* * * * *

THE

ASSIGNATION;

OR,

LOVE IN A NUNNERY.

A

COMEDY.

Successum dea dira negat
VIRG.

THE ASSIGNATION.

This play was unfortunate in the representation.  It is needless, at the distance of more than a century, to investigate the grounds of the dislike of an audience, who, perhaps, could at the very time have given no good reason for their capricious condemnation of a play, not worse than many others which they received with applause.  The author, in the dedication, hints at the “lameness of the action;” but, as the poet and performers are nearly equally involved in the disgrace of a condemned piece, it is a very natural desire on either side to assign the cause of its failure to the imperfections of the other; of which there is a ludicrous representation in a dialogue betwixt the player and the poet in “Joseph Andrews.”  Another cause of its unfavourable reception seems to have been, its second title of “Love in a Nunnery.”  Dryden certainly could, last of any man, have been justly suspected of an intention to ridicule the Duke of York and the Catholic religion; yet, as he fell under the same censure for the “Spanish Friar,” it seems probable that such suspicions were actually entertained.  The play certainly contains, in the present instance, nothing to justify them.  In point of merit, “The Assignation” seems pretty much on a level with Dryden’s other comedies; and certainly the spectators, who had received the blunders of Sir Martin Mar-all with such unbounded applause, might have taken some interest in those of poor Benito.  Perhaps the absurd and vulgar scene, in which the prince pretends a fit of the cholic, had some share in occasioning the fall of the piece.  This inelegant jeu de theatre is severely ridiculed in the “Rehearsal.”

To one person, the damnation of this play seems to have afforded exquisite pleasure.  This was Edward Ravenscroft, once a member of the Middle Temple,—­an ingenious gentleman, of whose taste it may be held a satisfactory instance, that he deemed the tragedy of “Titus Andronicus” too mild for representation, and generously added a few more murders, rapes, and parricides, to that charnel-house of horrors[1].  His turn for comedy being at least equal to his success in the blood-stained buskin, Mr Ravenscroft translated and mangled several of the more farcical French comedies, which he decorated with the lustre of his own great name.  Amongst others which he thus appropriated, were the most extravagant and buffoon scenes in Moliere’s “Bourgeois Gentilhomme;” in which Monsieur Jourdain is, with much absurd ceremony, created a Turkish Paladin; and where Moliere took the opportunity to introduce an entree de ballet, danced and sung by the Mufti, dervises, and others, in eastern habits.  Ravenscroft’s translation, entitled “The Citizen turned Gentleman,” was acted