Note 29 — CALAMITIES OF AUTHORS:

This comedy was first presented very hurriedly for the amusement of Prince Charles as he passed through Cambridge to York. Cowley himself describes it, then, as “neither made nor acted, but rough-drawn by him, and repeated by his scholars” for this temporary purpose. After the Restoration he endeavoured to do more justice to his juvenile work, by remodelling it, and producing it at the Duke of York’s theatre. But as many of the characters necessarily retained the features of the older play, and times had changed; it was easy to affix a false stigma to the poet’s pictures of the old Cavaliers; and the play was universally condemned as a satire on the Royalists. It was reproduced with success at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, as long afterwards as the year 1730.—Ed.