The United Company found themselves seriously hampered by the death of Mountfort, and even more so when fifteen days later the great comedian Anthony Leigh died. The "Account" says that Mountfort's death "had so great an Affect on his Dear Companion, Mr. LEE the Comedian, that he did not survive him above the space of a Week." The Company delayed the opening of a new play by one William Congreve, _The Old Bachelor_. But when that smash hit finally came on the boards in March 1693, Susanna Mountfort played the gay évaporée, Belinda, to great applause. And on 31 January 1694, she married the actor John Verbruggen. The rather mysterious Anne Bracegirdle, for whom Mountfort had been killed, played female leads in all of Congreve's plays, and just as the public had once speculated on her relationship to Mountfort, they now speculated on her relationship to Congreve. Although farce was popular with London audiences during the Restoration, there was considerable controversy as to what it was and what it was worth. In a period in which the canon of English literary criticism was being formed, farce illustrates the disparity between received classical principles and the playwright's actual craft. Dryden, who himself "stooped" to writing farce, nonetheless sneers in his preface to _An Evening's Love, or The Mock-Astrologer_ [1671]: Farce ... consists principally of grimaces ... Comedy consists, though of low persons, yet of natural actions and characters; I mean such humours, adventures, and designs, as are to be found and met with in the world. Farce, on the other side, consists of forced humours, and unnatural events. Comedy presents us with the imperfections of human nature: Farce entertains us with what is monstrous and chimerical.[6] Farce was theoretically unpopular because it relied on the extravagant and unnatural, as opposed to the play of real character found in comedy. And whereas in seventeenth-century comedy the avowed intention is usually to expose and thus to reform the vices and follies of the age, farce uses the grossly physical to draw a laugh; there is nothing to be learned from the slapstick and pigsbladder.