ABSTRACT
W. Congreve's integration of song, character, and action had been dramatically finer if morally coarser in The Old Bachelor. Take for example Heartwell's attempt to seduce Sylvia with song and dance. Congreve made it quite clear in the preface to his Works of 1710 that that edition should supersede all other versions, especially the earliest Quartos of his plays. When the works were next reprinted, however, in 1719-1720, Jacob Tonson and Congreve chose a smaller, duodecimo format and long primer type, and took the opportunity to introduce centred speech headings. Far from removing his texts further from the stage, as some have claimed, his typography heightened a reader's sense of the individual characters and gave them each a more distinctive voice on the page than the conventional abbreviated and sidelined forms in most English dramatic texts. There are other felicities in the way the dialogue instantly plays with the myth of Daphne and Phoebus-Apollo.
