The Rover

The prologue, “written by a person of quality” (2), says that when a play by an unknown playwright is produced, the writers and intellectuals in the audience tend to form a critical majority opinion and then bully the minority into following it. Sometimes people decide to hate the play because the jokes are so good that they strike a nerve, which is one of the pitfalls of writing comedy. The writers who sit in the audience and judge all think themselves superior to the new playwright, but a lot of them just steal ideas from each other. Others work so hard to carefully write extemporaneous dialogue that their dialogue sounds natural, but no one recognizes their hard work. Some writers are funny people, but their sense of humor is not sophisticated enough for the stage.

The “person of quality” comments that they asked the playwright what “he”—the audience would have known that Behn was a woman—wanted them to say to the audience, and “he” said that it did not matter, because people do not care about the playwright and only come to plays for themselves. The audience, the “person of quality” concludes, are all either smug intellectuals or hoping to see some debauchery, and they all crowd together and sweat like commoners.