Transcriber's Note:
Series Three:
Essays on the Stage
No. 2
Announcement of Publications for the Second Year
The Augustan Reprint Society
March, 1947
Price: 75c
General Editors: Richard C. Boys, University ofMichigan, Ann Arbor; Edward N. Hooker,H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California,Los Angeles 24, California.
Membership in the Augustan Reprint Society entitles thesubscriber to six publications issued each year. The annualmembership fee is $2.50. Address subscriptions and communicationsto the Augustan Reprint Society, in care of oneof the General Editors.
Editorial Advisors: Louis I. Bredvold, Universityof Michigan; James L. Clifford, Columbia University;Benjamin Boyce, University of Nebraska;Cleanth Brooks, Louisiana State University;Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago; JamesR. Sutherland, Queen Mary College, Universityof London; Emmett L. Avery, State College ofWashington; Samuel Monk, Southwestern University.
Within two or three years after the appearance in 1698 of JeremyCollier's A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the EnglishStage, the bitter exchanges of reply and counter-reply to the chargesof gross licentiousness in the London theaters had subsided. The controversy,however, was by no means ended, and around 1704 it flared againin a resurgence of attacks upon the stage. Among the tracts opposingthe theaters was an anonymous pamphlet entitled A Representation of theImpiety and Immorality of the English Stage, a piece which was publishedearly in 1704 and which appeared in three editions before the end of thatyear.
The author reveals within his tract some of the reasons for its appearanceat that time. He remarks upon the obvious failure of the opponentsof the theater to end "the outragious and insufferable Disordersof the STAGE." He stresses the brazenness of the players in presenting,soon after the devastating storm of the night of November 26-27, 1703,two plays, Macbeth and The Tempest, "as if they design'd to Mock the AlmightyPower of God, who alone commands the Winds and the Seas." (Macbethwas acted at Drury Lane on Saturday, November 27, as the storm wa