The origins and early years of Thomas Durfey are obscure; even his surname is equivocal, having been variously spelled in his day and this. Durfey himself preferred to Gallicize it as D'Urfey, the better to support his claims of kinship to the French romancier Honoré d'Urfé, author of L'Astrée (1607-1627); such claims, however, seem to have been the product of wishful thinking rather than actual fact, although Durfey's early biographers have generally taken such hearsay at face value. Durfey's father, Severinus, was probably a descendant of French Protestant emigrants, but there is no evidence that his mother, Frances, was related to the Elizabethan dramatist Shackerley Marmion, as is sometimes held. What is known for certain is that Durfey was born in Devonshire in 1653 and that he had moved to London by 1676, when his first play, The Siege of Memphis, was produced at the Drury...