Prologue to The Royal General

BY MR TATE, 1680.

  If yet there be a few that take delight
  In that which reasonable men should write;
  To them alone we dedicate this night.
  The rest may satisfy their curious itch
  With city-gazettes, or some factious speech,
  Or whate'er libel, for the public good,
  Stirs up the shrove-tide crew to fire and blood.
  Remove your benches, you apostate pit,
  And take, above, twelve pennyworth of wit;
  Go back to your dear dancing on the rope,                           10
  Or see, what's worse, the Devil and the Pope.
  The plays that take on our corrupted stage,
  Methinks, resemble the distracted age;
  Noise, madness, all unreasonable things,
  That strike at sense, as rebels do at kings.
  The style of forty-one our poets write,
  And you are grown to judge like forty-eight,[56]
  Such censures our mistaking audience make,
  That 'tis almost grown scandalous to take.
  They talk of fevers that infect the brains;                         20
  But nonsense is the new disease that reigns.
  Weak stomachs, with a long disease oppress'd,
  Cannot the cordials of strong wit digest.
  Therefore thin nourishment of farce ye choose,
  Decoctions of a barley-water Muse:
  A meal of tragedy would make ye sick,
  Unless it were a very tender chick.
  Some scenes in sippets would be worth our time;
  Those would go down; some love that's poach'd in rhyme:
  If these should fail--                                             30
  We must lie down, and, after all our cost,
  Keep holiday, like watermen in frost;
  While you turn players on the world's great stage,
  And act yourselves the farce of your own age.
-

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 56: 'Forty-one, forty-eight:' referring to the Puritan era, which some were then seeking to revive.]

-