Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Plagiarism in The Mistakes (1691)

2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/notesj/gjaa101

1471-6941

Matthew Steggle,

Scottish History and National Identity

Several features of Joseph Harris’s tragicomedy The Mistakes: Or the False Report (1691) ought to be of interest to Restoration drama studies. Acted by the United Company in 1690, in its print incarnation it possesses a prologue by John Dryden; an epilogue by Nahum Tate; and a dedication to the painter Godfrey Kneller. Furthermore, set as it is in Naples, it offers an interesting point of reference for the representation of Naples in that rather better-known specimen of Restoration drama, Behn’s The Rover. And yet, with the exception of Dryden’s prologue, the play is almost entirely ignored by scholars and critics, so that this note is, I believe, the first piece of scholarly work ever devoted to it. Regrettably, its argument is that the play contains substantial plagiarism from an earlier source, but nonetheless, it is a start. The Mistakes was the first of three plays written by Harris, an actor-writer who enjoyed a twenty-year career. His other plays are comedies: The City Bride, or the Merry Cuckold (1696)—which has long been recognized as an adaptation of John Webster’s A Cure for a Cuckold—and Love’s a Lottery and a Woman the Prize (1699). Harris is not, himself, a particularly well-known figure, and the Oxford DNB comments that he ‘was not important enough to leave much trace’.1 Still, his work is the stuff out of which 1690s theatre is made.