George Farquhar: A Migrant Life Reversed 9781350057067, 9781350057098, 9781350057081

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: A Brief Life Forwards
1. A Life Reversed
2. 1709: A Widow’s Pension
3. 1707: Deathbed Comedy
4. 1706: Military Comedy
5. 1704: In the Army
6. 1701: Moral George
7. 1700: The Irishman Abroad
8. 1698: Narratives of Arrival
9. 1696: Dear Bob
10. 1690: Farquhar Family History
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

George Farquhar

CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE The Methuen Drama series of Cultural Histories of Theatre and Performance recognizes that historical knowledge has always been contested and revised. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the transformation of conventional understandings of culture created through new political realities and communication technologies together with paradigm shifts in anthropology, psychology and other cognate fields have challenged established methodologies and ways of thinking about how we do history. The series embraces volumes that take on those challenges while enlarging notions of theatre and performance through the representation of the lived experience of past performance makers and spectators. The series aim is to be both inclusive and expansive, including studies on topics that range temporally and spatially, from the locally specific to the intercultural and transnational. Series editors : Claire Cochrane (University of Worcester, UK) Bruce McConachie (University of Pittsburgh, USA)

George Farquhar presented to Apollo

George Farquhar A Migrant Life Reversed David Roberts

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © David Roberts, 2018 David Roberts has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Adriana Brioso Cover image: The Beaux’ Stratagem with Mark Rose (Hounslow), Samuel Barnett (Aimwell) and Pippa Bennett-Warner (Dorinda) at the Olivier Theatre, National Theatre, London, UK, 2015. (© Marilyn Kingwill/ArenaPAL) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Roberts, David, 1960- author. Title: George Farquhar : a migrant life reversed / David Roberts. Description: London : Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2018. | Series: Cultural histories of theatre and performance | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017061647 | ISBN 9781350057067 (hb) | ISBN 9781350057081(ePDF) | ISBN 9781350057074 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Farquhar, George, 1677?-1707–Criticism and interpretation. | Authors, Irish–Biography. | English literature–Irish authors–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR3439 .R63 2018 | DDC 822/.4 [B] –dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061647 ISBN:

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978-1-350-05706-7 978-1-3501-4747-8 978-1-350-05708-1 978-1-350-05707-4

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To Fiona

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements x

Introduction: A Brief Life Forwards 1

A Life Reversed

2

1709: A Widow’s Pension

3

1707: Deathbed Comedy

4

1706: Military Comedy

5

1704: In the Army

6

1701: Moral George

7

1700: The Irishman Abroad

8

1698: Narratives of Arrival

9

1696: Dear Bob

3 27 43

65

75 89 109 119

133

10 1690: Farquhar Family History Notes 161 Bibliography Index 220

200

1

143

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to all those who have helped with matters concerning Farquhar’s family: Mary Clayton (University of Durham), Tim Gill (St Patrick’s Cathedral Grammar School, Dublin), Signe Hoffos (Friends of the City Churches, London), Graham Sadler (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire), Ernest Wiltshire, Sandra Wallace (Diocese of Derry and Raphoe Office), Aisling Lockhart and Claire Allen (Library of Trinity College Dublin), David Beasley (The Goldsmiths’ Company), Robert Athol and Megan Dumall (Lincoln’s Inn Library), Catriona Foote (University of St Andrews), Alyson Stanford (Public Record Office of Northern Ireland), Siobhan Convery and Michelle Gait (The Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen), Dr Susan Hood (Church of Ireland RCB Library), Natalie Milne (National Archives, Dublin), Dr William Roulston (Ulster Historical Foundation), Aoife Morrissey and James Harte (National Library of Ireland), Amy Hughes (Royal Irish Academy), staff of the Archive Services at the University of Glasgow, Ruth Long (Warwickshire County Record Office), Emily Rumble (Lambeth Palace Library), Eleanor Hoare (Eton College Library), Dr David Wykes (Dr Williams’s Library) and Major W.E. Pearson. Claire Cochrane first proposed this book as part of Methuen Drama’s new series on theatre, while her fellow editor Bruce McConachie supplied clarity on key themes. Mark Dudgeon, Senior Commissioning Editor, has been supportive throughout, while Gopinath Anbalagan took great care in copy editing the manuscript. This work could not have been completed without Izabela Hopkins, an exemplary research assistant. I stand indebted to the work of previous Farquhar scholars, notably Eugene Nelson James but foremost Shirley Strum Kenny, whose magisterial edition of the complete works includes a host of rich details about Farquhar which could not be included here for lack of space. All quotations from Farquhar in this book are taken from that edition, with old spelling and punctuation retained to give a flavour of speech patterns. Professor Kenny’s two volumes have been at my side throughout. The dedicatee of this book, Fiona Shaw Roberts, has endured the same proximity with patience and good humour. On dates: in 1752 the Julian calendar was replaced by the modern Gregorian version, which is ‘ahead’ by 11 days. All dates before 1752 are given in the Julian style. Dates of plays refer to publication except as otherwise indicated.

Introduction: A Brief Life Forwards

In reference works, George Farquhar’s life runs like this. He was born in Londonderry in 1677 (or a year either side, depending on the entry) to a clerical family of Scots planter origins.1 Protestantism was in his blood. His family had suffered losses at the hands of Catholics; Jacobite forces laid siege to Londonderry in 1689. He became a vocal supporter of William of Orange and then of Queen Anne. Aged thirteen when forces of the exiled James II were defeated at the Battle of the Boyne on 1 July 1690, he wrote his first known literary work to celebrate the heroism there of one of King William’s generals. On 17 July 1694 Farquhar enrolled at Trinity College Dublin, where his studies lasted only two years, interrupted by skirmishes with the authorities. He came to prefer the theatre. The year 1696 saw his acting debut at the Smock Alley playhouse, managed by Joseph Ashbury. There he met his lifetime friend Robert Wilks, an actor ten years his senior, who had already appeared in London, where Farquhar moved in 1698. A journalistic novella, The Adventures of Covent Garden, was published there in December of that year. In the same month Farquhar’s first comedy, Love and a Bottle, was performed by Christopher Rich’s company at Drury Lane, and published on 29 December 1698. Early biographers thought it had done well enough, but with a hint of scandal.2 It died soon afterwards, with no further performance until 1712.3 November 1699, however, saw the biggest success Farquhar ever enjoyed: so big that it turned round Rich’s fortunes.4 The Constant Couple; or a Trip to the Jubilee was performed more than fifty times between its premiere and 13 July 1700, when it closed the season at Drury Lane ‘for the Benefit of the Author’.5 A second, revised edition appeared within two months of the first.6 The play triumphed in Dublin too. Its hero, Sir Harry Wildair, became a signature role for Wilks. Flush with success and cash, Farquhar left for the Netherlands in the summer of 1700. Visiting King William’s homeland hardened his Protestant leanings. He returned to London in late October or early November 1700.

2

GEORGE FARQUHAR: A MIGRANT LIFE REVERSED

The dramaturgic outcome of his trip was a 1701 sequel to The Constant Couple called Sir Harry Wildair, but it flopped. Two plays followed in 1702; neither met their author’s expectations. The Inconstant, an adaptation of Beaumont and an adaptation of Fletcher’s A Wild Goose Chase, suffered in competition with French musical entertainments at the rival Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre. The Twin-Rivals was a moralistic comedy that aimed to appease people troubled by the Reverend Jeremy Collier’s denunciation of contemporary theatre. In that ambitious aim it failed. Love and Business, an assortment of letters and essays published in 1701, could not significantly have improved his fortunes. His writing career was going nowhere. Love and Business refers to a widow he met at church: probably Margaret Pemell, whom he married on the supposition that she had a substantial inheritance. She did not, any more than he was a consistently successful writer. A translated French farce, The Stage-Coach, was performed by the rival company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields – a sign, perhaps, that Rich’s company had not been interested. The new play, which Farquhar had worked on with Pierre Motteux, fared indifferently. It must have felt like the end of the road. He joined the army around March 1704, gaining a commission as Lieutenant in the Earl of Orrery’s Regiment of Foot. He served at one remove from action. Duties as a recruiting officer in the English Midlands meant time spent in Shrewsbury and Lichfield. The men he recruited went on to suppress, resist or defeat the Catholic enemy across Europe and, not least, in Ireland. Farquhar found himself back in Dublin in 1704–5, visiting his family and even resurrecting his acting career in The Constant Couple. Before his military service he had been scratching around for inspiration with sequels, adaptations, translations and co-authorship. Two years as a lieutenant gave him something fresh and personal to write about. In April 1706 The Recruiting Officer was a success at his old theatre, Drury Lane, again with Wilks in the lead as Captain Plume; later that year, Wilks and other actors left Rich’s company to join the Queen’s troupe at Haymarket. While writing The Recruiting Officer Farquhar was drafting another piece inspired by his military experience, an epic poem about the European war, Barcellona. In the midst of this resurgence of energy and fortune, he fell seriously ill. In the winter of 1706–7 Wilks visited him at his sick bed and urged him to draft another play. The Beaux’ Stratagem was the result, but its success came too late. George Farquhar died aged thirty and was buried on 23 May 1707. Margaret was destitute. Nearly three years after Farquhar’s death she found a publisher for the unfinished Barcellona, which failed to excite much interest. But Bernard Lintott, a prominent bookseller who had bought the rights to The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux’ Stratagem before they were performed, paid tribute to a writer he thought should ‘remain to Posterity’. On 27 March 1708 he published, in a single volume, The Comedies of Mr  George Farquhar,7 and Farquhar has been in print and performance ever since.

