Terry Foreman on 29 Sep 2011  •  Link

The City Match (1639), a domestic farce acted at Whitehall by the command of King Charles I.

"Jasper Mayne, the author, was a beneficed clergyman, and the translator of Lucian's Dialogues; the former of which circumstances may perhaps account for the absence, in his plays, of the indelicacy and obscenity which overspread the dramatic productions of the time, and the latter for the pure and attic wit which is plentifully strown in his dialogues. He was, say his biographers, much admired in his time for his wit and humour, and no one who reads his plays, will doubt that the admiration was well bestowed. He has been compared to Dean Swift, and probably, were more of his books extant, the comparison might bo sustained with some degree of justice. One anecdote of him still preserved, will shew, that, like the Dean, he was a humourist, and sometimes carried his jokes to an unseemly and unseasonable pitch: One of his servants waiting upon him with attention, in his last illness, was told by his master, that if he would look in one of his cheats, after his death, he would find something that would make him drink. Expecting, of course, from this, some handsome remuneration for his trouble, the man redoubled his attentions till they were no longer necessary. On the death of his master, he searched the chest for the promised reward of his pains, when, to his surprise and dismay, his legacy proved to be a red herring!

"[...In the play— Warehouse and Seathrift, two rich merchants, determine to make a trial of their two young heirs expectant, Frank Plotwell and Timothy Seathrift, by pretending to go on a voyage, and giving out a report of their deaths. [Several pages of a summary of the plot with generous excepts follow in "NOTICES OF OLD ENGLISH COMEDIES. No. II." Blackwood's magazine, Volume 11, 1822 ] http://goo.gl/obhzO