In any event the authors must have known that they were offering to swim against the tide but counted on their combined brilliance to win anyway. What they wrote happens to conform to the current rules in one respect--to paraphrase the epilogue to _Love's Last Shift_, no cuckold is made within the limits of its three hours' time span--but this compliance must have been accidental, for in every other respect the play deliberately flouts the regulations as established by Collier and his school. Obviously the authors were out to create a sensation: shock the stodgy and respectable element, jam the play down the throats of the audience, and win the admiration of the minority with whom libertine wit was still in favor. These aims, which even a friend and well-wisher has to view as a bit on the juvenile side, were far from fully achieved. The description that Breval gives of the behavior of the crowd on the first night (Sherburn quotes it, if the reader can not readily get hold of _The Confederates_) is suggestive, not of a house packed with enemies of the authors, friends of Dr. Woodward and John Dennis out to damn the play, but of a crowd that had come predisposed to approve--"Silent a while th'attentive Many sate"--but found themselves simply unable to endure the dramatic fare set before them. The murmur that began and then grew to a hiss must have surprised and alarmed the authors: Breval's version of how they reacted must have a grain or two of truth in it. In the account of the second and third nights furnished by our Key one can see matters improving, but it is clear that to quiet the audience took heroic efforts by the cast and there was probably some deletion of offending lines,[10] perhaps some resort to "packing" the house.[11] This last was a measure not infrequently taken in those days--Dr. Johnson's story of Steele's efforts in behalf of _Cato_ will be recalled--but this was not what the authors had anticipated. In the upshot they had dared the unpastured dragon of reform in his den and had got away with it--but barely. They were all right financially--the run should have brought them two "benefits"--and there was the fee from Lintot and an added present of guineas from those three court ladies who wanted the world to know that they were sophisticated enough to take the play in stride. (Pope paid them with "A Court Ballad.") Still, the pride of the authors must have received some damage; perhaps some sensitiveness on Pope's part is understandable. [10] Drub says that the actors left out "a considerable load of Obscenity and Prophaness." Presumably the authors would have to acquiesce in such bowdlerizing. [11] Breval, p. 11, and his note.