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Duffett's New Poems and Vacation Plays

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

Extract

Although Thomas Duffett is hardly one of the shining lights of the Restoration drama, his prologues and epilogues contain much theatrical information that gives him a continuing, although non-literary, value. His New Poems, Songs, Prologues and Epilogues (London, 1676), besides providing the only known record of the so-called Duchess of Portsmouth's company, gives considerable evidence of private and vacation performances in the early 1670's.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1964

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References

NOTES

1 The others are the prologue to The Indian Emperour “as acted by the Dutchess of Portsmouth's Servants,” which I have discussed elsewhere (Theatre Notebook XVII); two prologues and an epilogue to unidentified private performances; an epilogue to William Rowley's The Shoomaker's a Gentleman, evidently for a private (craft guild) performance; an “Epilogue by a Woman”; and the prologue and epilogue to Duffett's own Psyche Debauch'd.

2 Nicoll, Allardyce, Restoration Drama, 1600–1700, revised edition (Cambridge, England, 1955), p. 439.Google Scholar

3 Summers, Montague, The Playhouse of Pepys (New York, 1935), p. 377.Google Scholar

4 In the Norwich Court Books for 29 December 1681, for example, is the following entry: “Mr. John Aconeske, a Pollander, has leave to make show of three dancing bears.”

5 Fletcher, Ifan Kyrle, “Italian Comedians in England in the Seventeenth Century,” Theatre Notebook, VIII (1954), pp. 8788.Google Scholar

6 Fletcher, p. 87; Margouliouth, H. M., ed. The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell (Oxford, 1927), vol. I, p. 489.Google Scholar

7 Hotson, Leslie, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage (Cambridge, Mass., 1928), p. 192.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Doren, Mark Van, John Dryden, a Study of His Poetry; 3rd edition (New York, 1946), p. 268.Google Scholar

9 Gray, Philip H., “Lenten Casts and the Nursery: Evidence for the Dating of Certain Restoration Plays,” PMLA, LIII (1938), pp. 781–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar