Editor's Preface xxvii 



to the King in council and to the citizens in market-place, 

 and dying speeches for all conditions, from kings to courtesans. 

 There is a collection of speeches for a convivial meeting of 

 country gentlemen in a market town, ending with ' a speech 

 of a quarter-drunk gentleman ' and ' a speech of a half- 

 drunken gentleman '. Another little collection, headed 

 Female Orations, reports the speeches delivered at a meeting 

 of women on the great question of combining together to 

 make themselves as ' free, happy, and famous as men ', and 

 concludes with an oration persuading them to remain as they 

 are and be content with their present position. It is hardly 

 necessary to say that the orations are all singularly alike in 

 style and expression, for the Duchess, with a considerable 

 power of description, was entirely devoid of any dramatic 

 instinct. In all her plays there is hardly a single character 

 with any semblance of life ; her characters are mere abstrac- 

 tions, qualities, and humours, uttering the fantastic speeches 

 and quaint conceits which she loved to write 1 . The plots 

 are original enough, but there is no skill in the construc- 

 tion to redeem the weakness of the character-drawing. All 

 that can be said for the dialogue is that it contains occasional 

 passages of poetic beauty, and some amusing descriptions, but 

 it is too strained and affected to be spoken on the stage. 

 Nevertheless the Duchess was an indefatigable playwright : 

 in 1662 she published a volume containing twenty-one plays 

 {Plays, London, 1662, folio) ; this was followed in 1668 by a 

 second containing five more {Plays Never before Printed, 

 London, 1668, folio). They were not particularly well re- 

 ceived by the world ; the Duchess complains that the critics 

 condemned in them the very things she had admitted in her 

 preface. ' My plays, they say, are not made up so exactly 

 as they should be, having no plots, designs, catastrophes, 

 and such like, I know not what, which I expressed in the 

 Epistles prefixed before them ; acknowledging that I had 

 neither skill nor art to form them as they should be ' (Preface 

 to Orations). For this reason she boldly states, in the address 

 to the readers in her second volume : ' When I call this new 



1 Some of the figures represent the authoress herself. ' In a scene in the second 

 part of Youth's Glory and Death's Banquet, she appears under the character of Lady 

 Sanspareile, and gives what may be supposed to be a picture of her own reception at 

 Court. As the Lady Contemplation in the play of that name, as the Lady Chastity 

 of the Matrimonial Trouble, and in a score of other characters, the Duchess is recog- 

 nizable.' — Dictionary of National Biography. 