1 A Life Reversed

(i) In 1957 Trinity College Dublin marked the 250th anniversary of its former student’s death with a memorial lecture by Fitzroy Pyle, Fellow of the College.1 Given Farquhar’s undistinguished record as a sizar – that is, a student given an allowance in return for menial duties – it was not an obvious gesture. However, Pyle listed achievements and characteristics that continue to distinguish Farquhar as an attractive writer and subject. His early years were times of conflict marked by ‘peril, loss and suffering’.2 Among dramatists active in eighteenth-century London, he was the most popular, at least according to the number of performances of his work.3 A self-consciously Irish writer who sought success in England, ‘he fixed for the English theatre a certain type of Irish character’, colluding in the stereotypes that plagued him while striving to belong in a strange city.4 Almost alone among Restoration comic dramatists, he combined an interest in non-metropolitan, ungentle locales with imaginative sympathy for the plight of women. His appeal to modern audiences is summarized by theatre director William Gaskill’s appraisal of The Recruiting Officer as the only Restoration play that presented a cross-section of society and which was set outside London. It had ‘no fops, no court intrigue and even the gentry were not fashionable.5 Gaskill might have mentioned The Beaux’ Stratagem, the least distinction of which is that it is the best play ever set in Lichfield. An appealing prospect for directors, Farquhar is a minefield for biographers. As Pyle put it: We know Farquhar mainly through his plays. He did not consort with people of rank and fortune and is not much mentioned by his contemporaries. Nothing remains in his handwriting. His only surviving correspondence he published himself, and may, therefore, have edited for the press. Biographical accounts prefixed to posthumous editions of his

4

GEORGE FARQUHAR: A MIGRANT LIFE REVERSED

works are sketchy at first and become increasingly unreliable as time surrounds his memory in an aura of sentiment.6 The challenge of weighing and piecing together the sketches is ‘a precarious though fascinating task’, in Pyle’s words; to write Farquhar’s life is to ‘disentangle fact from fiction and to translate out of artistic terms into terms of actual life’.7 Duly fascinated, the three most substantial modern studies of Farquhar occupy extremes of imagination and scepticism. Willard Connely builds towers of chatter on real knowledge in a clubbable style the reader is encouraged to feel befits so self-evidently roguish and gregarious a subject.8 Amid all the speculation concealed as fact, Connely draws insightful connections and provides a rich outline of Farquhar’s social world. His work is not to be derided, if only because it is the capstone of a long-standing tradition that dates from Farquhar’s own lifetime. Since 1704, critics have treated his leading characters as self-portraits. That year, an anonymous author declared that ‘certainly Mr. Farquhar knew how necessary lewdness was to establish his reputation, when he exposed Roebuck in the first play he writ, for his own character’.9 The idea rapidly became scripture. In 1718 Edmund Curll asserted that Farquhar’s ‘chief Characters are generally no more than Copies of himself in various Scenes of Life’, while the following year Giles Jacob lifted the phrase verbatim (Farquhar was often criticized for plagiarism and his defenders quickly caught the habit).10 By 1753 it was obvious that the autobiographical school lacked proof, yet there was little desire to abandon it. Theophilus Cibber reflected that ‘it is thought that in all his heroes, he generally sketched out his own character, of a young, gay, rakish spark, blessed with parts and abilities’.11 Eleven years on, David Erskine Baker duly plundered Cibber but blundered first, stumbling over the circular logic of the biographical tradition and pressing on regardless: As it has been generally imagined that in all his Heroes, he has intended to sketch out his own Character, it is reasonable to conjecture that his own Character must have born a strong resemblance to that of those Heroes; who are in general a Set of young, gay, rakish Sparks, guilty of some Wildnesses and Follies, but at the same Time blessed with Parts and Abilities, and adorned with Courage and Honour.12 Eugene Nelson James dismisses the same passage as ‘interesting reasoning’, but too hastily.13 The mere fact that there was (and remains) no comparably rich biographical tradition in the criticism of other Restoration dramatists suggests that Farquhar’s early critics spotted a problem hard to solve but impossible to ignore.14 James skates over an adjacent issue when he describes Charles Dibdin’s account of Farquhar as one more instance of the flawed biographical tradition. Dibdin points to the role of Robert Wilks as a mentor, in return

A LIFE REVERSED

5

for which Farquhar ‘made [him] the hero of his pieces, which, however, he is said to have drawn as portraits of himself’.15 Dibdin’s grammar makes him more cautious than James believes, but he still does not attempt to solve the problem he highlights. What Dibdin represents as certainties – that Wilks encouraged Farquhar and Farquhar returned the favour by writing him leading roles – are contradicted by what he knew was the mere received idea that those roles were self-portraits. Far from recycling the naively autobiographical tradition, Dibdin’s assessment begins to fracture it. That fracture therefore appeared forty years earlier and on different grounds than in James’s narrative, where it is placed at 1840 with Leigh Hunt’s landmark edition of Restoration plays.16 Hunt argued that the man who wrote The Recruiting Officer was no rakish Captain but an impoverished writer desperate to maintain his family.17 Later nineteenth-century writers caught the sceptical habit, casting doubt on what one critic called ‘the inevitable conception of Farquhar’ as a self-portraitist.18 Reactions against the autobiographical tradition still had to account for the relationship of cheerless life to cheerful plays, and they did so in terms defined by Hunt. If Captain Plume was not Farquhar, he must be ‘the imaginary Farquhar’.19 In 1924 Bonamy Dobree was more specific. His Farquhar was ‘an original who projected his disappointments in life … onto the stage in the form of light-hearted comedy’.20 Do Hunt and Dobree present tired new faces in a tired old autobiographical tradition? That is how Eugene Nelson James thinks of them when he finds Otto Hallbauer lacking caution for his statement that ‘Farquhar’s heroes were improved Farquhars’.21 In his 1966 pamphlet for the British Council, A.J. Farmer comes to a similar conclusion. He argues that the autobiographical tradition is simply wrong because the signs are from his minor works that Farquhar was very far from the high-spirited fellow others derived back from Roebuck and Sir Harry. On the contrary, he was ‘a sadly harassed young playwright’. Farmer uses that observation to detach the work from the life instead of seeking to knit the two in a more complex manner.22 The contradiction is a reminder that the multiple and indirect relationship of life to work – among which are numbered the generation of fantasy selves through writing and the role of social networks in self-representation – has become a key feature of a new school of biographical criticism.23 The existence of all those ‘improved Farquhars’ only distances the writing of his life from the simplistic assumptions of the autobiographical tradition, not from the tradition itself. The third of the major Farquhar scholars of the modern period, Eric Rothstein, shares Eugene Nelson James’s impatience. In fact, he is so NewCritically suspicious that he can hardly bear to admit any relationship between life and work, nagging away at every text in a futile attempt to prove its detachment from personal experience.24 It is Farquhar’s technical and – in the precious way many critics in the 1960s and 1970s had of talking about such things – moral development as a writer that interests him. He sheds light

6

GEORGE FARQUHAR: A MIGRANT LIFE REVERSED

on the way Farquhar inhabited and adapted comic genres, but at the cost of demonstrating only that the writing stopped just when it was getting really promising. Unlike James, he offers readings of Farquhar’s non-dramatic works, but as freestanding formal and ethical entities that reveal nothing more than their author’s development as a writer. With tight-lipped discipline, Rothstein confines his own biographical reflections to a sixteen-page chapter cautiously entitled ‘Farquhar: The External Facts’ as though, Gradgrind-like, he believed no other approach to his subject’s life admissible.25 Connely’s study is given scant airing and Rothstein’s prevailing tone suggests he would agree with James that Connely’s wilder speculations about Farquhar’s selfrepresentation ‘left no room for a future writer pursuing this tradition’.26 So what is there left to write about? The answer is a better interrogation of the relationship of life to work. Farquhar’s work is distinctive not for its formal qualities or anecdotal reminiscences, or even for the simplistic use of biographical data in which Connely revels.27 Rather, it is a complex refashioning of personal history played out under the pressure of a broader historical experience. That refashioning is sometimes direct and sometimes oblique. Farquhar finds ways of inverting as well as reflecting known biographical facts, and he does so as a man living with the experience not just of hardship, but specifically of migration. The complexity of that experience – its economic push and pull, its refashioning of identity – requires us to look beyond what Fitzroy Pyle called ‘the florid constitution’ of Sir Harry Wildair and his fellow libertines. We should also see the dislocations of Farquhar’s migrant life realized in the grotesques, misfits and subversives who populate his plays; or rather, in the tension between them and the heroes earlier criticism likened to him.

(ii) The rich critical literature of migrant writing and migration revolves around core concepts.28 Dislocation it construes as both literal and psychological: a physical removal that by loosening familiar ties, networks and associations gives rise to tensions as creative as they are anxious. Migrant literature is compelling in the literary curriculum not simply because it provides a convenient bridge to contemporary world problems, but because the act of migration itself corresponds to the states of alienation commonly associated with modernist writing. Like the private reader, the migrant is often alone in thought, trying to make sense of the world outside. The role of the immediate environment, of what is often called the ‘host community’, is crucial. How is the migrant accommodated, characterized or generalized by the body he or she joins, or seeks unsuccessfully to join? What sense of identity results? The possibilities are multiple. On a spectrum from invisible assimilation to stigmatized rejection, critics often refer to ‘between-ness’, where the migrant falls between cultural stools into a land of non-definition and non-identity,

A LIFE REVERSED

7

or ‘hybridity’, where some new blend of traditions and languages emerges more confidently or less. There is no prescribed stopping point: these are, instead, states that have the potential to mingle, reassemble and vanish in different ways for every migrant journey. Much depends on whether the individual identifies as an emigrant or an immigrant. To look back and covet only one’s native identity, or forward in search of something that may be ill defined? Or both? Whatever the combination, a propensity for self-loathing is a marked feature of much migrant writing, expressed either explicitly or in the creation of impossibly heroic surrogates. Fitzroy Pyle spoke of the ‘consumptive [writer] … vicariously enjoying instead the imaginary existence’ of Farquhar’s ruddy young heroes, and so doing he pointed to the forward-looking fantasies of the migrant life, the fulfilment longed for but never achieved.29 But other fantasies also played their part. The economic ‘push and pull’ effect of migration is redoubled in the imagination: at once a pushing away from and a pulling towards both old and new. Through disillusionment in the present, the past may be reconfigured as utopian, an irrecoverable land of blue remembered hills. But it may equally be imagined as violently dystopian. Striving to belong to the host culture entails diminishing the worth of one’s homeland, to the extent even of mythologizing its horrors both as the price of admission and as an explanation of why the project of translation has failed. So it was for Farquhar, alienated from both his origins and the new life he sought: the tragic ‘between-ness’ of migration theory that left him suspended between the past he rejected and the future he desired. More than that, the rejected past evermore ferociously became, paradoxically, the only means of creating the future. Chapter 7 of this book traces the path by which Farquhar’s visions of his homeland coarsened, pandering increasingly to dominant stereotypes.30 He began by creating self-consciously Hibernian heroes in Roebuck from Love and a Bottle and Sir Harry Wildair in The Constant Couple, and then found the nearest route to acceptance was in aggravating popular prejudice through the creation of scheming priests and dim-witted servants. Striving to detach himself from such stereotypes, he helped keep them alive. Exploring such refractions of personal experience in a Restoration play will, it is hoped, move the field on from its long-standing immersion in matters of state and stage craft. ‘For some time now’, declares Tim Keenan’s new study of Restoration scenic practices, ‘Restoration theatre studies has been perceived to be moribund’.31 Keenan’s response is to argue that new interpretations and even audiences can be found via better understanding of back shutters, relieves and other apparatus of the late-seventeenth-century London stage: a worthy but forlorn hope. Like any others, Restoration plays will flourish on stage and in the curriculum if audiences and readers are persuaded of their contemporary interest. Locating in a diverse output of plays, translations, poetry, letters, treatises and occasional pieces a replaying of cultural anxieties that remain urgent, this book portrays a Farquhar as not just the most socially inclusive Restoration dramatist, but the most modern.

