The actors themselves, then, were not efficient as authors. Let us now see what the noble gentlemen, the amateur rather than professional poets, contributed towards the public entertainment, and their own reputation, during the last half of the seventeenth century.
They may be reckoned at a dozen and a half, from dukes to knights. Of the two dukes, Buckingham and Newcastle, the former is the more distinguished dramatic writer. He was a man of great wit and no virtue; a member of two universities, but no honour to either. He was one who respected neither his own wife nor his neighbour's, and was faithful to the King only as long as the King would condescend to obey his caprices. From 1627, when he was born, to April 1688, the year of his death, history has placed no generous action of his upon record, but has registered many a crime and meanness. He lived a profligate peer, in a magnificence almost oriental; he died a beggar; bankrupt in everything but impudence. Dryden and Pope have given him everlasting infamy; the latter not without a touch of pity, felt not at all by the former. Historians have justified the severity of the poets; Gilbert Burnet has dismissed him with a sneer, and Baxter has thrown in a word on behalf of his humanity.
His play of the "Chances" was a mere adaptation of the piece so named, by Beaumont and Fletcher. Plays which were attributed to him, but of which he was not the author, need not be mentioned. The Duke's dramatic reputation rests on his great burlesque tragedy, the "Rehearsal;" but even in this he is said to have had the assistance of Butler, Martin Clifford, and Dr. Sprat. Written to deride the bombastic tragedies then in vogue, Davenant, Dryden, and Sir Robert Howard are, by turns, struck at, under the person of the poet Bayes; and the irritability of the second, under the allusions, are perhaps warrant that the satire was good. The humour is good, too; the very first exhibition of it excited the mirth which afterwards broke into peal upon peal of laughter. The rehearsed play commences with a scene between the royal usher and the royal physician, in a series of whispers; for, as Mr. Bayes remarks, the two officials were plotting against the King; but this fact it was necessary, as yet, to keep from the audience!