The common quality, however, of all Dryden's comedies is their
nastiness, the more remarkable because we have ample evidence that he was
a man of modest conversation. Pepys, who was by no means squeamish (for
he found "Sir Martin Marall" "the most entire piece of mirth ... that
certainly ever was writ ... very good wit therein, not fooling"), writes
in his diary of the 19th June, 1668: "My wife and Deb to the king's
play-house to-day, thinking to spy me there, and saw the new play
'Evening Love,' of Dryden's, which, though the world commends, she likes
not." The next day he saw it himself, "and do not like it, it being very
smutty, and nothing so good as the 'Maiden Queen' or the 'Indian Emperor'
of Dryden's making. _I was troubled at it_." On the 22d he adds: "Calling
this day at Herringman's,[45] he tells me Dryden do himself call it but a
fifth-rate play." This was no doubt true, and yet, though Dryden in his
preface to the play says, "I confess I have given [yielded] too much to
the people in it, and am ashamed for them as well as for myself, that I
have pleased them at so cheap a rate," he takes care to add, "not that
there is anything here that I would not defend to an ill-natured judge."
The plot was from Calderon, and the author, rebutting the charge of
plagiarism, tells us that the king ("without whose command they should no
longer be troubled with anything of mine") had already answered for him
by saying, "that he only desired that they who accused me of theft would
always steal him plays like mine.
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