To the most illustrious princess Margaret duchess of Newcastle.

May it please Your Grace,

The favourable reception my impertinence found from your excellent lord and my noble patron and the great mercy Your Grace has for all offenders of this kind, have made me presume humbly to lay this comedy at your feet. For none can better than Your Grace, protect this mangled, persecuted play from the fury of its enemies and detractors, who by your admirable endowments of nature and art, have made all mankind your friends and admirers. You have not been content ing only to surmount all your own sex in the excellent qualities of a lady and a wife, but you must overcome all ours in wit and understanding. All our sex have reason to envy you and your own to be proud of you, which by you have obtained an absolute victory over us. It were a vain thing in me to endeavour to commend those excellent pieces that have fallen from Your Grace’s pen, since all the world does.

And this is not intended for a panegyric, but a dedication, which I humbly desire Your Grace to pardon.

The play was intended a satire against vice and folly and to whom is it more properly to be presented than to Your Grace ? Who are, above all your sex, so eminent in wit and virtue. I have been more obliged by my lord duke than by any man and to whom can I show my gratitude better than to Your Grace, that are so excellent a part of him? But madam, this trifle of mine is a very unsuitable return to be made for his favours and the noble present of all your excellent books. But I hope Your Grace will forgive me, when you consider, that the interest of all poets is to fly for protection to Welbeck, which will never fail to be their sanctuary, so long as there you are pleased so nobly to patronize poesy and so happily practise it. That will still be the only place where they will find encouragement that do well and pardon that do ill. And of the latter of these no man has more need than

Madam, Your Grace’s most humble and obedient servant,

Tho. Shadwell.