The Gamester

Gamester, The

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Gamester (1753), by Edward Moore This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: The Gamester (1753)
Author: Edward Moore
Commentator: Charles H. Peake Phillip R. Wikelund
Release Date: July 12, 2005 [EBook #16267]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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Series Five:
Drama
No. 1
Edward Moore, The Gamester (1753)
With an Introduction by Charles H. Peake
and
a Bibliographical Note by Philip R. Wikelund
The Augustan Reprint Society July, 1948 _Price: 75 cents_
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GENERAL EDITORS RICHARD C. BOYS, University of Michigan EDWARD NILES HOOKER, _University of California, Los Angeles_ H. T. SWEDENBERG, JR., _University of California, Los Angeles_
ASSISTANT EDITOR W. EARL BRITTON, University of Michigan
ADVISORY EDITORS EMMETT L. AVERY, State College of Washington BENJAMIN BOYCE, University of Nebraska LOUIS I. BREDVOLD University of Michigan CLEANTH BROOKS, Yale University JAMES L. CLIFFORD, Columbia University ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota ERNEST MOSSNER, University of Texas JAMES SUTHERLAND, _Queen Mary College, London_
Lithoprinted from copy supplied by author by Edwards Brothers, Inc. Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A. 1948
* * * * *

INTRODUCTION
This reprint of Edward Moore's The Gamester makes available to students of eighteenth century literature a play which, whatever its intrinsic merits, is historically important both as a vehicle for a century of great actors and as a contribution to the development of middle-class tragedy which had considerable influence on the Continent. The Gamester was first presented at the Drury Lane Theatre February 7, 1753 with Garrick in the leading role, and ran for ten successive nights. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century it remained a popular stock piece--John Philip Kemble, Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Barry, the Keans, Macready, and others having distinguished themselves in it--and in America from 1754 to 1875 it enjoyed even more performances than in England. (J.H. Caskey, The Life and Works of Edward Moore, 96-99). Moore's middle-class tragedy is the only really successful attempt to follow Lillo's decisive break with tradition in England in the eighteenth century. His background, like Lillo's, was humble, religious, and mercantile. The son of a dissenting pastor, Moore received his early education in dissenters' academies, and then served an apprenticeship to a London linen-draper. After a few years in Ireland as an agent for a merchant, Moore returned to London to join a partnership in the linen trade. The partnership was soon dissolved, and Moore turned to letters for a livelihood. Among his works are Fables for the Female Sex (1744) which went through three editions, The Foundling (1748), a successful comedy, and Gil Blas (1751), an unsuccessful comedy. In 1753, with encouragement and some assistance from Garrick, he produced The Gamester, upon which his reputation as a writer depends.
It is impossible, of course, to review here all the factors involved in the development of middle-class tragedy in England in the eighteenth century. However, certain aspects of that movement which concern Moore's immediate predecessors and which have not been adequately recognized might be mentioned briefly. Aside from Elizabethan and Jacobean attempts to give tragic expression to everyday human experience, historians have noted the efforts of Otway, Southerne, and Rowe to lower the social level of tragedy; but in this period middle-class problems and sentiments and domestic situations appear in numerous tragedies, long-since forgotten, which in form, setting, and social level present no startling deviations from traditional standards. Little or no attention has been given to some of these obscure dramatists who in the midst of the Collier controversy attempted to illustrate in tragedy the arguments advanced in the third part of John Dennis's _The Usefulness of the Stage, to the Happiness of Mankind, to Government, and to Religion_ (1698). Striving to demonstrate the usefulness of the stage, these avowed reformers produced essentially domestic tragedies, by treating such problems as filial obedience and marital fidelity in terms of orthodox theology. The argument that the stage can be an adjunct of the pulpit is widespread, and appears most explicitly in Hill's preface to his Fatal Extravagance (1721), sometimes regarded as the first middle-class tragedy in the eighteenth century, and in Lillo's dedication to George Barnwell (1731). The line from these obscure dramatists at the turn of the century to Lillo is direct and clear. Of these forgotten plays we can note here only Fatal Friendship (1698) by Mrs. Catherine Trotter whom John Hughes hailed as "the first of stage-reformers"
(_To the Author of Fatal Friendship, a Tragedy_), an unquestionably domestic tragedy inculcating a theological "lesson". To this play, which was acted with "great applause"