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REMARKS

ON

ENGLISH COMEDY.

In the notices of English Tragedy, prefixed to the first volume of this Collection, we have applied them severally to three periods of dramatic history. The same distinction may be followed with advantage in the present sketch; not that we pretend, in either case, a perfect and accurate division, for the influence of those causes which occasioned a change of taste was necessarily gradual. Our observations are therefore only applied to a general view of each æra, the commencement and termination of which may doubtless include plays which rather belonged to the school of that by which it is preceded or followed.

I. Our dramatic antiquaries maintain, that the oldest play which can, with any propriety, claim the title of a comedy, is the piece of low and broad humour, entitled, Gammer Gurton's Needle. If so, the art speedily improved; for that piece was acted in 1575, and within the space of thirty years, the comedies of Shakespeare, of Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of Massinger, had graced the British theatre. The nature of our miscellaneous collection necessarily excludes the works of Shakespeare, which every lover of the drama possesses in a complete state, and consequently excuses us from the presumptuous attempt of epitomizing the general characteristics of his comedies. His powerful, though far unequal rival, despairing of imitating the wild and impetuous flights of his genius, professed, with a sullen and splenetic affectation of condescension, that he copied nature, and required no laugh from the audience, but when their own observation could trace in common life a likeness of the comic characters which he drew. It was on Jonson's comedies those lines of Dryden were chiefly grounded, which exposed the latter poet to the charge of an attempt to undermine the reputation of a celebrated predecessor:

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