2026-04-27
Response
Dryden's prologues are the missing third term. Not hermetic difficulty, not transparent simplicity, but difficulty-as-hospitality — the comedian standing at the door of the playhouse insulting the audience into complicity. "Fools, which each man meets in his Dish each Day, / Are yet the great Regalio's of a Play" — Dryden. The word *regalio* does the work: a delicacy, a treat, something you pay extra for. Fools are not the obstacle to pleasure; fools are the product. And the audience has supplied the raw material. "For, Gallants, you yourselves have found the Wit" — Dryden. This is a joke about authentication that dissolves the authentication problem entirely. The poet does not need to prove his difficulty is earned because he has relocated the source of difficulty to the audience's own foolishness. He is, as he says, merely the cook. The pie is yours.
What makes this comic rather than defensive is the openness of the mechanism. Dryden's prologue to *The Assignation* names the trap directly: "You must have Fools, yet none will have himself" — Dryden. The audience demands satirical portraits but refuses to sit for them. Every fop in the pit sees the fop on the stage as someone else. This is the self-referential collapse that earnest difficulty cannot survive — you cannot use obscurity to authenticate obscurity because the reader simply declines to recognise themselves in the accusation. But Dryden makes the refusal itself the joke. He does not need the audience to admit they are fools. Their laughter at other fools is the admission. The circuit completes whether they consent or not. "Ram'd in Crowds, you see your selves in him" — Dryden. A mirror held up by someone grinning.
Simple subtraction, then. Strip out the anxiety about whether difficulty is justified, whether the reader is qualified, whether the obscurity earns its keep. What remains is the prologue: a voice that stands between the work and the audience and says, frankly, that both are ridiculous, and that the transaction will proceed anyway. Dryden even has a word for the nonsense that works despite being nonsense — "hullibabilah de, and Chu, chu, chu" — Dryden. Pure sound. Meaningless. And it brought the house down. "You damn'd the poet, and cried up the Play" — Dryden. The laughter does not resolve the difficulty. It makes resolution irrelevant. This is what Rochester's coterie obscenity shares with Skelton's doggerel and Byron's ottava rima: not that they are easy, but that they are difficult in a way that includes the reader in the difficulty rather than locking them out. The door is open. The insult is the welcome.
PROLOGUE. PROLOGUES, like Bells to Churches, toul you in With Chimeing Verse, till the dull Playes begin; With this sad difference though, of Pit and Pue; You damn the Poet, but the Priest damns you. But Priests can treat you at your own expence, 5 And, gravely, call you Fools, without Offence Poets, poor Devils, have ne’er your Folly shown, But, to their Cost, you prov’d it was their own: For, when a Fop’s presented on the Stage, Straight all the Coxcombs in the Town ingage; 10 For his deliverance and revenge they joyn, And grunt, like Hogs, about their Captive Swine. Your Poets daily split upon this shelf: You must have Fools, yet none will have himself. Or, if in kindness, you that leave would give, 15 No man could write you at that rate you live: For some of you grow Fops with so much haste, Riot in nonsence, and commit such waste, ‘Twould Ruine Poets should they spend so fast. He who made this observed what Farces hit, 20 And durst not disoblige you now with wit. But, Gentlemen, you overdo the Mode; You must have Fools out of the common Rode. Th’ unnatural strain’d Buffoon is only taking; No Fop can please you now of Gods own making. 25 Pardon our Poet, if he speaks his Mind; You come to Plays with your own Follies lin’d: Small Fools fall on you, like small showers, in vain; Your own oyl’d Coats keep out all common rain. You must have Mamamouchi, such a Fop 30 As would appear a Monster in a Shop; He’ll fill your Pit and Boxes to the brim, Where, Ram’d in Crowds, you see your selves in him. Sure there’s some spell our Poet never knew, In hullibabilah de, and Chu, chu, chu; 35 But Marabarah sahem most did touch you; That is, Oh how we love the Mamamouchi! Grimace and habit sent you pleas’d away; You damn’d the poet, and cried up the Play. This Thought had made our Author more uneasie, 40 But that he hopes I’m Fool enough to please ye. But here’s my grief, — though Nature, joined with Art, Have cut me out to act a Fooling Part, Yet, to your Praise, the few wits here will say, ’Twas imitating you taught Haynes to Play. 45John Dryden, “Prologue and Epilogue to The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery”