ABSTRACT
The ‘Prologue, Design’d for Mr. D—’s Last Play’ was published on 29 December 1713. The poem was never formally acknowledged by Pope and was not included in any of his own editions of his Works. On its first appearance, at pp. 40–1 of Steele’s Poetical Miscellanies (dated 1714), which contained three other poems by Pope (19, 20 and 22 of the present volume), it was said to be, ‘Written by several hands’. It is not adjacent to the other poems of Pope’s in the volume, all of which are acknowledged. However, since versions of lines 3–4 and 21–22 appear in letters from Pope to Cromwell, 10 May 1708, and to Wycherley, 20 May 1709 (Corr., I.49 and 61; TE, VI.75), Pope must have been at least one of these ‘hands’. TE (VI.102) makes a strong case for Pope’s being the dominant author, but Rae Blanchard assigns it largely to Steele in The Occasional Verse of Richard Steele (1952), pp. 103–6, on the grounds of Pope’s apparent detachment from D’Urfey’s cause, and because the tone seemed closer to Addison and Steele’s campaign on D’Urfey’s behalf than to Pope’s other references to him. But this ignores the lines which are obviously Pope’s, worked in here without apparent effort; and the tone of the ‘Prologue’ is a matter of judgment and can easily seem more hostile to D’Urfey than Addison and Steele were, though their attitude was certainly less than wholly earnest. Pope was closely enough involved with Addison and Steele and The Guardian , in which the benefit performance of D’Urfey’s A Fond Husband was promoted, and for which Pope was writing, for the attribution to him to be plausible. If it were Steele’s one would expect it to feature in the Guardian campaign, which it does not. It was, however, later printed in the Pope–Swift Miscellanies. The Last Volume (dated 1727, published March 1728), prompting the accusation that it had been ‘written at Button’s in a publick Room by several Hands’ and could not be claimed by either Swift or Pope (see Guerinot 1969: 119). Pope is far more likely to have produced it than Swift (see Context below). It is therefore on balance treated here as largely Pope’s work, though some verbal parallels with other writers, including Addison and Steele, are also noted in the Commentary. It was first incorporated into the canon of Pope’s verse in William Roscoe’s edition of The Works of Alexander Pope, 10 vols (1824).
