelor, Relapse. City Politicks, a play from which our authors took some hints, was revived in the July after the closure of Three Hours; it ran three performances (i.e., successfully). But it should be recalled that the most recent of the eight plays here mentioned — Vanbrugh’s — had been in the repertory twenty years.

  The quote is from the Short View, pp. 7-8 in the 1698 edition, from “Obscenity in any Company is a rustick and increditable Talent” to “But here a Man can’t be a Sinner without being a Clown.”

  Drub says that the actors left out “a considerable load of Obscenity and Prophaness.” Presumably the authors would have to acquiesce in such bowdlerizing.

  Breval, p. 11, and his note.

  NOTES

  Advertisement, printed exactly as it is acted. In 1717 Gay continued, “for, tho’ the Players in Compliance with the Taste of the Town, broke it into five Parts in the Representation; yet, as the Action pauses, and the Stage is left vacant but three times, so it properly consists but of three Acts, like the Spanish Comedies.” There are several puzzles here. In the first place for a three-act play the stage should be left vacant twice rather than three times. But setting this aside there is a contradiction which must have puzzled any reader who has used the 1717 edition, namely that if the players broke it into five parts and the play is printed exactly as it is acted, the play that follows should be in five acts but actually is in three. The London 1757 Supplement to Pope merely reprints Advertisement and play as they are in 1717 and it is not until the Dublin printings that the play appears in the five acts in which Gay says it was acted.

  I suggest that Lintot in 1717 had two scripts of the play, one in three acts, one in five, and that Gay wrote the Advertisement under the impression that Lintot would discard the former.

  I judge that when W. Whitestone undertook his Dublin Supplement of 1757 he took the Advertisement from the London book that had just been published (see the title-page of the volume) but that when he re-issued his book in 1758 he deleted the lines quoted above, perceiving that they were not to the point so far as his text of the play was concerned.

  Unless we imagine Whitestone revising the play into five acts himself we must suppose that he had got his hands on an authentic acting MS of the play, and it seems not one from a late revival. I suspect that Whitestone in fact had got the very MS of the play that Gay thought Lintot was going to print; one cannot guess from where, but presumably from the same source that supplied the Key and Letter. Besides the act divisions the most interesting variant is a speech of a dozen words added to Dublin; see the note to p. 183. Cibber may have put this in, or Gay, at Cibber’s request. But in either case it seems that the text that has it is the one that Gay authorized for printing.

  By the same token, the cast as given in the present reprint (no actors’ names are given in Dublin 1757 but they must have been in the script and in the reprint of 1758 Whitestone decided to put them in) is more probably correct than that printed in 1717. The only differences between the two are in five very minor roles, where, as rehearsals went on, substitutions would be easy. All the principals are the same.

  Prologue. Nothing to add to the Twickenham Pope, VI, 179-180.

  Dramatis Personae. Five minor roles differ from 1717, as stated above. Mrs. Bicknet. A misreading by the typesetter — he had never heard of Mrs. Bicknell.

  Play.

  Three Hours after

  MARRIAGE:

  A

  COMEDY.

  Rumpatur, quisquis rumpitur invidia. Mart.

  ADVERTISEMENT.

  It may be necessary to acquaint the reader, that this play is printed exactly as it is acted. I must farther own the assistance I have receiv’d in this piece from two of my friends; who, tho’ they will not allow me the honour of having their names join’d with mine, cannot deprive me of the pleasure of making this acknowledgment.

  John Gay.

  PROLOGUE

  Spoke by Mr. Wilks.

  Authors are judg’d by strange capricious rules,

  The great ones are thought mad, the small ones fools.

  Yet sure the best are most severely fated,

  For fools are only laugh’d at, wits are hated,

 
; Blockheads with reason, men of sense abhor;

  But fool ‘gainst fool is barb’rous civil war.

  Why on all authors then should critics fall?

  Since some have writ, and shewn no wit at all.

  Condemn a play of theirs, and they evade it,

  Cry, damn not us, but damn the French that made it;

  By running goods, these graceless owlers gain,

  Theirs are the rules of France, the plots of Spain:

  But wit, like wine, from happier climates brought,

  Dash’d by these rogues, turns English common draught:

  They pall Moliere’s and Lopez sprightly strain,

  And teach dull Harlequins to grin in vain.

  How shall our author hope a gentle fate,

  Who dares most impudently —— not translate.

  It had been civil in these ticklish times,

  To fetch his fools and knaves from foreign climes;

  Spaniards and French abuse to the worlds’ end

  But spare old England, lest you hurt a friend.

  If any fool is by your satire bit,

  Let him hiss loud, to show you all — he’s hit.

  Poets make characters as salesmen cloaths,

  We take no measure of your fops and beaus.

  But here all sizes and all shapes ye meet,

  And fit yourselves — like chaps in Monmouth-street.

  Gallants look here, this[B] fool’s cap has an air —

  Goodly and smart, — with ears of Issachar.

  Let no one fool engross it, or confine:

  A common blessing! now ‘tis your’s, now mine.

  But poets in all ages, had the Care

  To keep this cap, for such as will, to wear;

  Our author has it now, for ev’ry wit

  Of course resign’d it to the next that writ:

  And thus upon the stage ‘tis fairly[C] thrown,