Like Macklin's other early farces, THE COVENT GARDEN THEATRE contains proto-characters for his later plays. Sir Roger Ringwood, a "five-bottle man," who rode twenty miles from a "red-hot Fox Chace" to appear before Pasquin, is an early study for Macklin's later hard-drinking, fox-hunting Squire Groom in _Love-a-la Mode_ or Lord Lumbercourt in _The Man of the World_. But Macklin's usual good ear for dialogue is missing from this play, nor is any character except his own as Pasquin followed long enough to make his characteristic speech identifiable. Since plot is absent too, all that remains is the wealth of topical and personal satire which in itself is interesting to the historian of the mid-eighteenth-century theatre. If THE COVENT GARDEN THEATRE is studied along with his other two unpublished afterpieces in the Larpent collection (A WILL AND NO WILL, OR A BONE FOR THE LAWYERS and THE NEW PLAY CRITICIZ'D, OR THE PLAGUE OF ENVY), Macklin's skill at satiric comedy after his initial abortive attempt at tragedy can be seen as developing steadily toward such later full-length comedies as the better known _Love-a-la Mode_ (1759) and _The Man of the World_ (1764). His recognition that tragedy was not his forte and his self-criticism in THE COVENT GARDEN THEATRE, where he exhorts the audience to "explode" him when he is dull, reveal the comic spirit operative in his sometimes cantankerous personality. It is that strain, here seen in genesis, which develops full-fledged in his later comedies. A word should be added about the Dramatis Personae for the play. It does not contain the Stage-Keeper, who speaks only once, the Servant whose single word is accompanied by the stage direction "This Servant is to be on from the beginning," nor the Romp (probably the Prompter, who speaks twice off-stage during the play). Hic and Haec Scriblerus, however, although he is listed in the cast of characters, speaks only once, and his entrance on stage is never indicated. The "naked lady," Lady Lucy Loveit, whose entrance causes so much excitement, is described as appearing in a Pett-en-l'air, which eighteenth-century costume books portray as a short, loose shift! _Coe College_ NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION [Footnote 1: The author of this introduction is indebted to the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, both for a research Fellowship in the summer of 1963 and for permission to reproduce this Macklin play as well as two others by the same author, A WILL AND NO WILL, OR A BONE FOR THE LAWYERS (Larpent 58) and THE NEW PLAY CRITICIS'D, OR THE PLAGUE OF ENVY (Larpent 64).] [Footnote 2: George W. Stone, _The London Stage_, Part 4, I, cxlv.] [Footnote 3: Dougald MacMillan, "Censorship in the Case of Macklin's _The Man of the World_," _Huntington Library Quarterly_, No. 10 (1936), pp. 79-101.]