ABSTRACT
Extracts from Jeremy Collier (1650–1726), A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage: Together with The Sense of Antiquity upon this Argument (1698). ‘I have been wrongfully accus’d’, says Dryden in the Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), ‘and my Sense wire-drawn into Blasphemy or Bawdry, as it has often been by a Religious Lawyer [Collier], in a late Pleading against the Stage; in which he mixes Truth with Falshood, and has not forgotten the old Rule, of calumniating strongly, that something may remain’ (Poems, 1958, ed. Kinsley, iv. 1447 and note). Text from the fourth edition (1699).
