Thomas Duffet

Thomas Duffet (fl. 1673 – 1676), or Duffett, was an Irish playwright and songwriter active in England in the 1670s. He is remembered for his popular songs and his burlesques of the serious plays of John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell, Elkanah Settle, and Sir William Davenant.

By profession, Duffet was a milliner; he maintained a shop in the New Exchange in London. Virtually nothing is known of his life apart from his surviving works. A Thomas Duffet confessed to forgery in 1677; this may have been the author. Duffet's plays show a close familiarity with the lower and criminal classes of London society, perhaps suggesting first-hand knowledge.

Duffet's dramatic canon is uncertain and in dispute among scholars and critics. Six plays are generally attributed to him with a fair degree of certainty:

(The plays were first printed in the same years they were staged, except where noted.)

Duffet started out as a conventional dramatist; his earliest two works were comedies. The market steered him in a different direction. The Spanish Rogue has been called "the best of all this author's dramatic works, yet it met with very indifferent success." Upon publication, the play was dedicated to Nell Gwyn.

Duffet had much greater success in mocking other men's plays. Burlesque was a new development in English theatre in Duffet's generation; Sir William Davenant's The Playhouse to Be Let (1663; printed 1673) has been called the first burlesque in English drama. Duffett was the one author who took the greatest advantage of this new development in theatrical fashion, prior to Henry Fielding and other writers of the following century.

Like other practitioners of farce and burlesque, Duffet often responded quickly to developments in contemporary society. The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island, Dryden and Davenant's 1667 adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, was first staged in Thomas Shadwell's "opera" version in 1674; Duffet's parody of it was on the stage before the end of the year. Duffet also parodied Settle's The Empress of Morocco (1673) and Shadwell's opera Psyche (1675).

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