Produced by Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY _JOHN GAY_, _ALEXANDER POPE_ _JOHN ARBUTHNOT_ THREE HOURS AFTER MARRIAGE Edited, with an Introduction, by John Harrington Smith Publication Number 91-92 William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California Los Angeles 1961 GENERAL EDITORS Richard C. Boys, _University of Michigan_ Ralph Cohen, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Vinton A. Dearing, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Lawrence Clark Powell, _Clark Memorial Library_ ADVISORY EDITORS John Butt, _University of Edinburgh_ James L. Clifford, _Columbia University_ Arthur Friedman, _University of Chicago_ Louis A. Landa, _Princeton University_ Samuel H. Monk, _University of Minnesota_ Everett T. Moore, _University of California, Los Angeles_ James Sutherland, _University College, London_ H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., _University of California, Los Angeles_ CORRESPONDING SECRETARY Edna C. Davis, _Clark Memorial Library_ INTRODUCTION It is a privilege to have a part in this reprint of what is certainly one of the wittiest plays in the language, and one of the most neglected.[A] Its tripartite authorship and raffish character have encouraged editors to bypass it. The 1717 London edition and Dublin reprint the same year bore no author's name on the title-page, but as Gay signed the Advertisement one would think his editors would have felt it somewhat incumbent on them to keep the play alive. However, so far as I have been able to discover, only the 1795 collected edition of Gay does its duty in this respect, and the editor of Gay's plays in the Abbey Classics (2 vols., 1923) refused to admit it there, claiming that though "this justly abused piece" had been ascribed to Gay, "the authors of the greater part were Pope and Arbuthnot." _Three Hours_ has fared somewhat better as a work of Pope, but interest in reprinting it under his aegis seems to have died out early in the nineteenth century, where the Twickenham Edition (VI, 180) locates two collections of writings attached to Pope that include it--very far to the back of the volume in each case. Since then, nothing, except for a few scraps in G. C. Faber's _Poetical Works of Gay_, 1926. [A] Since this introduction was written the _Johnsonian News Letter_ for June 1961 has announced that an edition of _Three Hours_ is being prepared and may be expected to appear at an early date. It is gratifying to learn that the play is receiving this attention and I hope that this reprint may be of use to the editors in their task.