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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Although most of Dryden's plays can be dated approximately, if not precisely, two have eluded efforts to fix even a good conjectural date: Marriage à la Mode and Amboyna. Both, it is certain, appeared after The Conquest of Granada. The first acting of Marriage à la Mode is usually placed in May or June, 1672. The basis for May rests upon the assumption, made first by Malone, that the following lines from the Prologue “seem to allude to the equipment of the fleet, which afterwards engaged the Dutch off Southwold Bay, May 28, 1672.”
1 Malone, E., The Prose Works of John Dryden (1800), i, 106.
2 See The Stationers Register, vol. ii, and Thorn-Drury, G. ed., Covent Garden Drollery, p. x.
3 Professor Noyes in Selected Dramas of John Dryden (1910), pp. xxxiii–xxxiv, has noted this and has suggested that, because of the ridicule cast upon an episode in Marriage à la Mode by The Rehearsal (Dec., 1671), Dryden's play was doubtless handed about in MS before the end of 1671. But he has not pursued the point further.
4 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1671, p. 263.
5 Ibid., p. 279.
6 Ibid., pp. 382, 384.
7 Ibid., pp. 393, 396.
8 Ibid., p. 582.
9 P. 136.—On January 25, 1671/72, we recall, the Theatre Royal had burned to the ground. The company was idle for a month, opening again on February 26 in the Duke's Theatre, which had been vacated in November, when the company moved to their new quarters in Dorset Gardens.
10 “Political Aspects of Dryden's Amboyna and The Spanish Friar,” in University of Michigan Studies in Lit., viii, 119–132.
11 Ibid., p. 121.
12 Loc. cit.
13 Italics mine.
14 Reprinted in Noyes, Dryden's Poetical Works, p. 70.
15 See G. Thorn-Drury, ed. Covent Garden Drollery, 1928, pp. 33, 133.
16 Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1672–73, p. 148.
17 See J. Q. Adams, The Dram. Records of Sir Henry Herbert, pp. 138–139.
18 I quote from Nicoli, A History of Restoration Drama, p. 238.
19 It may be that the “several proceedings” against Devolto in the crown office arose from complaints of the patent theatres that he was encroaching upon their province.