A seasoned actor addresses the audience to deliver a witty and self-deprecating prologue regarding the plight of poets and the unpredictability of public taste. He pleads for the audience's favor while satirically suggesting that the play contains no satire because the town is already too 'reformed' to need correction.
MR BETTERTON: Of those few fools, who with ill stars are curst,
Sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare the worst:
For they’re a sort of fools which fortune makes,
And after she has made ’em fools, forsakes.
With Nature’s oafs ’tis quite a diff’rent case,
For Fortune favours all her Idiot-race:
In
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