Publisher's Synopsis
From the PREFACE.
IN the year 1691, there was published at Oxford, a work which, for an age that offered small facility or encouragement to the prosecution of researches in the field of early English Literature, was one of extraordinary merit. It is a small octavo volume, never one of great price, and even now to be obtained at the book-stalls of this metropolis for a very trifling sum; and it bears the follow- ing title, -"An Account of the English Dramatick Poets; or, Some Observations and Remarks on the Lives and Writings of all those that have Published either Comedies, Tragedies, Tragi- Comedies, Pastorals, Masques, Interludes, Farces, or Opera's in the English Tongue. By Gerard Langbaine. Oxford, Printed by L.L. for George West and Henry Clements, An. Dom. 1691." The enumeration in this title exceeds, in comprehensiveness, even the liberal summary of Polonius. But the subject well deserves it, for the English of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were un- questionably the best writers "in the world, either for tragedy, history, comedy, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral." They were, indeed, "the only men;" and so Langbaine judiciously thought, when he devoted some years to the compilation above mentioned, notwithstanding that he considered it necessary to pay a deference to the then public opinion, by apologizing, as became a Doctor of Divinity, for occupying his leisure in such a frivolous undertaking. Fortunately, in these days, most of us have candour enough to recollect that even St. Paul quotes an "old play," were any excuse requisite for a devotion of time to the consideration of particulars respecting some of the noblest efforts of human genius....
