ER. / A / TRAGEDY. / As it is Acted at the / _Theatre-Royal_
in _Drury-Lane_. / [rule] / ornament / [rule] / _LONDON_: / Printed for
R. FRANCKLIN, in _Russel-Street_, / _Covent-Garden_; and Sold by
R. DODSLEY, / in _Pall-Mall_. M.DCC.LIII. / The anonymity of the
titlepage is half-hearted, for the dedication to Henry Pelham is
signed "Edw. Moore." A prologue written by Garrick, an epilogue,
and the cast of the original performance precede the eighty-four page
text. Francklin and Dodsley brought out a second edition in the same
year and a fourth edition in 1755; presumably a third edition had
been issued in the interim. In 1771 a fifth and a sixth edition
appeared, and in 1776 another London edition came out. In 1784 two
more editions made an appearance, the first printed for R. Butters
(John H. Caskey, _The Life and Works of Edward Moore_, Yale Studies
in English, LXXV [New Haven, 1927], p. 174), the second printed for
a group of four booksellers--Thomas Davies, W. Nicoll, Samuel Bladon,
and John Bew. The same combination of booksellers, with W. Lowndes
taking the place of Davies, issued in 1789 an inferior reprinting of
their 1784 text. The editions of 1784 and 1789 are interesting because
they identify by inverted commas the cuts made in contemporary stage
versions. Before the end of the century three editions were printed
outside London: two Dublin imprints of 1763 and 1783, and an American
imprint of 1791 by Henry Taylor in Philadelphia.

In addition to these separate publications, _The Gamester_ was included
in two collections of Moore's works. The 1756 edition has already been
noticed. THE DRAMATIC WORKS OF Mr. Edward Moore, as the 1788 titlepage
describes the volume, was issued by the Lowndes-Nicoll-Bladon-Bew group
and was actually an assembled text made up of the 1784 printing of _The
Gamester_, the 1786 _The Foundling_, and the 1788 _Gil Blas_.

The play was a favorite in many popular dramatic collections of the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century; it appeared in Bell's
_British Theatre_ in 1776 and thereafter, in Mrs. Inchbald's _The
British Theatre_ in 1808, in Dibdin's _London Theatre_ in 1815, and in
Cumberland's _British Theatre_ in 1826. According to Caskey and other
sources the play was thus reprinted more than a dozen times by the
middle of the nineteenth century. Since then it has declined in favor
and has seldom been reprinted, even in textbook anthologies covering
representative literature