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GEORGE FARQUHAR: A MIGRANT LIFE REVERSED

He was, in fact, dislocated multiple times by virtue of money, opportunity, family and temperament: wanderer and fugitive as much as migrant, pushed and pulled by economic forces as well as by personal setbacks he struggled to stand and face. Migrancy criticism typically refers to primary and secondary migration, to the pioneer and to the family who follow. The Farquhars were among the roughly 25,000 Scots planters who first settled in Ulster only two or three generations before George was born.32 A smaller number moved south to Dublin. If they arrived with a sense of entitlement, they were, nonetheless, arrivistes with family narratives that stretched back to other domains and cultural practices. ‘For later seventeenth-century Dublin’, notes the leading history of Irish migration, ‘there is clear evidence of the regional origins of British settlers in the city’.33 Historians are prone to stress the cultural accommodation of the native Irish: Roy Foster writes of a ‘conversion environment’ in which ‘local papists seemed ready to conform to the newcomers’ ethos’.34 Yet across the country the insecurity of the settlers was apparent in fortifications, troop movements and violent uprisings. Moving to London in 1698, Farquhar escaped one migrant dream that could turn lethally sour. His time as a recruiting officer in the English Midlands was, in turn, the consequence of another project gone wrong: aiming for success as a dramatist and poet, he faced vituperation from London’s critical establishment. In the passing hospitality of Shrewsbury and Lichfield he found something like home, and he would go on to represent the English provinces as though they were Ireland. He was one of approximately 7,500 Irish people who settled in London between 1650 and 1700.35 ‘Although they came from a wide range of social backgrounds’, observe Fitzgerald and Lambkin, ‘the strong association with poverty and vagrancy persisted’.36 Since the Civil War years, the Irish rogue had been a cipher for lawlessness exploited by royalist and republican propagandists alike.37 In his plays, Farquhar tried to make a virtue of that association by portraying wandering heroes who achieved assimilation by natural charm. So doing, he drew attention to his own marginal identity in a way that inevitably attracted a measure of adverse comment. His speech alone must have made him stand out: Ulster Scots, morphing into the refined species of Hiberno-English spoken in Dublin and the Pale then refined by Trinity but still, in London, a curiosity in a social world where deviation from linguistic norms was a subject of professional amusement.38 His name alone caused perplexity. ‘Forker’ and ‘Farker’ were common variants, the latter appearing in the register of his burial. When the first edition of Love and a Bottle was published, a newspaper listed the author as ‘Farghner’; at a second attempt the editor managed the even more wayward ‘Farynhens’, a sign of both confusion and how little it mattered to be exact in such things when the bearer was Irish.39 Among those 7,500 Irish migrants to London, there cannot have been many Farquhars, and none distinguished enough yet to make the name stick.

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9

He was by no means the only dramatist of the period to make the journey from Dublin to London, but he alone sought to make capital of his Irishness. Four other significant playwrights emerged from Ireland during the Restoration period, together with minor figures such as Nicholas Brady and John Wilson.40 Their histories provide context for understanding how Farquhar framed his own migration through drama, and how unfitted he was for the kind of cultural translation he imagined in his plays.

(iii) Too embroiled in the identity crises of high politics to worry unduly about those befalling humbler migrants, Roger Boyle, First Earl of Orrery, was born at Lismore Castle and went on to study at Trinity Dublin.41 Loyal to Charles I, he maintained contact with the exiled Prince Charles after the King’s death. Discovering the correspondence, Cromwell ordered him back to Ireland, where he assisted in the brutal suppression of the royalist rebellion in 1650. Come 1660, his colours switched back. The contradictions of his position, and his exposure to French classical drama, were articulated in a series of heroic plays that helped audiences of the 1660s deal with the passage from regicide to Restoration.42 Dilemmas of honour and allegiance now seem stilted as expressed in Orrery’s rhyming couplets, but their stark binarism rang true for spectators like Samuel Pepys, himself a servant of old and new regimes. Just as importantly, the plays end well for the virtuous and deserving. If Orrery’s dramas played out anxieties with regime change, they also showed him to be a man confident of safe harbour whatever the circumstances. Nahum Tate’s background was much more like Farquhar’s.43 Not only his father but both his grandfathers were Protestant clergymen (both father and brother were called Faithful). The family probably suffered in the Catholic rebellion of 1641. Tate’s father was a published poet in his own right, although his lengthy verses on the Trinity, Ter Tria (1658), have failed to impress literary historians. As a student at Trinity Dublin, Tate learned enough Latin to make him a competent translator of Juvenal, Ovid and Heliodorus; he even shared published space with John Dryden.44 By the mid-1670s, in his mid-twenties, he was in London writing genre verse. Stimulated by national politics, he took to drama in the Popish Plot years upon Roman inspiration: his first play, Brutus of Alba, overlaid Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history of Britain onto Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid. Best known are his adaptations of Shakespeare: versions of Coriolanus, Richard II and, notoriously, King Lear, that recrafted the originals around new political and aesthetic circumstances.45 Whatever merits are attributed to his libretto to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (?1684), they involve service to the music rather than any literary distinction.

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GEORGE FARQUHAR: A MIGRANT LIFE REVERSED

Tate was prolific, with seventy-three published works to his name, and his facility was parasitic. Gerard Langbaine, scourge of the new-found sin of plagiarism, declared that ‘generally he follows other Mens Models and builds on their Foundations’.46 Theophilus Cibber linked ease of composition to suavity of manner: ‘a man of learning, courteous and candid, but … possess[ed of] no great genius, as being deficient in what is its first characteristic, name, invention’.47 Charles Gildon agreed, describing Tate as a ‘Person of great Probity of Manner, Learning, and Good Nature’: qualities Gildon asserted had counted against him in a world where ‘it is the noisy pushing Man in Poetry, as well as other things, that prevails with Fame as well as Fortune’.48 But Tate’s fortunes were hardly as ill as Farquhar’s. True, he died evading arrest for debt in 1715 at the age of sixty-three, but he had at least spent the previous twenty-three years as Poet Laureate. With his own occasional paeans to Queen Anne, Farquhar probably envied him the role. Whatever his misfortunes, Tate achieved the success Farquhar craved: an Irish Protestant who, translating classics in the company of ‘eminent hands’, translated himself successfully from studious undergraduate to migrant writer to establishment poet. Even Tate did not acquire the respectability – still less the longevity – attained by a third Trinity graduate, Thomas Southerne.49 The son of a Dublin brewer, Southerne was in London by 1680, when he enrolled at the Middle Temple. Like Tate, he was drawn to the theatre by politics. By February 1682 he had written his first play, The Loyal Brother, whose title announced support for James, Duke of York, Catholic heir to the throne. Southerne allied himself to a group of playwrights defending the Tory succession cause, for whom constitutional obligations overrode religious objections.50 Like Orrery, Southerne would learn to adapt. Having enlisted in Princess Anne’s Regiment of the Duke of Berwick’s Foot in 1687, he found himself on the wrong side of history the following year when James II fled to France. Southerne promptly left the army. When he returned to playwriting, he flourished in a new world of enlightened drama more inclined to portray female suffering than male domination, and so helping to establish the trend Farquhar would exploit in The Beaux’ Stratagem.51 Although his dark comedy of 1691, The Wives Excuse, proved too challenging in its reversal of Restoration comic conventions, The Fatal Marriage (1694) and Oroonoko (1695) earned him a reputation for portraying passion with dignity. Like Farquhar, he endured commercial failures and periods of silence, in the latter case stretched out over decades; unlike Farquhar, he gained the respect of influential fellow writers, befriending Pope and Addison. He died at the grand old age of eighty-six, up to twenty years after writing his last play. While his writing career was no more or less of a success than Farquhar’s, he had the knack of ingratiating himself into polite society in a way that eluded his younger compatriot. When The Wives Excuse played to unenthusiastic audiences in 1691, one of the reasons given was that it was too satirical about the people Southerne had come to know outside the theatre; having

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been admitted to salons and clubs, he had betrayed their rules of trust.52 He never made the same mistake again. A fourth Trinity graduate who became a Restoration playwright was not Irish, but his transition to London provides the starkest contrast with Farquhar’s. William Congreve, born in Yorkshire, came from a military family with roots in Staffordshire who moved to Ireland when the dramatist’s father was appointed to lead the garrison at Youghal, County Cork. Like Southerne, Congreve moved to London to study law but soon started writing; like Farquhar, one of his earliest attempts was not a play but a novella. But where Farquhar’s The Adventures of Covent-Garden was an excited and satirical novitiate’s view of the big city, Congreve’s Incognita (1692) was a maturely crafted experiment in how to realize the rules of classical comedy in prose fiction.53 Farquhar would go on to decry playwrights who, lacking natural talent, followed the Aristotelian rulebook.54 In Congreve London had a writer for whom the two worked in tandem. While his second play, The Double Dealer (1694), was not his greatest commercial success, it was a fine example of how intricate plotting and subtle characterization could accompany strict observance of the dramatic unities of time, place and action. His masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), begins with an edgy card game between rivals and ends with them exchanging threats of legal action, exhibiting a narrative poise that generally eluded Farquhar. Congreve’s success, buoyed by masters such as Dryden, Pope and Swift, allowed him to withdraw from the theatre as though it were beneath him; greeting Voltaire, he is alleged to have said that he wished to be visited as a gentleman rather than a mere writer.55 Having made the journey from Ireland to London he achieved the conventional migrant’s dream of a prosperous life populated by equally successful acquaintances.56 When set alongside Farquhar, he was the finished article.

