A sophisticated prologue in which the speaker addresses the audience to manage expectations for the upcoming play. He humorously critiques the plight of poets and humbly submits the author's work to the audience's judgment, emphasizing a desire to please rather than moralize.
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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