ABSTRACT
Date and publication. First printed in The Pilgrim, a Comedy: As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal, in Drury-Lane. Written Originally by Mr. Fletcher, and now very much Alter’d, with several Additions. Likewise A Prologue, Epilogue, Dialogue, and Masque, Written by the late Great Poet Mr. Dryden, just before his Death, being the last of his Works, published by Benjamin Tooke in 1700 (two issues); advertised in The London Gazette 13–17 June; TC June (siglum: 1700). The second issue (Macdonald 94b) has a separate half-title for ‘A Dialogue, and Secular Masque, in the Pilgrim. Written by the Late Famous Mr. Dryden.’, and separate pagination, which suggests that some copies of the song and masque were sold separately, perhaps at the performance. Macdonald records no evidence of such separate sales, but there is a separate copy of the second issue of the song and masque, without the play, in the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library. The play proper ends with a speech by the Governor designed to introduce the ‘Secular Masque’: ‘I hope before you go, Sir, you’l share with us, an Entertainment the late great Poet of our Age prepar’d to Celebrate this Day. Let the Masque begin’ (42). On 11 April 1700 D. had written to Mrs Steward: ‘Within this moneth there will be playd for my profit, an old play of Fletchers, calld the Pilgrim, corrected by my good friend Mr Vanbrook; to which I have added A New Masque, & am to write a New Prologue & Epilogue’ (Letters 136). John Fletcher’s play, revised by Sir John Vanbrugh, was performed by Christopher Rich’s company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields; the first performance was probably on Monday 29 April 1700, as it was reported that because D. died on the third day (1 May) the share of the profits which would have accrued to him fell to his family (LS 527). (One BL copy (841.c.7 (1)) has a MS note on the title page: ‘the 5. of May / monday’, which may preserve a correct memory of the day of the week, although the date itself cannot be that of the first performance.) Colley Cibber (who, unusually, spoke both the Prologue and the Epilogue) records that Vanbrugh revised the play ‘to assist the benefit Day of Dryden’ (Apology, cited in LS 528). D.’s contributions to The Pilgrim (omitting the song) were collected posthumously in The Comedies, Tragedies, and Operas … With A Secular Masque, 2 vols (1701; Macdonald 107a ii, published by Daniel Brown, a set of sheets from Tonson’s 1701 edition of the collected plays expanded to include the ‘Secular Masque’; siglum: 1701), which makes four textual alterations to the Prologue (at ll. 16, 26, 29 and 40). The first is an obvious correction, the second and fourth seem clearly preferable, and the third is indifferent, so for consistency all four have been incorporated in the present text, which otherwise follows 1700.