(iv) The dedicatory epistles Farquhar wrote for the publication of his plays flesh out his marginal place in society. Dedications announced social capital in the hope that readers might favour a play in print even when its performance had failed.57 They might earn a playwright up to ten guineas from the dedicatee. The master of the dedication as networking tool and artistic medium was John Dryden, who did not stoop to a genre he claimed to regard with suspicion unless the dedicatee met a certain quality threshold. The First Earl of Orrery, the Duke and Duchess of Monmouth, the Dukes of Newcastle and York, and the Earls of Leicester, Sunderland, Rochester and Danby all sponsored his work; the furthest down the social ladder he climbed was in asking a minor baronet, Sir William Leveson Gower, to accept Amphitryon in 1690.58

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Influential friends were, for Farquhar, hard to come by; Theophilus Cibber observed that his ‘straitened’ circumstances ‘prevented his mingling with persons of rank’, although it is doubtful whether the ‘more finished characters’ and ‘more polished dialogue’ that might have resulted would, as Cibber asserts, have improved his plays.59 His creative distinction was in his ostracism. Any thought of finding a patron for The Beaux’ Stratagem was smothered by Farquhar’s early death. The most that could be managed was this sorry ‘Advertisement’: The Reader may find some faults in this play, which my illness prevented the amending of, but there is great amends made in the representation, which cannot be matched, no more than the friendly and indefatigable care of Mr Wilks, to whom I chiefly owe the success of this play.60 The printed text, raised to the status of a handsome monument in numerous dedications, is here humbled as an inferior annex to the performance, with the mere actor pre-eminent over the author. Even for The Recruiting Officer, a success in the theatre to a degree that might have merited aristocratic attention, Farquhar relied on humbler acquaintance. He dedicated the play only ‘To All Friends round the Wrekin’ who had entertained him during his army service, taking the opportunity to triumph sarcastically over Thomas Durfey, whose new play had premiered at the rival theatre and lost out.61 Drunk with the success of a single play, he did not believe he needed to build his social capital further. The audience supplied friends enough. It was a reaction not just to recent success but to prior disappointment. Before The Recruiting Officer his history with patrons had been one of slow decline and disillusionment. First he took a shot in the dark. Love and a Bottle is dedicated to a man he had never met: Peregrine, Lord Marquiss of Carmarthen, son of the Duke of Leeds and appointed Rear Admiral the year before. Shirley Strum Kenny speculates that Farquhar may have been seeking a naval commission.62 He begins like a nervous visitor stammering at the door: Being equally a stranger to your Lordship, and the whole Nobility of this Kingdom, something of a natural impulse and aspiring motion in my inclinations, has prompted me, tho I hazard a presumption, to declare my Respect.63 Carmarthen is portrayed as an ideal of manly vigour, full of ‘youthful Bravery and Courage’, a fit companion for Peter the Great during his visit to London that year.64 There is no indication that the young Rear Admiral so much as noticed the compliment. Farquhar’s novella of 1698, The Adventures of Covent-Garden, was dedicated summarily ‘To all my Ingenious Acquaintance at Will’s Coffee-House’, but with no epistle between that title and his signature.65 Will’s was John Dryden’s domain, widely conceived as London’s

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literary HQ: ‘There is a kind of Unity among the Great Ones, to preserve the Commerce of the Stage to themselves, as our Companies do their Trade to Guinea, and the Indies’, wrote William Walker before adding, with an eye to arrivistes such as Farquhar, ‘they treat any Upstart, who Barters his Wit there, like an Interloper’.66 Even a man as settled as Pepys might look on with name-dropping envy at ‘Draydon the poet (I knew at Cambridge), and all the wits of the town’ as they filled the coffee house with ‘very witty and pleasant discourse’.67 Farquhar’s dedication, which he described in the Preface to The Adventures of Covent-Garden as a deliberate ‘Blank’, is an admission that he can say nothing to justify sitting among the ‘Ingenious Acquaintance’ at Will’s. It is a business card without logo or job title. This time, the nervous stammering is directed towards a door shut in his face. Farquhar’s next play, his greatest commercial success in his lifetime, The Constant Couple, was dedicated to Sir Roger Mostyn of Flintshire, whose political career was in its infancy; Mostyn was not elected to parliament until the following year.68 For weight of influence he fell several notches below the Marquiss of Carmarthen. Once again, the dedication begins with a chip on its shoulder: ‘I am too young an author to have learnt the art of flattery.’69 It cannot be written off as the conventional self-denial of the dedicatory genre. The sophistication of Dryden’s efforts in the same vein makes it not entirely ironic for him to state that ‘dedication is grown more an art than poetry’. Farquhar is an outsider in the business of cultivating friends in high places, but builds on his admiration for Carmarthen by choosing for protection of someone who represents all that the migrant Irishman aspires to and can never possess. Mostyn combines ‘the Fire of Youth, with the Sedateness of a Senatour, and the Modern Gaity of a fine English Gentleman, with the noble Solidity of the Ancient Britton.70 Recollecting his unworthiness for the task of praising such a man, Farquhar admits that ‘more celebrated pens than mine’ should attempt it. He got the reward his reticence predicted. A modern editor observes drily that he ‘does not appear to have been helped by this dedication’.71 Farquhar could be excused for thinking he did not need it, given the success of the play with audiences. But since its success inevitably made him enemies, he needed more than ever to cultivate friends rather than lose them. He and John Oldmixon had been on good terms until The Constant Couple drew audiences away from Oldmixon’s opera, The Grove, so creating an obvious target. Farquhar’s play, Oldmixon complained, was a farcical jumble of incoherent elements, in contrast to the refined entertainment that supposedly was The Grove.72 Although Oldmixon appears to have extended an olive branch months later, his reservations about Farquhar’s work lingered in the obituary he wrote for his former friend in May 1707.73 The success of The Constant Couple, and Farquhar’s intervening trip to Holland, gave him his cue for the most influential dedicatee he ever secured. Arnold Joost van Keppel had accompanied William III to England in 1688. He was made Earl of Albemarle in 1696 and became Colonel of the First

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Swiss Regiment in the Netherlands in 1701. Farquhar made his acquaintance during his own trip there, again perhaps seeking a commission.74 If Keppel was an obvious choice for the virulently anti-Catholic tone of Sir Harry Wildair (1701), Farquhar’s gesture occasioned adverse comment the following year. Richard Steele dedicated The Funeral (1701) to Keppel’s wife, and a satire duly bracketed his and Farquhar’s dedications together as the work of ‘two dirty poets in their Damnable plays’.75 For the third time in a row Farquhar plays the neophyte card: ‘My Pen is both a Novice in Poetry, and a Stranger at Court.’ His next thought is to single himself out among ‘that Crowd of Followers that daily attend upon your Lordship’s Favour’, inviting Keppel to ‘behold a Stranger’ too inexperienced for formal panegyric and too sincere to ‘stoop to the Art of Flattery’.76 The cringing formalities of the dedicatory epistle provide the perfect framework for Farquhar’s selfimagining as an outsider, even at the third attempt. It is tempting to dismiss the biographical authenticity of his writing on the grounds that much of it is generic and rule-bound. However, the way authors manipulate or merely submit to their genres remains a matter of serious biographical interest.77 Love and Business, a miscellany of poems and letters published in late 1701, is dedicated to a much humbler connection, but one who at least helped Farquhar’s family in their later distress. Edmund Chaloner was a treasury commissioner who saved the widowed Margaret Farquhar from the debtor’s prison and, after her death, cared for her children.78 Yet even this kindly benefactor appears to have declined the opportunity to stand patron for one of Farquhar’s plays.79 Like Mostyn and Keppel, he presents Farquhar with an image of military heroism written into the family lineage. Sir Thomas Chaloner the Elder had fought at the Battle of Musselburgh in 1547, negotiated peace with Philip II of Spain and became ambassador there. More than that, he was a poet and translator, bridging the careers Farquhar craved, although even Farquhar must have swallowed hard in describing him as ‘one of the greatest Poets that ever England produced’ by virtue of some Latin verses and a translation of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. By the time Farquhar wrote The Inconstant the obvious signs of the outsider’s neurosis had disappeared, but this was a mere adaptation and its dedicatee little more than an old college friend. Richard Tighe matriculated at Trinity Dublin the year before Farquhar as a scholar-commoner, permitted to eat with the scholars and with every reason to look down with them upon the mere sizars. Again Farquhar lighted upon someone who had not yet achieved influence; Tighe did not become an MP until 1703.80 By now, at least, Farquhar had learned a golden rule of the dedicatory epistle by arguing that his patron was the model for his protagonist: Mirabel, ‘a gay, splendid, generous, easie, fine young Gentleman’.81 Then he admits to ‘a bent to that kind of description’, reflected in Roebuck from Love and a Bottle and the two plays about Sir Harry Wildair – images of the independent, carefree masculinity he failed to attain himself.

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In Henry Bret (or Brett), dedicatee of The Twin-Rivals (1702), Farquhar found another instance of the type and someone ahead of Tighe in polite society. Colley Cibber praised Bret’s ‘uncommon Share of Social Wit, and … handsome Person, with a sanguine Bloom in his Complexion’.82 Establishment charm blended with social risk. Oxford-educated, Bret began to study law, became the MP for Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire in 1701 and married Anne Gerard, the divorced wife of the Earl of Macclesfield and mother of two illegitimate children by Earl Rivers. Like Farquhar, he joined the army briefly, but as a Lieutenant Colonel; like Farquhar, he took to the theatre but as a manager, having bought Thomas Skipwith’s Drury Lane patent in 1707.83 Farquhar channelled his disappointment with his latest play’s reception into a more confident dedication, aligning Bret’s twin love of theatre and parliamentary debate in a way that would resonate throughout the eighteenth century.84 He had found his dedicatory groove, but only as his disappointment with the theatre mounted. The Preface that follows lists all the reasons why audiences objected to his latest play.85 Bret was his final dedicatee before he joined the army and gave up on people he thought might have some influence. He was, at least, proved right in the long run. The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux’ Stratagem, his two most enduring successes, managed perfectly well without them. His fellow Trinity alumni did much better. Thomas Southerne rapidly acquired influential patrons and penetrated literary circles denied to Farquhar. His first play, The Loyal Brother (1682), is dedicated to the Duke of Richmond, with a prologue by Dryden, who continued to write in his favour and with whom he collaborated on a play of 1692, Cleomenes.86 While Southerne conventionally professes infancy as a playwright, he does so in a playful way that speaks of a confident sense of destiny. The play is ‘the first fruits of my Muse’, laid before Richmond like a ‘Maiden-head’.87 His subsequent dedications almost exclusively draw connections with the upper echelons of society or people of real influence in the theatre; in the early phases of his career he does not, unlike Farquhar, linger over the idea that as a relative beginner he needs special protection. Addressing the Earl of Ossory in his second play, The Disappointment (1684), he says he is now ‘hardened … against the malice of detraction’, a state of personal resilience Farquhar struggled to attain.88 Southerne was actively supported by successive Earls of Orrery;89 after Farquhar’s death, his widow had to beg the Earl just to confirm that her late husband had been in his regiment. If the secret of Southerne’s accommodation within English society was the favour extended to him by the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, the key to Farquhar’s alienation is his exclusion by the same cadre. When Pope described Ireland as the ‘mother of sweet singers’, he did not have Farquhar’s voice in mind.90 Nahum Tate’s plays were dedicated to a succession of minor aristocrats, gentlemen and officials, but his poems aimed much higher.91 Even before his appointment as Poet Laureate in 1692 he had been dedicating his poetry to members of the royal family; his first collection, Poems Written on Several

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Occasions (1684), is addressed to the future Queen Anne.92 For consistency, admittedly across a smaller oeuvre, Congreve did no worse than Dryden himself. The Old Bachelour (1693) was dedicated to Lord Clifford of Lanesborough; The Double Dealer (1694) to Charles Mountague, one of the Treasury Lords; Love for Love (1695) to the Earl of Dorset; The Mourning Bride (1697) to Princess – later Queen – Anne; and The Way of the World (1700) to Ralph, Earl of Mountague. The overlaps with Tate’s own list of patrons suggest how tightly drawn the circle of influence might be.

