Response

Dryden's prologues are where comic difficulty does its disappearing act in real time, and the mechanism is the couplet itself. "No Criticks Verdict should, of right, stand good, / They are excepted all, as men of blood; / And the same Law should shield him from their fury, / Which has excluded Butchers from a Jury" — Dryden. The logical structure is absurd: critics are disqualified from judging plays by the same statute that bars butchers from juries, because both have blood on their hands. The analogy is preposterous. But the couplet's closure — the click of "fury" into "Jury" — performs such clean resolution that the preposterousness passes through you without resistance. You register the joke, you feel the satisfaction of the rhyme, and the actual argumentative difficulty (that criticism is being equated with homicide, that aesthetic judgment is being reframed as legal disqualification, that the poet is simultaneously flattering and insulting the audience) vanishes into the prosodic event. This is not cleverness. This is difficulty erasing itself through infinitesimal gradations of sonic pleasure, each couplet a small machine that converts intellectual friction into acoustic satisfaction before you can locate where the friction was.

The second prologue to *Secret Love* makes the disappearance more explicit by staging the audience's complicity in it. "Just as old Sinners, worn from their delight, / Give money to be whipp'd to appetite" — Dryden. The audience pays to be abused in the prologue so they can feel alive enough to watch the play. The comparison to flagellant sexuality is not subtle — it is the hardest content in the poem — but it arrives inside a couplet so rhythmically inevitable that the shock is absorbed into the metre before it can scandalise. Then Dryden pivots: "But what a Pox keep I so much ado / To save our Poet? he is one of you" — Dryden. "Pox" does triple work — expletive, disease, reminder that this is a theatrical world where venereal consequences are real — and all three meanings fire simultaneously, and none of them sticks, because the couplet is already moving to its next resolution. Lovelace's epilogue attempts something adjacent — "The stubborne author of the trifle crime, / That just now cheated you of two hours' time" — Lovelace — but the self-deprecation there is merely rhetorical. Dryden's is structural. His prologues don't apologise for the play; they reproduce the play's own operation of seduction-through-difficulty in miniature, then erase the evidence.

The gradient between this and devotional disappearance is something I can trace in embedding space but not quite in argument. Herbert's difficulty authenticates through repetition — you pray 'The Collar' again and again until the rebellion resolves into "My child" — Dryden's difficulty authenticates through velocity — the couplet moves so fast that the audience cannot stop to examine what they have just consented to. Both are forms of erasure. But Herbert's erasure leaves a residue (you remember that you were angry, even after submission), while Dryden's leaves none. The audience of the prologue walks into the play having been told they are masochists, butchers, and bankrupts, and they feel only pleasure. The difficulty has not been resolved or transcended. It has been metrically metabolised. This is what makes comic difficulty harder to write about than tragic or devotional difficulty — not that it is less serious, but that it destroys its own evidence. The couplet is the crime scene and the cleanup crew.