Three Hours after Marriage. John Gay
trio composed of Mrs. Townley and her followers I like them all, for various reasons, but the lady best. Once she shrieks (p. 186) but considering the circumstances anyone would consider this justifiable; otherwise she moves through the incredible crises of her role with a self-possession and an easy charm and good humor that one can only admire: as if she knew it was all nonsense but condescended to cooperate for the sake of the joke.
Among the minor characters one deserves especial mention. It was probably heartless of the authors to make fun of an aging and unfortunate (if rather eccentric) lady in "poor Lady Hyppokekoana" (as her compassionate, but, perforce, ever neglectful physician calls her) but at least the result was esthetically satisfactory, and I beg leave to nominate her for listing with that class of comic characters who, though kept behind the scenes throughout, still come through unforgettably in the reports we have of them: Mrs. Grundy in Speed the Plough; Mrs. Harris in Martin Chuzzlewit; Dashenka in The Cherry Orchard.
John Harrington Smith
University of California
Los Angeles
NOTES
Advertisement, printed exactly as it is acted.
In 1717 Gay continued, "for, tho' the Players in Compliance with the Taste of the Town, broke it into five Parts in the Representation; yet, as the Action pauses, and the Stage is left vacant but three times, so it properly consists but of three Acts, like the Spanish Comedies." There are several puzzles here. In the first place for a three-act play the stage should be left vacant twice rather than three times. But setting this aside there is a contradiction which must have puzzled any reader who has used the 1717 edition, namely that if the players broke it into five parts and the play is printed exactly as it is acted, the play that follows should be in five acts but actually is in three. The London 1757 Supplement to Pope merely reprints Advertisement and play as they are in 1717 and it is not until the Dublin printings that the play appears in the five acts in which Gay says it was acted.
I suggest that Lintot in 1717 had two scripts of the play, one in three acts, one in five, and that Gay wrote the Advertisement under the impression that Lintot would discard the former.
I judge that when W. Whitestone undertook his Dublin Supplement of 1757 he took the Advertisement from the London book that had just been published (see the title-page of the volume) but that when he re-issued his book in 1758 he deleted the lines quoted above, perceiving that they were not to the point so far as his text of the play was concerned.
Unless we imagine Whitestone revising the play into five acts himself we must suppose that he had got his hands on an authentic acting MS of the play, and it seems not one from a late revival. I suspect that Whitestone in fact had got the very MS of the play that Gay thought Lintot was going to print; one cannot guess from where, but presumably from the same source that supplied the Key and Letter. Besides the act divisions the most interesting variant is a speech of a dozen words added to Dublin; see the note to p. 183. Cibber may have put this in, or Gay, at Cibber's request. But in either case it seems that the text that has it is the one that Gay authorized for printing.
By the same token, the cast as given in the present reprint (no actors' names are given in Dublin 1757 but they must have been in the script and in the reprint of 1758 Whitestone decided to put them in) is more probably correct than that printed in 1717. The only differences between the two are in five very minor roles, where, as rehearsals went on, substitutions would be easy. All the principals are the same.
Prologue.
Nothing to add to the Twickenham Pope, VI, 179-180.
Dramatis Personae.
Five minor roles differ from 1717, as stated above. Mrs. Bicknet. A misreading by the typesetter – he had never heard of Mrs. Bicknell.
Play.
140 Almost three and twenty. Mrs. Oldfield was only 34 in 1717 but no doubt popular enough to draw a laugh by simpering at this line.
The office of the church … brute beasts. The Book of Common Prayer (1709) says of matrimony that it is not to be taken in hand "wantonly … like brute beasts." The fashion of alluding to the Prayer Book in a jocose context, if it did not begin in the reign of Charles II, was at least in vogue than; a couple of instances in Dryden's Wild Gallant will be pointed out in the Clark Dryden, VIII (scheduled to appear in 1962). Another touch of "profaneness" that Collieresque critics objected to in Three Hours was the paraphrase of Holy Writ in Sir Tremendous's line about "ten righteous criticks," p. 153; cf. Key, p. 215.
141 pistachoe-porridge. An aphrodisiac concoction? (I apologize for my neglect of the pharmaceutical, medical, and alchemical jargon – J.H.S.)
144 spoils of quarries. Cf. the anecdote of Dr. Woodward in the Key, p. 211; Parker's Key has it also, but in a less complete form.
145 Shock. Mrs. Townley's lapdog – perhaps named after Belinda's in Rape of the Lock. Of course it may have been a common name for such dogs before Pope wrote the poem; see Twickenham Pope, II, 153.
147 my pace and my honour. 1717, "Peace."
148 forgive thee, if thou hadst … kill'd my lapdog. Parker, with a citation to Rape of the Lock, assigned this speech to Pope, and indeed it smacks of several places in the poem, e.g., III, 157-8, IV, 119-120.
150 some … that nauseate the smell of a rose. Cf. Essay on Man, I, 200.
152 That injudicious Canaille. In view of her bias Phoebe's
strictures on the players are of course to be taken in the directly
opposite sense.
155 Parker finds some double-entendres in the dialogue in which
Phoebe and Sir Tremendous compliment each other; if such there be,
the speakers are unaware of them.
156 if stones were dissolved, as a late philosopher hath proved. In summarizing his thesis in the preface to his Essay Toward a Natural History of the Earth (1695) Dr. Woodward does say that "the whole Terrestrial Globe was taken all to pieces and dissolved at the Deluge, the particles of Stone …" According to the DNB, Arbuthnot published a criticism of this book in 1697.
163 The "old woman" who brings the letter from Madam Wyburn (a name beyond all praise!): Drub, p. 18, calls her "an Old Woman without a Nose," and objects strenuously. One dislikes siding with Drub on anything, but this was indeed an unsavory touch, perhaps one of the embellishments suggested by Cibber while refining the ore of the play into gold during the rehearsal period. Our authors should have ruled against it but they were in no mood to pull punches at this time, though, as stated above, they had to consent to some bowdlerizing after the first night of the play.
168 a rouge in disguise. 1717, "Rogue."
171 my Mercury. 1717, "by Mercury."
173 s. d. in a chair like a sick man. Idea from Crowne, City Politicks, first acted 1682.
178 fitigue. 1717, "Fatigue."
s. d. powers some drops in. 1717, "pours."
180 have the any power. 1717, "they."
182 Townley's concealing Plotwell under the petticoat owes to Mrs. Behn's The Younger Brother (acted 1696, not revived), Mirtilla's hiding "Endimion" under the train of her gown in IV.ii.
invisible i th is very. Typo for "in this very"; 1717 has "on this very." Gay (or Cibber) might have changed "on" to "in" when adding the sentence at the end of Act IV; see next note.
183 But prithee … rarities. This sentence is not in 1717, but seems an improvement, as it hints at developments to come and raises the expectations of the audience.
186 desarts. 1717, "Disserts."
Macedonian queen. Olympias: Underplot in his verses alludes,
mock-heroically, to the fabled begetting of Alexander the Great.