French drama (Comedy) -- Translations into English; Molière, 1622-1673 -- Translations into English
Dryden has imitated, in the fourth act of _An Evening's Love_, a
small part of the scene between Marinette and Éraste, the quarrelling
scene between Lucile, Éraste, Marinette, and Gros-René, as well as in
the third act of the same play, the scene between Albert and
Metaphrastus. Vanbrugh has very closely followed Molière's play in the
_Mistake_, but has laid the scene in Spain. This is the principal
difference I can perceive. He has paraphased the French with a spirit
and ease which a mere translation can hardly ever acquire. The epilogue
to his play, written by M. Motteux, a Frenchman, whom the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes brought into England, is filthy in the extreme. Mr.
J. King has curtailed Vanbrugh's play into an interlude, in one act,
called _Lover's Quarrels_, or _Like Master Like Man_.
Another imitator of Molière was Edward Ravenscroft, of whom Baker says
in his _Biographia Dramatica_, that he was "a writer or compiler of
plays, who lived in the reigns of Charles II. and his two successors."
He was descended from the family of the Ravenscrofts, in Flintshire; a
family, as he himself, in a dedication asserts, so ancient that when
William the Conqueror came into England, one of his nobles married into
it.
He was some time a member of the Middle Temple; but, looking on the dry
study of the law as greatly beneath the attention of a man of genius,
quitted it. He was an arrant plagiary. Dryden attacked one of his plays,
_The Citizen turned Gentleman_, an imitation of Molière's
_Bourgeois-Gentilhomme_, in the Prologue to _The Assignation_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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