(v) Marginal in the literary society of late Restoration London, Farquhar has remained an outsider in literary history, in spite of sometimes grandiose claims for his importance as an ‘English’ writer.93 Eugene Nelson James details a 250-year heritage of comparative criticism in which Farquhar sometimes rises to equality with other Restoration dramatists but often dips below them.94 He reproduces a table in which Oliver Goldsmith, writing in 1758, rated Farquhar highly for ‘Genius’ and ‘Judgment’ but marked him down for ‘Learning’ and ‘Versification’.95 He charts more explicit twentiethcentury denunciations such as John Palmer’s, who thought of Farquhar as an inferior Congreve, and Louis Kronenberger’s, who argued that Farquhar, precisely because of his gifts, buried the tradition he inherited. While he was ‘richer in humanity and sheer creative fancy’ than Congreve, Etherege and Vanbrugh, he ‘killed Restoration comedy as it had existed’. As though humanity and creative fancy counted for nothing, Kronenberger adds that ‘he killed it without creating anything better or even counter-balancing’, so casting Farquhar as some desperate literary iconoclast, taking vengeance on the coffee-house establishment that had scorned him.96 Yet Farquhar’s inclusive lens influenced the landmark theatrical success of the early eighteenth century, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera.97 He contributed to the emergent ‘sentimental’ style of comedy, which privileged women’s rights over men’s and emphasized the role of right feeling in creating a harmonious society.98 In turn, that transitional place in literary history has been disputed. In 1970 A.N. Kaul downplayed Farquhar’s agency in creating the new sentimental comedy; seven years on, Shirley Strum Kenny defined his style instead as ‘humane’, the sum of complex characters and the kind of realistic dialogue that Alexander Pope would find ‘pert’ and ‘low’.99 A feature of that humane style is Farquhar’s distinctive use of what may appear to be a clumsy device, the aside. Where Congreve and Wycherley use the aside to reveal deceitfulness or game-playing, Farquhar’s characters provide a gentler counterbalance by offsetting sentiment with irony, and turpitude with correctness.100 Such vivid and multi-layered characterization has led some critics to link Farquhar’s individuality as a dramatist to the emergence of the novel, seeing in his later plays a premonition of Fielding’s

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1749 Tom Jones. That tendency is most pronounced among those writing histories of the ‘long’ Restoration or eighteenth century and so requiring a convenient fulcrum between periods and genres.101 Eugene Nelson James’s conclusion in 1972 was that a ‘new critical study’ was needed, free from the shackles of traditional Farquhar criticism, whether autobiographical, comparative or otherwise.102 A review of work published since suggests that his monograph, for all its many virtues, has not had the impact he hoped. Introducing The Constant Couple in 1988, Simon Trussler noted that Farquhar has ‘not been a frequent subject for monographs’, and that more general studies of Restoration Drama ‘tend to “squeeze” him, either chronologically or into their own critical straightjacket’.103 Even Robert D. Hume’s comprehensive 1976 survey of the period cites his work merely as an instance of broader shifts in comic style. John Palmer’s view that Farquhar was an inferior Congreve lies behind Jocelyn Powell’s Restoration Theatre Production, which gives spacious salons to Congreve while consigning Farquhar to a bottom drawer.104 In John Loftis’s anthology of critical essays, Restoration Drama, he does not feature at all; in an earlier volume Loftis had regarded him as interesting largely because of his social topicality. Farquhar is taken more seriously in Derek Hughes’s English Drama 1660–1700, but Hughes pitches his argument at an altitude where lived experience is transformed into philosophy. Where Farquhar is to Hume an incidental episode in the history of genres, to Hughes he is an instance – albeit a distinctive one – of theoretical power relations between the sexes.105 Farquhar has fared even worse in Irish literary history. In a standard survey of Irish theatre, he is dismissed for ‘vicious anti-Catholicism’.106 From broader histories of Irish literature he is excluded altogether, given only a passing mention, or praised for his first two plays, less satirical in their view of Ireland.107 That is, David Clare points out, as much a problem for Irish literary history as it is for Farquhar’s memory: As a Protestant writer of Ulster Scots and Anglo-Irish descent, his work expresses the sentiments of Irish communities who have too often been excluded from … definitions of the word ‘Irish’.108 This returns us to the core biographical issue. Amid the many attempts to pin down the quality that made Farquhar unlike any other writer of his time, two obvious facts have been largely overlooked in the haste to abandon the autobiographical tradition: that he was from Ireland and that he had left that country for London.109 Kenny goes so far as to deny that Farquhar’s origins had anything to do with the opprobrium his work attracted.110 But the transitional quality literary historians have found in his work was for him a lived reality of cultural adjustment and rejection, a reality repeated in the lives of later Anglo-Irish writers who found themselves falling between definitions of identity. Where recent criticism of Anglo-Irish fiction has focused on Protestant writers’ relationships to Ireland as members of a

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relatively privileged social group, it is Farquhar’s experience of London as an impoverished writer that is the concern here.111 A more serviceable parallel is with Commonwealth migration to post-war Britain, where loyalty to the mother country was challenged by the experience of rejection and poverty that make staying as difficult as going back, and the establishment of a normative cultural identity a dream reserved for works of fiction. Moreover, the London where Farquhar sought to settle was a place whose ideological lines were sharpened not by memories of war, but by its living reality.

(vi) In 1840 Leigh Hunt declared Farquhar ‘the finest dramatic genius’ of the Restoration period and ‘the most likely to be of lasting popularity’. The grounds? Farquhar’s ‘fits of the deepest sympathy, the greatest wish to please rather than strike, the most agreeable diversity of character’. He also found Farquhar to be a more conventionally moralistic writer than his contemporaries, ‘avoiding the revolting extravagances of the time’.112 If this avoided the ‘vicious anti-Catholicism’ identified by Irish literary historians, it also skated over the peculiar misery of an alienated life. For William Archer, writing in 1906, sympathy and alienation combined to form a unique creative force: in his reading, Farquhar released comedy from the ‘circle of malign enchantment’ that characterized the work of Congreve and Vanbrugh, whose work Archer found populated by ‘a small coterie of exceedingly disagreeable people’ capable of ‘sheer nastiness’.113 Modern critics have agreed about Farquhar’s tone, if not his status. Robert D. Hume declared the tone of The Recruiting Officer to be ‘genial’.114 Directing the 1988 Royal Shakespeare Company revival of The Constant Couple, Roger Michell hailed Farquhar as a writer who had learned from his experience of acting, creating ‘wonderful, clearly differentiated roles in a language which is always clear, conversational and precise, and now and then startlingly vernacular and naturalistic’. More than that, he credits Farquhar with drawing characters who have ‘a capacity for genuine vulnerability’; there is neither satire nor ridicule for ‘the new world to which he was exposed’ since he preferred to ‘celebrate and applaud it’.115 If it is timely to have so sharp a distinction between Farquhar and Congreve, such a view nevertheless falls into the familiar trap of overlooking the standpoint of exclusion and disorientation from which Farquhar found it within himself to ‘celebrate and applaud’. Two older critical voices strike a better balance. In 1891 Edmund Gosse observed that Farquhar ‘lies even further from literature than Vanbrugh, but he has a greater knowledge of life’.116 It is the kind of comment often reserved for writers who are social outsiders and it draws on a tradition that cast Shakespeare as an unlearned genius.117 In 1924 Bonamy Dobree lighted on the ambiguous qualities highlighted thirty years later in Fitzroy

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Pyle’s tribute: ‘Life was a discoloured and painful thing to him, and the only remedy was to treat it as a game.’ Yet that game was no rarefied construct – ‘not the delicate intellectual game of Etherege’ – but the kind often associated with Fielding, Smollett and, in Dobree’s mind, a much earlier period. Farquhar, he argues, was a dab hand at the ‘good Elizabethan romp’, socially inclusive and full of what Leigh Hunt called ‘the highest animal spirits’ – the very qualities that make his plays a continuing success in the theatre, and oblige any critic to pay attention to them in their natural locale rather than simply on the page.118 That view was further endorsed in 1924 by Ashley H. Thorndike, who compared Farquhar’s ‘contagious gaiety’ to John Fletcher, Shakespeare’s collaborator and successor among the King’s Men.119 If that was a tribute to Farquhar, it further compounded his status as a misfit, the creature of another period as well as another place. At a time when literary production and literary history sought to detach the present from the past, he had a knack of reminding people of values and trends they believed had been left behind.120 The out-of-joint quality of his plays is emphasized by the way in which they respond to modern theatre spaces. Chapter 3 of this book reflects on the difficulty of staging The Beaux’ Stratagem in a vast space such as the Olivier auditorium at London’s National Theatre. Roger Michell’s 1988 production of The Constant Couple, by contrast, was perfectly attuned to an arena designed specifically for the revival of English Renaissance Drama: the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan at Stratford-Upon-Avon, where audience and performers share space so intimately that it was possible, at the performance this spectator saw, for the actor playing Clincher Senior to ask someone on the front row to hold his drink during the country dance that closed the show.121 Without loss of high definition (Clincher Senior was brilliantly played by Simon Russell Beale, wide-eyed and speechless at the loss of his favourite clothes), this was Restoration Drama thriving in the kind of space most Restoration theatre practitioners regarded as typical of an uncivilized past.

(vii) Just as his plays proved more popular after his death than those of his rivals, so Farquhar has migrated more successfully than any other Restoration dramatist to the imaginations of later writers. There are numerous European translations of his work.122 In Trumpets and Drums (1955), Bertolt Brecht grafted onto The Recruiting Officer a recruitment drive for the American War of Independence, but still set in Shrewsbury. At the 1956 London premiere sat William Gaskill, his interest in Farquhar’s original duly sparked.123 The marketplace speech by Kite that opens Farquhar’s play serves naturally as a Brechtian chorus in which the audience is invited to join a dishonest enterprise:

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I’m Sergeant Barras Kite, now gathering a company To help our good King George. For across the sea In His Majesty’s colony America There’s rebellion such as no man ever saw … … Who among you, in exchange for a handsome uniform and plenty of fodder Will defend our dear old England … ?124 In Scene Two, Justice Balance enters reading, with some disgust, a draft of the Declaration of Independence: ‘All men are created equal … ’ Where does the Bible say that? – ‘Liberty and the pursuit of happiness … ’ So here it is in black and white; these new ideas we’ve heard so much about. It’s base greed, that’s what it is.125 Brecht’s indignation flips from the old world to the new: there are noble ideals Balance can’t see, but there is also base greed. Brecht’s representation of Kite’s victims is less ambiguous but calls into question the ‘genial’ quality some critics have found in Farquhar’s original. In The Recruiting Officer Kite’s first success is to coax a compliant ‘mob’ into marching off to huzzas and drumrolls. Updating Plume on his progress, Kite proudly announces he has ‘been here but a week and … recruited five’, confirming that ‘the mob are so pleased … that we shall soon do our business’.126 Did this require Brecht’s intervention? In Trumpets and Drums, Kite’s five is a failure, his influence over the ‘mob’ negligible: Kite

Plume Kite

I ask this rabble, as is my bounden duty: doesn’t your English blood boil in your veins when those American dirt farmers and fur trappers refuse to pay taxes to our good King George? Well? Their answers weren’t nice. I’ve been here a full week and only recruited five.127

