ABSTRACT
Date and publication. The play, by John Dryden Jr (D.’s second son), was performed by Betterton’s Company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields late in 1695 or early in 1696. LS suggests a date between February and April 1696, on the basis that D. refers to its forthcoming production in a letter to Tonson of c. November 1695 (Letters 79), and that D. negotiated with Tonson for the publication of the play in another letter of 26 May 1696 (Letters 82). However, the second letter is dated simply ‘May 26th’, without a year. Malone dated it to 1696, but John Barnard (following Margaret Boddy, but with additional evidence) redates it to 1695 (PQ xlii (1963) 396-401), which would place the first performance in the autumn of 1695. Milhous and Hume 399-400 reject this redating, and posit a performance in June 1696, on the basis of the normal lapse of around one month between premiere and publication in this period: the play was published in July 1696. But Barnard’s redating is sound, and there is no reason why the normal interval between performance and publication should necessarily apply to this amateur play which was perhaps being published by Tonson more as a favour to D. than to satisfy a commercial demand. In his Preface D. says that he received the play ‘from Italy some years since’ (Works iv 471), and in his contract with Tonson for the translation of Virgil (16 June 1694) he stipulates that he be allowed to provide his son’s play with a prologue, epilogue and songs (Works vi 1179-80). This led C. E. Ward (RES xii (1937) 303-4) to suggest that the two songs in the play were by D., but the contract simply gives D. liberty to provide such material, and is not an indication that he had actually done so or definitely would do so: in the event Congreve wrote the Prologue. The Husband His own Cuckold. A Comedy was published by Tonson in 1696 (advertised in the London Gazette 9-13 July 1696). The Dedication to Sir Robert Howard is dated from Rome, 20 August 1695; D. also contributed a Preface and Epilogue. D.’s Preface includes an alternative version of the opening of the Epilogue, which he says he supplied to the actors in case the original version had given offence when it was spoken: ‘it seems at the first sight to expose our young Clergy with too much freedom. It was on that Consideration that I had once begun it otherwise, and deliver’d the Copy of it to be spoken, in case the first part of it had given offence’ (Works iv 472). The original version attacks Church of England clergy (see ll. 13, 17nn), while the alternative version attacks Nonconformist preachers. For D.’s anticlericalism at this period, see ‘Prologue to Don Sebastian’ l. 16n.
