The Mock Doctor
The Mock Doctor: or The Dumb Lady Cur'd is a play by Henry Fielding and first ran on 23 June 1732 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It served as a replacement for The Covent-Garden Tragedy and became the companion play to The Old Debauchees. It tells the story of a man who pretends to be a doctor at his wife's request and his exploits.
The play is an adaptation of Molière's Le Medecin malgre Lui though it has an emphasis on theatrics over a faithful translation. It is a pure comedy and, unlike other plays by Fielding, has no serious moral lesson or purpose. The play was far more successful than The Covent-Garden Tragedy. Contemporary critics disagreed over whether the play was inferior to the original, but modern critics believed Fielding's version was equally impressive.
Read more about The Mock Doctor: Background, Cast, Plot, Themes, Sources, Critical Response
Famous quotes containing the words mock and/or doctor:
“Oh! mock not the poniarded heart. The stabbed man knows the steel; prate not to him that it is only a ticking feather.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist.... This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)