This only rams home the point made in the previous scene, where Coster Pearmain answers Kite’s blandishments with all the clarity of a conscientious objector: Look ’ere, sergeant; no coaxing and wheedling. You can’t pull the wool over my eyes. Take back your cap and your brothermanship, because I ain’t in the mood today.128 The willingness of Farquhar’s ‘mob’ is arguably the more instructive sight. The broader refashioning that is Trumpets and Drums privileges the public lives of the characters over the private pasts explored by Farquhar. Recruiting for war is exposed not just as false patriotism but as economic

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interest: Plume’s friend Worthy is turned by Brecht into a boot manufacturer supplying the army. This was in tune with the historical moment of Trumpets and Drums, although history threatened to wriggle free of Brecht’s analysis. In 1955 the relatively new state of West Germany was beginning to re-arm, making Kite’s opening chorus an uncomfortable experience for audiences, but the communist-run East was re-arming too. As he was working on the play, Brecht was preparing to travel to Moscow to receive that dubious honour, the Stalin Peace Prize. It did occur to him to wonder whether Trumpets and Drums might have to be postponed. Some of Brecht’s revisions make it seem like the work of a narrowly partisan writer, but it manifestly speaks against empires of all colours. Empire was the foundation of Farquhar’s next leap into time travel. Robert Hughes’s 1987 history of the founding of modern Australia, The Fatal Shore, brought to light a curiosity in the stage history of Farquhar’s play. Already it was known that The Beaux’ Stratagem was probably the first play to have been performed in Florida, where a group of Tory refugees watched a performance in 1783.129 Hughes identified a parallel event. The journal of a British Naval Lieutenant, Ralph Clark, tells how a group of transported convicts performed The Recruiting Officer at Sydney in 1789.130 The event was re-imagined by Thomas Keneally in his own book of 1987, The Playmaker. Catching the tide of interest, Max Stafford-Clark commissioned Timberlake Wertenbaker to devise a 1988 adaptation of Keneally’s novel (eventually entitled Our Country’s Good) that would play in tandem with a new production of The Recruiting Officer. Stafford-Clark pursued the idea with a later production of The Man of Mode that played alongside Stephen Jeffreys’s The Libertine, which dramatized the life of Etherege’s presumed model, the Earl of Rochester.131 The process was one of reverse adaptation, where the original text is left to its own devices but speaks in dialogue with a later text created in its shadow. Playwright Wertenbaker was keener than novelist Keneally to cast Farquhar’s work in a positive light. The hero of The Playmaker, Ralph Clark, falls foul of Farquhar’s geniality only to discover his mistake: As Ralph’s version of The Recruiting Officer neared its end, as all the characters grew not only redeemable but worthy of congratulation, the players and the playmaker Ralph himself were left with the sense that life could be easily amended, that love was an easy ploy, and that everyone really intended the best. Ralph considered that in the real world it might also be the case that there was always too much hidden, and too much to take into account. It was only within the circumference of a play, and particularly of a comedy, that all characters could be so deftly delivered from their meanness … though art perpetually improved itself, society went its reckless and complicated way.132

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Lonely and separated from his wife by 12,000 miles, he falls for his Silvia, a convict called Mary Brenham (in real life he abandoned her and their daughter and sailed back to England). The chaplain of the penal colony, Dick Johnson, upbraids him in the tones of Jeremy Collier, scourge of Restoration playwrights: First I come to you and counsel you against a play. The play finds fornication funny, fidelity a joke and woman a fickle organ of pleasure. But it is merely an entertainment, you say. Yet now I approach you under circumstances which have made the conditions of that play incarnate in this cove, on this shore, in your very household, Ralph. Adultery is a laughing matter for you now, fidelity is a joke and woman is an organ of pleasure! The play – as I warned – has become your very life.133 The novel leaves Ralph guilt-crushed for his infidelity and renders the performance more shambolic than history suggests, with crime, punishment and colonialism providing noises off and on. This ‘sputter of the European humour on the edge of a continent’ would lead, Keneally posits, to the end of ‘the different and serious theatre of the tribes of the hinterland’ – as unlikely a legacy for Farquhar as any he could imagine.134 The text of Wertenbaker’s play is prefaced with letters from contemporary convicts who benefited from exposure to theatre. Their enthusiasm colours Our Country’s Good, which counters Keneally’s colonial pessimism with arts therapy. Ralph Clark’s penultimate speech suggests that far from obliterating the indigenous cultural landscape, The Recruiting Officer looks forward to the modern state idealized in the revolutionary year, 1789: ‘The theatre is like a small republic,’ he tells his company, ‘it requires private sacrifices for the good of the whole.’ Watching Stafford-Clark’s production it was easy to revel in this enactment and defence of theatre while forgetting Keneally’s postcolonial purpose. But both the Florida performance of 1783 and the Botany Bay show six years later disclose a poignant truth about the appeal of Farquhar’s plays to people like him: the dislocated, the wanderers, the ones who find themselves on foreign shores having to craft a new identity.

(viii) How to capture the contradictions of Farquhar’s writing life in a biography, especially one based on relatively fragmentary evidence? This one has so far told the story twice: the first as an entry in a reference book might and the second as a sequence of attempts to interest patrons or friends in his printed work; both in chronological order, according to the usual biographical process. But there is no longer a ‘usual’ course for any biographer. The final journey or work, the deathbed scene, the funeral: all have become as common starting points for biographers as family trees

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or pseudo-poetic evocations of home towns and favourite places. Friends, objects, reading habits and a host of alternative metonyms provide the modern biographer with any number of structuring principles to disturb the inevitable progress from youth to age. Even so, David Nokes, an exceptional literary biographer who before his death thought of writing about Farquhar, described the genre in which he excelled as a complacent one. Too often, he argued, literary biography finds in every childhood event some premonition of a later masterpiece. Literary biographers, he added, have an extraordinary knack of ignoring episodes less prophetic. Such biographies are like novels ‘written backwards’: all anticipation and no revelation.135 After all, life is lived forwards, without foreknowledge, and must be represented as such. Chronology may be the route to understanding a life’s sequence, but it is only one among many to grasping its meaning; or rather, not so much grasping as embodying. Every biography does both but with varying degrees of self-awareness. So many biographers favour a birth-to-death approach that we might be forgiven for thinking biography is not a distinct literary form at all, merely an act of mimesis whose aim is to dissolve the difference between life and narrative. Yet the artifice of strict chronology remains palpable. Telling the story forwards creates a familiarity between reader and subject that borders on the familial: knowing the ‘Other’ from birth and exercising the ‘sympathy’ or even ‘love’ articulated by Emmanuel Levinas, the reader sits with the writer metaphorically in loco parentis.136 Such a design sits well even with formalists such as Eric Rothstein, whose main purpose is to articulate Farquhar’s development from jejune experiment to moral and aesthetic maturity: a cipher for linear biography rather than an alternative. Yet alternative designs abound, some of them radical. In 2005, Alexander Masters’s Stuart: A Life Backwards traced the life of a homeless man from the present day towards a childhood that combined abuse, illness, violence and bereavement in shocking proportions, so ‘matching a topsy-turvy structure to a topsy-turvy life’.137 Masters was driven by social and psychological conviction. By showing that Stuart had never had what others would call choices, he hoped to show how his current trauma was as traceable as Oedipus’s to a disastrous past. Defeated by the multiplicity of his subject’s woes, he clutched at straws until Stuart admitted it was his discovery of violence that made him the wreck he had become. The reverse structure did more than offer a compelling metaphor for the particular nature of the subject: it foregrounded the business of research. Masters’s greatest achievement, arguably, is in paying a finer Levinasian respect to his ‘Other’ by staging the obstacles to – and rewards of – knowing him at all. His reverse narrative evolves in his own mind as well the reader’s as a drama of accelerating research accompanied by accelerating sympathy, even as Stuart resists all attempts to categorize him.

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In Farquhar’s case, as in migrant writing more generally, the meaning of ‘home’, its manifestation in a particular, originating place, and the misfortunes associated with it form necessary points of narrative convergence. As it was for Stuart, exposure to violence assumes importance in the quest to understand Farquhar. In literal terms Masters shows that ‘reverse biography’ is incompatible with the linear, forward motion of Roman script, which demands episodes of linear chronology such as are found here. However, a narrative in which key events are arranged in reverse order enacts the pull exerted on Farquhar’s career by past events and associations, as well as the fragility of his future ambitions. It emphasizes the way the ‘development’ model favoured by formalists, with its inexorable forward trajectory of moral and technical improvement, is challenged by cultural reversion and personal reversal, enforced from without and compelled from within. Farquhar’s migrant, fugitive life entailed a constant refocusing of past and future opportunity, the one consistently refreshing or undermining the other. In this narrative, his major works emerge not as a series of aesthetic experiments that exhibit growing capability and confidence. With heightened complexity came more profound fragmentation, an ever more distorted re-shaping of experience. The success of his best-known works, it may be said, lies not in the accuracy with which they portray Farquhar himself, but in their effort to do his experience justice. So, a life of reverses reversed: Farquhar endured multiple reversals of fortune, false dawns that left him despairing even as he tried to reverse the past in order to imagine a better future. Thanks to fresh discoveries about his early life the backwards narrative deployed here introduces that element of novelistic disclosure whose absence Nokes laments in conventional literary biography. Throughout, by necessity, past and present collide and interpenetrate. Such a choice of method necessarily erects a creative challenge for the reader, mitigations for which have already been introduced. The twin forward narratives so far told should form reference points should they be needed. In evaluating Farquhar’s life this book seeks to enact the process by which lives are discovered and understood via documents, networks, associates and other traces. The true occasion of biography, it has often been said, is not life but death, and the practitioner’s mission is to coax breath from the corpse of the subject, bringing back into the world a vanished presence by evoking the events and contexts that render it comprehensible. So, foregrounding the Farquhar we know best through his two late works, The Beaux’ Stratagem and The Recruiting Officer, this study delves progressively into the one we know much less well: migrant George, fugitive George, George the runaway. In the process it draws on the prearranged categories of migrancy criticism yet declines to adopt them mechanistically. Farquhar’s life is represented here as a singular and dynamic blend of both cultural and personal push and pull: an existence governed by the migrant’s wish for a new life and the fugitive’s desire to avoid and escape the old.

