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- 12 Merry Wives of Windsor
derived his information from some other source. He
adds that the queen was so eager to see the play acted
" that she commanded it to be finished in fourteen
days, and was afterwards, as tradition tells us, very
well pleased at the representation." The anecdote was
repeated by Gildon in 1710, and was accepted without
controversy by Pope, Theobald, and other of the earlier
editors.
Some of the more recent critics have been more
sceptical ; but they are ably answered by Verplanck
thus : " Yet, as Rowe relates his anecdote on the same
authority with that on which most of the generally re-
ceived facts of the poet's history are known, acknowl-
edging his obligations to Betterton ' for the most
considerable passages ' of the biography ; as Betterton
was then seventy-four years of age, and thus might have
received the story directly from contemporary authority ;
as Gildon was Betterton's friend and biographer, and
as Dennis (a learned acute man, of a most uninventive
and matter-of-fact mind) told his story seven or eight
years before, 'with a difference,' yet without contradic-
tion, so as to denote another and an independent source
of evidence ; as Pope, the rancorous enemy of poor
Dennis, whom he and his contemporary wits have
* damned to everlasting fame,' received the traditions
without hesitation ; we have certainly, in the entire
absence of any external or internal evidence to the con-
trary, as good a proof as any such insulated piece of
literary history could well require or receive, although
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