ABSTRACT
Extracts from The Rehearsal by George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham (1628–87), and others; a dramatic satire on drama drafted about 1664 and first acted at Drury Lane on 7 December 1671. Dryden is represented as Bayes, an author. ‘I answer’d not the Rehearsall,’ he wrote in 1693, ‘because I knew the Author sate to himself when he drew the Picture, and was the very Bays of his own Farce. Because also I knew, that my Betters were more concern’d than I was in that Satire: And lastly, because Mr. Smith, and Mr. Johnson, the main Pillars of it, were two such Languishing Gentlemen in their Conversation, that I cou’d liken them to nothing but to their own Relations, those Noble Characters of Men of Wit and Pleasure about the Town.’ (‘Discourse concerning Satire’; Poems (1958), ed. James Kinsley, ii. 605.)
