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I am grateful for the aid of Suzanne Flandreau and Carolyn E. Jakeman of the Houghton Library, who provided access to the broadside and information on its recent history. The prologue is reprinted below by permission of the Harvard College Library.

[2]

Mary E. Knapp, Prologues and Epilogues of the Eighteenth Century (1961), p. 4.

[3]

Autrey Nell Wiley, Rare Prologues and Epilogues 1642-1700 (1940), pp. 313-20.

[4]

Wiley, pp. xxxviii-xxxix.

[5]

William Oldys, The History of the English Stage (1741), p. 120.

[6]

Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, ed. B. R. S. Fone (1968), pp. 177-81; John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, ed. John Loftis. Augustan Reprint Society (1969), p. 50; Emmett L. Avery, The London Stage 1660-1800 Part 2: 1700-1729 (1960), I, 101, 129-30.

[7]

Robert Gore-Browne, Gay Was the Pit (1957), pp. 34, 18-19.

[8]

Cibber, pp. 139-40, 145, 184.

[9]

Avery, I, 101, 130.

[10]

For the prices paid for prologues, see Wiley, pp. 67-69.

[11]

Cibber, p. 179.

[12]

Pp. 86-87.

[13]

See Cibber's somewhat biased account, p. 149.

[14]

Cibber, p. 133, says ". . . Wilks never lost an Hour of precious Time, and was, in all his Parts, perfect, to such an Exactitude, that I question, if in forty Years, he ever five times chang'd or misplac'd an Article, in any one of them."

[15]

The speed of broadside publication is demonstrated by Hills's bill on the verso which refers in the title to "this Afternoon."

[16]

Cibber, p. 172.

[17]

For details of the loan see P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688-1756 (1967), pp. 59-60.

[18]

Daily Courant, 20 March, 22 March, 23 April 1708.

[19]

This account is derived primarily from John W. Velz, "'Pirate Hills' and the Quartos of Julius Caesar," PBSA, 63 (1969), 177-93, and A. F. Johnson, "The King's Printers, 1660-1742," The Library, 5th Series, 3 (1948-1949), 33-8.

[20]

Cal. S. P. (Dom.) William and Mary, 1689-90, p. 239; 19 May 1693, p. 144; cited in Velz, 187.

[21]

Johnson, 33.

[22]

Velz, 189-90.

[23]

Richmond P. Bond, "The Pirate and the Tatler," The Library, 5th Series, 18 (1963), 264; Edward Solly, "Henry Hills. The Pirate Printer," The Antiquity, 11 (1885), 152.