If George Farquhar knew, as these lines from his prologue to David Crauford's Courtship A-la-Mode indicate, the futility of trying to bolster the popularity of a bad play by its prologue, his career as a prologist and epilogist must have reinforced his scepticism. Besides the five prologues and four epilogues he wrote for his own plays, Farquhar wrote at least three prologues and two epilogues for other authors' plays, plus two occasional prologues and one occasional epilogue, a total of ten known prologues and seven epilogues.