An exceptionally skillful, thoughtful, and inventive comic playwright, Thomas Shadwell was a man of multiple misfortunes. By running afoul of one of the deadliest satirists in English, John Dryden, he found himself the butt of a poetic attack, Mac Flecknoe, that marked him as a pretentious dunce forever after: Mac Flecknoe is still read by everyone with more than a smattering of English literature, while only a few specialists now sample Shadwell's plays. Shadwell was highly successful at the time Mac Flecknoe appeared in late 1682, but he may already have been barred for political reasons from having new plays of his performed--the dedication to his Bury Fair (1689) refers to his having been "for near Ten years ... kept from the exercise of that Profession which had afforded me a competent Subsistence"--and we, in fact, have no record of his plays being performed for six or seven years. He...