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In reverse gear, then, this biography peels away the facades and fantasies of belonging that accumulated during his short writing career, homing in eventually on the less disguised narratives of arrival that characterize his early work, and on his turbulent childhood. First come the efforts of Farquhar’s widow to survive her husband’s death by exploiting as best she could his literary legacy. Chapters follow on his last play, The Beaux’ Stratagem, and on his other and immediately preceding masterpiece, The Recruiting Officer. In both cases as much attention is paid to the plays in performance as on the page, Farquhar having always been recognized as a ‘repertory’ rather than a ‘canonical’ writer, his distinction now lying partly in the opportunities he gives to actors, directors and designers alike. The origins of The Recruiting Officer in his real experience of military life are the subject of Chapter 5. Next, Farquhar’s marriage, his occasional prose (including his own autobiographical sketch) and his attempts to curry favour with the self-consciously moral contingent of playgoers. Chapters 7 and 8 deal with his first major success, The Constant Couple, his relationship to the theatre company that produced it, his unsuccessful attempt at a sequel and his lesser plays. Then to his first appearance in London, and his friendship with Robert Wilks, an actor who served him better than any patron and whose story is controversial enough to merit its own biography. So, finally, to Farquhar’s family history, and the facts behind what his widow Margaret claimed was the truth when, in January 1709, she sat down to write to Queen Anne.

2 1709: A Widow’s Pension

(i) She is writing about her late and second husband, a soldier, Lieutenant of Grenadiers in the Earl of Orrery’s Regiment. He had died two years before, leaving her next to nothing. Already she has tried an oblique route to the Privy Chamber, lobbying Juliana, Lady Burlington, a lady in waiting. Promises were made, Margaret asserts, but none kept. In her desperation now, she has asked two Dukes and an Earl – Ormond, Bolton and Orrery – to lend their support. They agree, attesting neutrally to her late husband’s military service.1 Her petition to the Queen summarizes more distant memories that seem no less painful. She had sought help before in memory of her first husband, Benjamin Pemell, a man she describes here as an ‘officer’ in Colonel St John’s Regiment. Her new plea portrays him as a heroic scourge of the Catholic enemy. In 1696, she says, a French privateer had been terrorizing the Irish coast, intercepting shipping, disrupting the business of the army and providing succour to Irish rebels. So Pemell got a group of men together, commandeered a fishing boat and stormed the enemy ship. Eight Frenchmen died and another fourteen were wounded and captured, including the Captain. The privateer was duly brought into the port of Youghal, on the Cork coast. With impeccable fairness, Pemell went through the ship and divided the spoils of war among his men. King William himself had known of his bravery from someone Margaret calls ‘The Earl of Rumney, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland’, who must actually have been Charles Porter, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, the office having passed from Lord Capel to the Lords Justices in May 1696. But death had intervened in any prospect of reward. Pemell was ‘unfortunately kill’d’ before the King’s purse opened. The laconic term speaks loud. If he had died in action, Margaret would surely have tugged at the heart-strings and detailed the heroic circumstances; instead, his death sounds like some

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ignoble accident – random, sudden, even a little shameful. Her command of detail may be fuzzy, but she is not prepared to make extravagant claims. Whatever happened, it was a compounding of ill fortune. Pemell had been in the army only because he had, Margaret claimed, lost the best part of an inherited fortune of a thousand pounds a year. He never enjoyed the rewards of the ‘officer’ class she said he belonged to, because he was almost certainly never an officer; at least, Dalton’s Army Lists make no mention of him.2 Margaret was supporting him and her own fortune went the same way as his, leaving her with three children and no money. And so, five or six years on from Pemell’s exploits and plausibly his death, and already with an impressive history of bad luck and half-remembered truth behind her, Margaret married the late Lieutenant, George Farquhar. When they met he was no soldier, but the struggling author of five plays and a few occasional pieces. He had not yet written the two works that would preserve his name for posterity. Of interest to her, surely, was that he embodied everything Benjamin had tried to protect. The son of an ‘eminent divine of the Church of England in Ireland’, George had seen his family ‘plundered and burned’ out of house and fortune by a Catholic mob. In the aftermath, she adds, he had seen his father die of grief. Farquhar’s earliest biographer claims a comparable social status: ‘a Gentleman by Birth, being descended from a very good Family in Ireland’.3 William Chetwood, the Drury Lane prompter who published his own biographical essay in 1728 following conversations with Robert Wilks, describes ‘parents that held no mean rank’ in Ireland, albeit hampered by ‘numerous Issue’.4 Margaret then makes an extraordinary statement. As a boy, she writes, George had fought as a volunteer at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, a thirteen-year-old Orestes or Hamlet bent on avenging his father. The likelihood is she heard it from George. But a supplementary note adds that he finished his university studies soon afterwards, which suggests he had volunteered later or never, since there was no battle in Ireland after Aughrim in July 1691. One thing is certain: George had served as a Lieutenant in the Earl of Orrery’s Regiment. She is particular about his rank; Pemell she describes as an ‘officer’ in the confidence that the facts could be stretched given his leadership in combatting French piracy. But in George’s case there was no other claim than rank to military distinction. The best she could do to reinforce the impression was to claim that he had ‘died in your Majesty’s service’, a statement hard to uphold because he probably resigned his commission at least a year before his death. For true valour, Margaret implies, look to Pemell. Her loss was not confined to two husbands. The eldest son of her marriage to Benjamin had risen to midshipman in the navy during his six years’ service. In this tale of ill luck defeating just desert, he had been on the point of receiving a commission before, in unexplained circumstances, he too died. The overall tally of children goes like this. George had died

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leaving ‘two small children unprovided for’ – those he had with Margaret, presumably. She had three by Pemell, including the now-dead midshipman. So, she is now a ‘disconsolate widow with 4 fatherless children’. In a final gesture, her petition collapses fifteen years of financial decline to a doleful formula: she is ‘reduced from a once very plentiful fortune to an extreme desperate one’. Read out of context, Margaret Farquhar’s petition might prompt the suspicion that for her and for the Queen herself the sword was mightier than the pen; better a Pemell than a Farquhar. George’s chief claim to eminence in 1709 was kept well out of sight. Margaret made no attempt to move Her Majesty on the subject of The Recruiting Officer, The Beaux’ Stratagem or even The Constant Couple. There was no diplomatic or moral need for such reticence. As a girl Anne had taken part in amateur theatricals at court and attended the public playhouses frequently.5 Generally Margaret was not slow to exploit George’s plays. On 25 May 1708, one year on from his death, and probably because she pressed them to do it, the Drury Lane Theatre staged a benefit performance in her name and her children’s of The Constant Couple.6 This was in spite of the fact that Margaret had disputed the level of costs the theatre wanted to retain for a previous benefit performance of The Beaux’ Stratagem, a play gallingly revived for the benefit of actors at a time when Margaret was desperate (the roster of beneficiaries includes Anne Oldfield, with whom Farquhar enjoyed a relationship that may have excited Margaret’s suspicion).7 Nevertheless, Farquhar’s principal modern editor has described this as ‘a fiercely intense series of attempts to make money from her husband’s reputation’, which seems more than a little fierce from a tenured professor to an impoverished widow with four children, and not least from someone engaged in a project not so very far removed from Margaret’s.8 As her second husband lay dying she had to contend with the sight of both London theatres staging his plays, one of them for the benefit of yet another actress.9 If the aroma of desperate haggling hangs over Widow Farquhar’s attempt to realize the value of her second husband’s legacy, she had good cause. So it was, in January or February 1709, that she tried Queen Anne.

(ii) The late Lieutenant Farquhar’s playwriting exploits may have been consigned to the background, but another strand of his writing was not. With her first attempt, via Lady Juliana, Margaret had sent an unfinished poem found among her late husband’s papers. A reward of ten guineas followed, which says something for Margaret’s persistence as well as her sheer nerve. She complained to Robert Harley, Leader of the Opposition no less, that she ‘never yet receiv’d a farthing from her Matie, except ten Guinneys by ye hands

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of ye Duchess of Devonshire upon ye presentation of my husband’s poem’.10 A disconsolate widow might have been expected to withdraw gratefully and look for other support, but Margaret was convinced she was owed more. Kenny attributes her tenacity to avarice and accuses Margaret of doing a disservice to her late husband’s literary reputation; this was, after all, an incomplete draft. The poem itself offers a different clue. In all likelihood Margaret had read it, since it features Queen Anne herself as presiding deity, the incarnation of newly found national liberties at a time of war. Such was the prompt she needed to appeal high and keep appealing; such, too, was George’s advantage over Benjamin. Pemell may have fought but Farquhar had written about fighting, and in the grandest style. During the six months between November 1705 and the end of May 1706, in quiet times before surrendering his commission, he had drafted six books of an epic poem in rhyming couplets, with all the trappings of the Homeric tradition and flashes of Milton thrown in. But his Barcellona was about real rather than mythical heroes: a work of contemporary history told in the manner of the ancients. In this he had been riding on a wave of patriotic epic verse inspired by Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim in 1704.11 Blenheim was one battle in a bigger war. The death of Carlos II of Spain on 1 November 1700 meant succession to the Spanish throne had fallen to Philippe of Anjou. Louis XIV promptly declared Philippe as successor to the crown of France, creating the threat of a Catholic superpower. Pouring petrol on the fire, Louis reasserted his support for the Old Pretender’s claim to the English throne following the death of the former James II in September 1701, knowing that William III was ailing. The War of the Spanish Succession began formally in May 1702, two months after William’s death and the accession of Anne. The immediate subject of Farquhar’s poem was a conflict three years on. Charles Mordaunt, third Earl of Peterborough, departed for Lisbon with an expeditionary force in the early summer of 1705. He was to rendezvous with allies there, including the Archduke Charles of Austria, England’s preferred heir to the Spanish throne. It took more than a month to agree where they should enter Spain. When they set sail again, on 17 July 1705, it was for Barcelona. The fleet anchored on 11 August and, life imitating Homeric art, further disagreements broke out among the generals. Eventually a plan was formed to march through the Catalan port of Tarragona and on to Valencia. Then, at the last minute, Mordaunt heard that the hillfort of Montjuic was vulnerable, its fortifications incomplete and its troops depleted. The resulting action was a success born of terrible mishaps. Today Montjuic is accessible by cable car. On 2 September 1705 the only way up was scaling ladders that turned out to be too short, leaving soldiers scrambling up the higher reaches of a cliff face. In their defiance the Spanish garrison cried out ‘viva el Rey’, which English soldiers somehow heard as ‘we surrender’; hundreds broke cover, charged and were shot.12 Blind to

