The Toy Shop (1735) The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737). Dodsley Robert
Dick and Peggy poignantly engage the audience's pity and admiration, while the improbable resolution affirms the inevitable triumph of goodness. There is even – what some critics have required of sentimental drama – love of rural scenery and use of native setting.7
Dodsley has cleverly integrated scene and theme in The King and the Miller of Mansfield. The moral and social problem stressed in the play is the existence and abuse of aristocratic privilege. Implicitly the play assumes that rank should correlate with goodness. The king himself is the best example of this. Alone at night in Sherwood Forest, Henry asks himself, "Of what Advantage is it now to be a King? Night shews me no Respect: I cannot see better, nor walk so well as another Man" (p. 11). Cut off from the trappings of monarchy he finds his common humanity and, at the conclusion of the play, redresses the wrongs of rank when he knights the instinctively noble miller and reproves the vicious but hereditarily titled Lord Lurewell. His accidental separation from the corruption of court and courtiers initiates Henry's contact with John Cockle, representative of all the middle-class virtues. Significantly, they are in the miller's environment: rural England, symbol of uncorrupted beauty, correlative to the innocent beauty of young Peggy before her acquaintance with Lords "of Prerogative."8
As critics have noted, the whole sentimental movement in English drama is opposed in tone to the cynical ethos of aristocratic privilege; but Dodsley explicitly advocates a democratic sensibility that estimates individual worth independent of the accident of birth. The "bourgeois sententiae" of The King and the Miller of Mansfield are certainly as ideologically explicit as the arguments for the value of the mercantile middle class in Lillo's The London Merchant (1731).9 Dodsley did, after all, have working-class credentials; his years in "service" furnished the materials for Servitude: A Poem (1729) and A Muse in Livery (1732). The allegorical frontispiece to A Muse in Livery shows a young man aspiring to knowledge, virtue, and happiness but manacled by poverty to misery, folly, and ignorance, his foot chained to a giant stone inscribed "Despair."
Despite the play's clear egalitarian sympathies, it seems excessive to characterize Dodsley's work as "revolutionary" and to be reminded too forcibly of the coming events in France. And yet, as has also been suggested, things might now look different had there been a revolution in England. Plays like Dodsley's discomforted the government. As Fielding notes in the dedication of The Historical Register, For the Year 1736, the Gazetteer of 7 May 1737 had accused his play and Dodsley's The King and the Miller of Mansfield of aiming at the overthrow of Walpole's ministry. "Bob Booty" reacted to this threat from the stage by enacting legislation in June requiring that all new plays and all alterations of old plays be approved by the Lord Chamberlain; in contrast, the reaction of the monarchy to Dodsley's work was much more ingenious. The third performance of The King and the Miller of Mansfield, that from which the author was to receive the proceeds, was held "By Command of their Royal Highness the Prince and Princess of Wales." Both royal personages were present to honor the apprentice from Mansfield. "The Boxes not being equal to the Demand for Places, for the better Accommodation of the Ladies, Side Boxes [were] made on the Stage."10 Although the production of Dodsley's best play, Cleone (1758), was still twenty years in the future, it seems safe to regard this night as the height of Dodsley's dramatic career.
Auburn University
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The Toy-Shop (1735) is reproduced from the copy of the first edition in the Henry E. Huntington Library (Shelf Mark: 152063). A typical type-page (p. 23) measures 135 x 72 mm.
The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737) is reproduced from the copy of the first edition in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (Shelf Mark: *PR3409/D7K5). A typical type-page (p. 13) measures 145 x 73 mm.
EPILOGUE
Well, Heav'n be prais'd, this dull grave Sermon's done.
(For faith our Author might have call'd it one)
I wonder who the Devil he thought to please!
Is this a Time o' Day for Things like these?
Good Sense and honest Satire now offend;
We're grown too wise to learn, too proud to mend.
And so divinely wrapt in Songs and Tunes,
The next wise Age will all be – Fiddlers Sons.
And did he think plain Truth wou'd Favour find?
Ah! 'tis a Sign he little knows Mankind!
To please, he ought to have a Song or Dance,
The Tune from Italy, the Caper France:
These, these might charm – But hope to do't with Sense!
Alas, alas, how vain is the Pretence!
But, tho' we told him, – Faith, 'twill never do. —
Pho, never fear, he cry'd, tho' grave, 'tis new:
The Whim, perhaps, may please, if not the Wit.
And, tho' they don't approve, they may permit.
If neither this nor that will intercede,
Submissive bond, and thus for Pardon plead.
"To gen'rous Few, to you our Author sues
His first Essay with Candour to excuse.
'T has Faults, he owns, but, if they are but small,
He hopes your kind Applause will hide them all."
Dramatis Personæ
THE TOY-SHOP
Gent. And you have never been at this extraordinary Toy-shop, you say, Madam?
1 La. No, Sir: I have heard of the Man, indeed; but most People say, he's a very impertinent, silly Fellow.
Gent. That's because he sometimes tells them of their Faults.
1 La. And that's sufficient. I should think any Man impertinent that should pretend to tell me of my Faults, if they did not concern him.
Gent. Yes, Madam. But People that know him take no Exceptions. And really, tho' some may think him impertinent, in my Opinion, he's very entertaining.
2 La. Pray, who is this Man you're talking of? I never heard of him.
Gent. He's one who has lately set up a Toy-shop, Madam, and is, perhaps, the most extraordinary Person in his Way that ever was heard of. He is a general Satyrist, yet not rude nor ill-natur'd. He has got a Custom of moralizing upon every Trifle he sells, and will strike a Lesson of Instruction out of a Snuff-box, a Thimble, or a Cockle-shell.
1 La. Isn't he cras'd?
Gent. Madam, he may be call'd a Humourist; but he does not want Sense, I do assure you.
2 La. Methinks I should be glad to see him.
Gent. I dare say you will be very much diverted. And if you'll please to give me Leave, I'll wait on you. I'm particularly acquainted with him.
2 La. What say you, Madam, shall we go?
1 La. I can't help thinking he's a Coxcomb; however, to satisfy Curiosity I don't care if I do.
Gent. I believe the Coach is at the Door.
2 La. I hope he won't affront us.
Gent. He won't designedly, I'm sure, Madam.
For a survey of attempts to characterize sentimental drama, see Arthur Sherbo,
John Loftis,
Laura Brown,