SOURCE: Knowles, Jack. “Thomas D'Urfey and Three Centuries of Critical Response.” Restoration 8, no. 2 (fall 1984): 72-80.

In the following essay, Knowles describes the critical reception to Durfey's work from his own lifetime to the twentieth century.

In his own day, Thomas D'Urfey (or Durfey) was compared by Gerard Langbaine to “the Cuckow [who] makes it his business to suck other Birds Eggs.”¹ Roughly two centuries later, even less regard was expressed by A. W. Ward, who claimed that D'Urfey probably represented “the literary nadir of Restoration comedy—and indeed of the Restoration drama in general.”² More recently, however, Robert D. Hume has found elements worthy of praise and study in a wide variety of D'Urfey's productions, comic, tragic, and operatic.³ Such positive attention no doubt signals a rise in D'Urfey's reputation, a rise that has been a long time in coming, as the critical response to D'Urfey in the...