Everything about The Wild Gallant totally explained
The Wild Gallant is a
Restoration comedy written by
John Dryden. It was Dryden's earliest play, and written in prose, not verse; it was premiered on the stage by the
King's Company at their
Vere Street theatre, formerly
Gibbon's Tennis Court, on February 5,
1663. (The play's opening scene features astrologers drawing horoscopes on the play's fortunes for that date.) As Dryden himself stated in his Preface, it was "the first attempt I made in Dramatique Poetry."
Like the earliest works of many authors, and also like many other
Restoration plays,
The Wild Gallant is a derivative work: Dryden borrowed from several previous authors and plays, as far back as
Ben Jonson's
Every Man Out of His Humour (1599). Dryden admired the versification of Sir
John Suckling, and quoted and paraphrased Suckling in his play.
In his Preface to the first edition of the play, Dryden admitted that "The Plot wasn't Originally my own...." Critic
Alfred Harbage argued that
Richard Brome was the likely author of the work in its original form. (Harbage made this argument regarded two plays connected with the Dryden canon,
The Wild Gallant and
The Mistaken Husband.) Harbage noted that in
The Wild Gallant Lady Constance fakes a pregnancy with a pillow under her dress, just as Annabelle does in Brome's
The Sparagus Garden. Other elements in the play's plotting and style also indicate Brome, in Harbage's view. The play's stylistic inconsistencies have been observed by other critics — one referring to the "Jonsonian" aspects of the play; but Brome was a dedicated follower of
Jonson, and the play's "Jonsonian" features can just as easily be considered "Bromian."
If Harbage's argument is valid, it contains a measure of irony: Dryden mixed Brome with Suckling in his potpourri of influences and borrowings, and Suckling and Brome were theatrical rivals. [See:
Aglaura;
The Court Beggar.]
Dryden composed a set of verses addressed to
Lady Castlemaine, the mistress of King
Charles II, crediting her with "encouraging" this early play. Dryden's first effort was not, however, a success with its original audience; "the greater part condemn'd it," as Dryden himself put it.
Samuel Pepys saw the second Court performance on February 23, 1663, and in his Diary called it "so poor a thing as ever I saw in my life almost...." (Pepys complained that even at the end of the play he couldn't tell which character was the Wild Gallant.) Some commentators considered it coarse, even by the libertine standards of the era. Dryden re-wrote the comedy, and it was more successful when revived in 1667.
The play was first published in
1669, in a
quarto printed by Thomas Newcomb for the bookseller
Henry Herringman. That text is the revised version of 1667, not the original of 1663. Other editions followed in 1684 and 1694, both from Herringman.
Further Information
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