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Tho several Assaults have been made upon the Comick Poets in Fashion, and many Batteries have been rais’d against the Theatre, yet hitherto they have prov’d unsuccessful; the Stage is become Impregnable, where loose Poets, supported by Numbers, Power, and Interest, in Defiance of all Rules of Decency and Vertue, still provide new Snares and Temptations to seduce the People, and corrupt their Manners. Notwithstanding the earnest Cries of this great City, that importune these Writers to reform the Theatre, and no longer to infest her Youth, and draw their Inclinations from their Professions and Employments; notwithstanding the Sighs and Tears of many once flourishing, but now disconsolate Families, ruin’d by the dissolute Lives of their chief Branches, who lost their Vertue by frequenting the fatal Entertainments of the Theatre; notwithstanding the wise and sober part of the Kingdom earnestly sollicit them to spare the People, to stop the spreading Plague and slay the destroying Pen, they persevere with intrepid Resolution and inexorable Cruelty, to poison the Minds, and ruin the Morals of the Nation.

The great Archbishop Tillotson has set our present Theatre in a true Light in his Discourse upon Corrupt Communication :

“I shall only speak a few words concerning Plays, which as they are now order’d among us, are a mighty Reproach to the Age and Nation.

“To speak against them in general, may be thought too severe, and that which the present Age cannot so well brook, and would not perhaps be so just and reasonable; because it is very possible they might be so fram’d and govern’d by such Rules, as not only to be innocently diverting, but instructing and useful, to put some Vices and Follies out of Countenance, which cannot perhaps be so decently reprov’d, nor so effectually expos’d and corrected any other way. But as the Stage now is, they are intollerable, and not fit to be permitted in a civiliz’d, much less a Christian Nation. They do most notoriously minister both to Infidelity and Vice. By the Profaneness of them, they are apt to instil bad Principles into the Minds of Men, and to lessen that awe and reverence which all Men ought to have for God and Religion: and by their Lewdness they teach Vice, and are apt to infect the Minds of Men, and dispose them to lewd and dissolute Practices.

“And therefore I do not see how any Persons pretending to Sobriety and Vertue, and especially to the pure and holy Religion of our Blessed Saviour, can, without great Guilt, and open Contradiction to his holy Profession, be present at such lewd and immodest Plays, much less frequent them, as too many do, who yet would take it very ill to be shut out of the Communion of Christians, as they would most certainly have been in the first and purest Ages of Christianity.”

And not only wise and sober Men have declar’d their detestation of the Immorality of the Stage, but eminent Poets themselves, who have written the most applauded Comedies, have own’d, that the Theatre stands in great need of Restraints and Regulation, and wish’d that Plays were compil’d in such an inoffensive Manner, that not only discreet and vertuous Persons of the Laity, but a Bishop himself, without being shock’d, might be present while they were acted. Mr. Dryden has, up and down in his Prefatory Discourses and Dedications, freely aeknowledg’d the Looseness of our Dramatick Entertainments, which sometimes he charges upon the Countenance given to it by the dissolute Court of King Charles the Second, and sometimes upon the vitiated Taste of the People. In his Dedication of Juvenal, made English, to the late famous Earl of Dorset, he thus bespeaks him; “As a Counsellor bred up in the Knowledge of the Municipal and Statute Laws may honestly inform a just Prince how far his Prerogative extends, so I may be allow’d to tell your Lordship, who by an indisputed Title are the King of Poets, what an Extent of Power you have, and how lawfully you may exercise it over the petulant Scriblers of the Age. As Lord Chamberlain, you are absolute by your Office, in all that belongs to the Decency and good Manners of the Stage; You can banish thence Scurrility and Profaneness, and restrain the licentious Insolence of the Poets and their Actors, in all things that shock the publick Quiet or the Reputation of private Persons, under the Notion of Humour.” Hence it evidently appears, that Mr Dryden look’d on the Decency of the Stage to be violated in his Time, by licentious and insolent Poets; and I wish I could say, that there is less Reason of Complaint in ours; In a Copy of Verses, publish’d in one of the Volumes of the Miscellany Poems, the same celebrated Author inveighs against the Lewdness and Pollutions of the Stage in the strongest Expressions that can be conceiv’d; and in his latter days, when his Judgment was more Mature, he condemns all his loose and profane Writings to the Flames, which, he says, they justly deserve: Which is not only a free and ingenious Confession of his Fault, but a considerable Mark of Repentance, and worthy to be imitated by his Successors, who have broken in upon the Rules of Vertue and Modesty in the like manner.