The Rival Ladies (1664), Dryden's second play, features strong female leads in comical competition. Women had just been admitted, for the first time, onto the English stage, and trouser roles like those in The Rival Ladies fully exploit FTM crossdressing comic potential. (The queen herself had recently begun a fashion for women wearing men's breeches and stockings. ) Charles II shared the palace with his mistresses, so the "rival ladies" of this drama were "drawn from the life." Interwoven with the comedy is a Spanish melodrama plot which gives full play to Dryden's sublime eloquence. The final act contains tender and memorable poetry about selfless love. -The Kraken Series offers the only editions of Dryden's plays that fully explain all archaic language, slang, historical references, and also all the sometimes perplexing syntax employed by Dryden, who wrote in English but often thought in Latin. Kraken does for Dryden what Folger did for Shakespeare.

Excerpt from The Rival Ladies: A Tragi-Comedy; As It Was Acted at the Theatre-Royal About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.