He
wrote, 1st, The Art of War--2d, Parthenissa, a romance--3d, Some
Poems--4th; Eight Plays--5th, State Tracts.]
My Lord,
This worthless present was designed you long before it was a play;
when it was only a confused mass of thoughts, tumbling over one
another in the dark; when the fancy was yet in its first work,
moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be
distinguished, and then either chosen or rejected by the judgment; it
was yours, my lord, before I could call it mine. And, I confess, in
that first tumult of my thoughts, there appeared a disorderly kind of
beauty in some of them, which gave me hope, something, worthy my lord
of Orrery, might be drawn from them: But I was then in that eagerness
of imagination, which, by overpleasing fanciful men, flatters them
into the danger of writing; so that, when I had moulded it into that
shape it now bears, I looked with such disgust upon it, that the
censures of our severest critics are charitable to what I thought
(and still think) of it myself: It is so far from me to believe this
perfect, that I am apt to conclude our best plays are scarcely so; for
the stage being the representation of the world, and the actions in
it, how can it be imagined, that the picture of human life can be more
exact than life itself is? He may be allowed sometimes to err, who
undertakes to move so many characters and humours, as are requisite in
a play, in those narrow channels which are proper to each of them; to
conduct his imaginary persons through so many various intrigues and
chances, as the labouring audience shall think them lost under every
billow; and then, at length, to work them so naturally out of their
distresses, that, when the whole plot is laid open, the spectators may
rest satisfied, that every cause was powerful enough to produce the
effect it had; and that the whole chain of them was with such due
order linked together, that the first accident would naturally beget
the second, till they all rendered the conclusion necessary.
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