A COMPARISON BETWEEN THE TWO STAGES, … 1702
Malone, who has been followed by others, down to and including M. Paul Dottin in his recently published reprint of Robinson Crusoe Examined and Criticised, ascribes this book to Gildon. I should be glad to be told what, if any, evidence there is to support such an attribution, which seems to me quite incredible. The author loses no opportunity of abusing the players, an indulgence which a practising dramatist, as Gildon was, is hardly likely to have allowed himself, and, in particular, goes out of his way to attack the private character of Mrs. Bracegirdle, to whom Gildon had expressed his acknowledgments for her “admirable Action” in the preface before his Love’s Victim, in the preceding year.
In the course of the Comparison it is proposed to examine the then recent plays, but one of the interlocutors protests that the very memory of ’em gives his stomach the puke; the examination is consequently confined to a brief enumeration, and among those lumped together, “cum multis aliis quæ nunc—and so forth—all Damn’d, every Son and Daughter for ever,” is (Gildon’s) Phaeton (p. 32). A little later on (p. 54), “Etheridge, Dryden, Wicherly, Otway, Congreve and Vanbrug” are mentioned as “extraordinary men” that “the latter part of this Age has produced,” these names are immediately contrasted with D—s, D—y, G—n, S—e, B—y, and the speaker concludes “but above all, commend me to the ingenious Author of the Trip to the Jubilee.” I have not learned that excess of modesty was characteristic of Gildon so that he would be apt to include himself among inferior writers, and I am unwilling to believe that he would treat a man with insolent contempt, as Farquhar is treated in this book, and accept from him an Epilogue for his play The Patriot in the following year.
G. T-D.
