SOURCE: Ward, A. W. “Crowne's Place in Restoration Comedy.” In Representative English Comedies, edited by Charles Mills Gayley and Alwin Thaler, Vol. IV, pp. 243-55. New York: Macmillan, 1936.

In the following essay, Ward provides a general overview of Crowne's comedies and characterizes the playwright as a second-rate writer who made the most of his limited talents.

Whether or not it be true that Rochester intended Crowne to supplant Dryden in the favour of the Court, and that the great writer ever afterwards maintained a lofty silence as to the successes of the other, congratulating him only when he had failed¹—there is nothing to show that Crowne himself at all mistook the height of his own literary stature. His editors roundly assert that, as a writer of comedies, the author of Sir Courtly Nice was Dryden's superior; but even of his supposed masterpiece in the branch of the...