Robert Dodsley: Cleone

Robert Dodsley’s play, Cleone, A Tragedy, was first produced by John Rich and performed, to great acclaim, at Covent-Garden Theatre on 2 December 1758, with another fourteen performances before the end of the year. Dodsley published the text on Thursday 7 December, and the print-run of two thousand copies sold out on the first day. Dodsley immediately printed another two thousand copies, which also rapidly sold, and in 1759 published a corrected, third edition, in the Preface to which he wrote, “I have endeavoured in this third edition to avail myself of every material objection that hath come to my knowledge […] not indeed with the vain hope of producing at last a faultless piece, but in order to render it in some d