During his career on the stage Harris found time to compose a tragi-comedy, _The Mistakes, or, The False Report_ (1691), produced in December 1690; _The City Bride_, produced in 1696; and a comedy and a masque, _Love's a Lottery, and a Woman the Prize. With a New Masque, call'd Love and Riches Reconcil'd_ (1699), produced about March 1698/9. _The Mistakes_ is clearly apprentice work, for Harris acknowledges in a preface the considerable help of William Mountfort, who took the part of the villain, Ricardo. Mountfort, who had already written three plays himself, cut one of the scenes intended for the fifth act and inserted one of his own composition (probably the last) which not only clarified the plot but also elevated the character of the part he was to play. The company seems to have done its best by the budding dramatist, for Dryden wrote the prologue, a rather unusual one in prose and verse, and Tate supplied the epilogue. Harris professed himself satisfied with the play's reception, but owned that it was Mountfort's acting which really carried it off. _The City Bride_, on the other hand, shows its author completely self-assured, and rightly so. No doubt some of his ease comes from the fact that he had nothing to invent, but in large part it must derive from his ten-years' experience on the stage. Harris added nothing to the plot of _The City Bride_, although he commendably shifted its emphasis, as his title makes clear, from infidelity to fidelity; but he rewrote the dialogue almost completely, and the new dialogue is remarkable good. The reader will notice that it is, except for the last half of the first act, printed as prose. The quarto of _A Cure for a Cuckold_, from which Harris worked, is also largely printed as prose, but has correct verse lineation in the same portion of the first act. It is the more remarkable that Harris, following thus closely the apparent form of his original, could vary from it so successfully. Most notable, probably, are the passages in which he intensified the expression of his source. They may indicate no more than the eternal "ham" in our author; but I think they probably indicate as well a new style of acting, more rhetorical in one way, more natural in another. A good example, in which the new rhetoric is not oppressive, is the account of the sea fight at the end of Act III. Even when Harris followed his original most closely, we seem to hear the actor, speaking in a new tongue, in a more relaxed and colloquial rhythm. The reader will find it both amusing and instructive to compare the two versions of Act II, scene ii. The new cadences do more than merely prove that Harris had no ear for blank verse.