[John Tatham], Knavery in all Trades: or, The Coffee-House. A Comedy. As it was acted in the Christmas Holidays by several Apprentices With great Applause. With License (London, J. B. for W. Gilberton and H. Marsh, 1664), 38pp.; 4°. BL: 644.a.13. ESTCR3000.

This anonymous five-act comedy is the first dramatic piece to be set in a coffeehouse. In this play the coffee-house is an arena in which important conflicts over the nature of modern trade and its effects on society are negotiated and resolved. The play focuses on four young tradesmen’s apprentices: Rasey, Samphire, Froth and Smoake. They are bound respectively to: Compound, a vintner or wine-seller; Pickle, an oilman; Pepper, a grocer; and Subtler, a victualler. The apprentices’ ‘Society of Brothers’ habitually take advantage of their employers by entertaining each other with the pilfered wares of their masters. The play ends farcically when Hunt-Cliffe, a fallen courtier, persuades Sweet-Lips, wife of Compound, to lend him money to pay his creditors. The money she gives him is old underweight coin, perhaps counterfeit, which he uses to pay off his debt to Compound (paid with a pig from his own sow, as Compound laments). Douglas Canfield, in Tricksters & Estates: on the ideology of Restoration comedy (Lexington, KY, University of Kentucky Press, 1997), pp. 210–11), argues that the tragic ending was probably added to the published version, perhaps to evade censorship by turning it from a comedy to a satire.