Not much can be done with the play in the space here available, but neither is a complete treatment attempted. Our purpose is to dispel the impression that _Three Hours_ is "dull"[1] (or so risqué that in the public interest it should be kept from general circulation) and to bring it to the attention of more scholars. Certainly the present discussion does not aim to pre-empt the possibilities for study; much will remain to conquer still-for example, the knotty problem of which author wrote precisely which parts of the play, if anyone wants to try an untangling here--I prefer to think it a collaboration through and through, though some tracks of individuals may be made out.
[1] Thus the editor of the Cambridge _Pope_ in his headnote to the prologue; one wonders whether he had read the play or was merely going on hearsay.
In the selection of the text to be reproduced for this series the first edition (somewhat unexpectedly) had competition, not from the London 1757 _Supplement_ to Pope's works, but from the version of the play given in the three Dublin printings of the collection of this title: 1757, 1758, 1761. The Dublin play is not merely a debased version of 1717: it is in five acts, 1717 in three, and it contains a sentence of dialogue that 1717 does not: these differences, when taken in conjunction with the prefatory remarks that Gay wrote for the 1717 printing, made it possible to determine (readers will find the argument set forth further on, in a note to the Advertisement) that Dublin, though printed so long after the event (and somewhat butchered by the type-setter, we admit, but corrections of his worst misreadings and typos will be found in the notes) dates from the year 1717 just as the other does, was the script used in the production of the play, and actually was the one that Gay thought Lintot would use in the edition he published. The other consideration inclining us toward the Dublin version of the play was that only in its printings can one get the Key and Letter which, a number of years ago, George Sherburn had in a copy of 1761 and used with such striking effect in his article on the "Fortunes and Misfortunes" of the play;[2] he quoted liberally from both documents but they seemed to us so interesting as to be worth putting into the reader's hands entire.