University of Virginia Library

To Mr. Alexander Goughe upon his publishing. The excellent Play call'd the Queen; or the Excellencie of her Sex.

If Playes be looking glasses of our lives
Where dead examples quickning art revives:
By which the players dresse themselves, and we
By them may forme a living Imagry
To let those sullied, lie in age in dust
Or break them with pretense, of fit and just.
Is a rude cruelty, as if you can
Put on the christian, and put off the man.
But must all morall handsomnes undoe
And may not be divine and civill too.
What though we dare not say the Poets art
Can save while it delights, please and convert;
Or that blackfriers we heare which in this age
Fell when it was a church, not when a stage,
Or that the

In the originall it is Puritans.

Presbiters that once dwelt there,
Prayed and thriv'd though the playhouse were so near.
Yet this we dare affirme there is more gain
In seeing men act vice then vertue fain;
And he less tempts a danger that delights
In profest players then close Hypocrites,
Can there no favour to the scæne be shown
Because Jack Fletcher was a Bishops son,
Or since that order is condemn'd doe you
Think poets therefore Antichristian too;
Is it unlawfull since the stage is down
To make the press act: where no ladies swoune
At the red coates intrusion: none are strip't;
No Hystriomastix has the copy whip't
No man d' on Womens cloth's: the guiltles presse
Weares its own innocent garments: its own dresse,
Such as free nature made it: Let it come
Forth Midwife Goughe, securely; and if some
Like not the make or beautie of the play
Bear witnes to 't and confidently say
Such a relict as once the stage did own,
Ingenuous Reader, merits to be known.