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their loss, Mordaunt ordered his men to hold their ground. Persistence was rewarded. Four days later the garrison was captured and reinforcements followed; by the end of the month, after prolonged bombardment, the rest of Barcelona fell. Mordaunt’s reaction was to describe the siege as ‘the most amazing action perhaps that Ever was heard of’ – a Miltonic puff to rival any – but he would also reflect bitterly on the ‘inexpressible’ factional fighting and meanness that had marked the preparations.13 He felt the force of those disagreements in his own pocket, paying personally for the services of mercenaries because there was no agreement about the subsidy required. Amazing action it may have been, but it was not all over. During his subsequent capture of Valencia, the back door was left open and he had to return to beat off a French insurgency; and so the second siege of Barcelona ended on 11 May 1706. Farquhar must have been writing his 1508-line epic alongside the first of his two masterpieces, The Recruiting Officer, which he sold to Bernard Lintott on 12 February 1706 ahead of its 8 April premiere. Barcellona refers to events that took place as late as April 1706, but stops short of the celebratory opportunity afforded by Mordaunt’s victory at the second siege.14 Farquhar was, perhaps, embarrassed by the partial success of the first. The general’s conduct was a popular topic. Complaining about the factious behaviour of his fellow leaders, Mordaunt himself took a share of blame for being an unpredictable colleague. Printed defences followed, with a connection to Farquhar. An Exact and Full Account of the Siege. By Way of Journal, from the 2d of April to the 11th of May 1706 was published by Benjamin Bragg in 1706; Bragg had published The Stage-Coach the year before. On 31 March 1707, a month before Farquhar’s death, Bragg would publish The History of the Triumphs of Her Majesty’s Arms both by Sea and Land in and about Spain during This War; More Particularly under the Conduct of his Excellency Charles Earl of Peterborough and Monmouth. Later the same year, John Friend would join the argument with An Account of the Earl of Peterborow’s Conduct in Spain, a work of painstaking military history that sought to vindicate the mercurial Earl with lists of officers and minutes of meetings. If Barcellona was a commercially minded writer’s response to a hot topic, it was also Farquhar’s attempt to elevate his own status as an author of something weightier than popular comedies. In both respects it failed. The text is incomplete, with obvious fluffs and missing pieces that survived Margaret’s attempts to correct them using further manuscript discoveries.15 It was entered in the Stationer’s Register in 1707 by John Smith but not published then; presumably Farquhar had promised it but died before delivery.16 At the start of the poem there is no conventional invocation to a muse or heroic subject, but a description of navies reconciling historic differences. The wind that fills their sails inadvertently embodies the selfconscious inflation of Farquhar’s poetry as he attempts to create a vast sea picture through heroic cliché:

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Now had those Fleets once Rivals in dispute, Had battl’d often, for a bare Salute Own’d the same common Cause; their Squadrons meet And yield a Prospect formidably great, With loosen’d Sails before the Winds they go, Here English Flags, there Belgick Stremers flow. Those in the Van, with awful Pomp appear, And these, lie by, to guard the lagging Rear; Capacious Transports, big with warlike Force, Sail safe between, and keep the middle Course.17 There are moments worse than clichéd: passages of clumping bathos that would have caused mirth to Dryden and even Congreve, past and future translators of Homer.18 Here is Farquhar’s rendering of Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt’s fatal assault on Montjuic: When Darmstad saw the staggering Troops give back, He swiftly hasten’d to the left Attack, There rally’d ’em, and said: What is’t I see! You combat an inferior Enemy: But if you’re English Men, you’ll follow me.19 Dryden’s translation of the first book of The Iliad rings in his ears, but he cannot sing its tune. Eventually he gave up. The manuscript was abandoned, unrevised, until in her desperate search for literary capital Margaret found it. Posterity has been not so much unkind as lethal to Barcellona. Kenny begins her introduction to it with the blunt assessment that ‘Epic poetry was not Farquhar’s genre’, while the best a sympathetic Eric Rothstein can do is vouch for its ‘sheer competence’ (Rothstein adds that the poem ‘begins quite well’, another compliment most writers would dread).20 Such statements verge on futility when applied to a work that is incomplete and, arguably, a more stringent labour than any its author had previously attempted. Its existence lends credibility to the claim made in the 1718 ‘Life and Character’ that Farquhar had drafted a tragedy on a ‘subject very agreeable to [his] Temper, Love and War’, which was subsequently lost before it could be ‘offer’d to the Players’.21 Like his epic, that lost effort expressed a wish to be taken seriously that was ultimately defeated; also, we might reflect, a desire to use his talent to face up to violence. It is not only criticism that has prevented Barcellona gaining more attention. The contemporary history Farquhar celebrated came back to bite. One of the poem’s heroes, the rebel Frenchman Antoine de Guiscard, tried to assassinate First Minister Robert Harley only a year after the poem appeared in print. Mordaunt’s conduct was staged as farce in a show at Bartholomew Fair in August 1706: a pinprick to the half-inflated balloon

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of Farquhar’s epic, the more galling because it featured two actors who had appeared in The Recruiting Officer. An advertisement for The Siege of Barcelona; or the Soldier’s Fortune promised an account of ‘The Taking of Fort Montjouy’ with ‘The Pleasant and Comical Exploits of That Renown’d Hero, Captain Blunderbuss, and His Man Squib’, played by Bullock and Norris, fresh from the characters Bullock and Pearmain in Farquhar’s play.22 Barcellona’s prime interest is biographical: in what it tells us about its author’s politics, his reading and what prompted his widow to present it for the attention of the Queen. Farquhar had written in praise of Anne just before starting Barcellona. A few guineas could be earned by contributing a prologue or epilogue to other writers’ plays, and Farquhar did that a number of times between 1700 and his death in 1707.23 The most conspicuous occasion of those was for the opening of the new Queen’s Theatre at the Haymarket on 15 October 1706. His prologue weaves national and theatrical narratives into a royal celebration. The War was continuing, but Louis XIV was on the defensive after the defeat of his army at the Battle of Ramillies on 23 May; by a neat parallel, the Queen’s Theatre had been established to challenge the alleged tyranny of a former company. Farquhar’s prologue strikes a note of brimming chutzpah: Great Revolutions Crown this Wond’rous Year, And Scenes are strangely turn’d, abroad, and here; A Year mark’d out by Fate’s Supream Decree To set the Theatre, and Europe free: A Year, in which the Destinies Ordain The Mighty Monarch LEWIS to Restrain, And the Dramatick Prince of Drury-Lane.24 Not content simply to drop in the comparison, Farquhar extends it with what sounds like personal rancour against previous management (Christopher Rich, nicknamed Lewis le Grand by a former associate), as well as tubthumping patriotism against Louis himself:25 Both boldly push’d, to make the World their Prey, Beggar’d their Subjects to inlarge their Sway. Deftly withdrawing from the ‘simile’, he digs at Rich’s regime by conceding that at least Louis acted in the name of religion. This was opportunism from a writer Rich had once supported. But the concession turns into a more general denigration of things French, for it is the Drury Lane company that has espoused the empty ‘Fa la la’ of French-style entertainment. In the new ‘Asylum of the Refugee’ that is the Queen’s Theatre, ‘British Law’ prevails in governance and aesthetics, thanks to the presiding deity: A Female Reign gives Liberty to Man; And Tyrants vanish at the Name of ANNE:

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Our State, and Stage must Liberty pursue, When ruled by ANNA, and Maintain’d by you.26 That easy, conversational turn shows a poet more at ease with couplets than he would be in Barcellona, perhaps because the prologue is conceived as a living channel of communication rather than a knowingly archaic one. Farquhar may have been indebted to his friend Peter Anthony Motteux’s prologue to The Twin-Rivals (1702), which sustains an elegant analogy between military sieges and critical onslaughts.27 Fellow migrants from Catholic terror (Motteux was a Huguenot exile who arrived in London after Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes), the two men had worked together on The Stage-Coach, Motteux contributing his greater knowledge of French.28 Writing directly about contemporary history in the form of epic poetry has, despite the efforts of poets after the Battle of Blenheim, survived more as a vehicle of satire than celebration. Pope’s 1712 The Rape of the Lock and 1728 The Dunciad are the finest examples of a trend set in motion in 1664 by Charles Cotton’s Scarronides, a racy burlesque of Virgil’s The Aeneid. For Farquhar to take on the task of building a controversial modern hero from such traditional materials was something of an act of daring. If epic poetry was not his genre, it was partly because he was trying to do something inherently risky. Applying a heroic register to a botched campaign led by an unpopular general points to a writer attempting to capture the zeitgeist and finding he has chosen the wrong subject. Milton, an important presence in The Beaux’ Stratagem, lingers behind Barcellona to good effect as well as ill. The opening of the poem has more than a touch of the grandiose Miltonizing Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot bemoaned in the history of English poetry.29 But the passage where French soldiers, trapped between the enemy and a steep precipice, suffer a combination of traumatic stress and vertigo, borrows fruitfully from Milton’s majestic poetry of infinite distances: The Summit gained, their trembling Eyes they cast With Horror back upon the Danger past.30 At the close of the same passage, a favoured Miltonic adjective introduces with polysyllabic grandeur a gruesome list of shattered body parts, for which a succession of monosyllables is the ideal vehicle: The Prospect lengthen’d, for below are seen Promiscuous Arms, Brains, Legs, and Trunks of Men.31 In its contemporary historicizing, the poem’s main aim is to vilify French Catholic tyranny and extol Queen Anne in precisely the terms explored in the Haymarket Prologue. Farquhar was a self-borrower as well as a plunderer of others’ work, and Guiscard’s lament over the state of France sounds very

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like the playwright’s complaint against his former employers. More than that, it advances a nightmarish vision of a country laid to waste by tyranny that is shot through with the phobic force of Farquhar’s childhood, but also with Shakespeare. Guiscard’s description of his suffering country recalls Macduff lamenting to Malcolm the state of Scotland under Macbeth: from near the Banks of Rhone I lately fled, whose bleeding People groan Beneath a Tyrant’s Rage, no Rods before Was e’er so sharp, no Land such Lashing bore.32 Destitution, a fierce reality for Farquhar as it was for Margaret, is imagined as a permanent condition of life for the ordinary people of the Catholic state: The Labours of a Life are snatch’d away; The Poor and Weak are always in the wrong, Nor is there Property, but in the Strong.33 Farquhar draws liberally on the language of the Glorious Revolution, with its statutory limitations on the power of the monarch: The Free born Mind is now no longer free, Nor Reason acts but by the King’s Decree. Strange Arbitrary Sway that thus commands A Forfeiture of Sense as well as Lands.34 He hits his stride when it comes to the horrors of what passed in France for a justice system. For all its strident anti-Catholicism, this passage takes its place among the finest literary denunciations of state terror: Religion to the Gown becomes a Sport. Priests like Dragoons take Order from the Court; No sacred Mission from their God they bring, Their Gospel is a Warrant from their King; By that, these ghostly Villains preach and pray, Draw forth Confessions, privately betray, And make all Seals of Secrecy give way. Hence, Patriots unheard are doom’d to feel The lasting Rigours of the dark Bastile, Sudden and Sure as the Arrests of Fate Are those, for that close Limbo of the State, Hard to repass, as Hell’s infernal Gate. Here, lusty Youth, whose light aspiring Soul, The wide capacious World could scarce controul,

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In vain laments his darling Freedom crost, And his whole Brood of noble Pleasures lost. There aged Truth to Walls may plead his Cause, The Walls his judges, and his Chains the Laws; Tortur’d by private Racks, the Wretch sometimes Is forc’d to own some ne’er committed Crimes, Condemn’d by false Confessions he must bleed, And private Murder expiates the Deed.35 Of all Restoration comic writers, Farquhar is unique in his attention to the quirks and failings of the human body; rather than displaying what Leigh Hunt called ‘the highest animal spirits’, his own frailties drew him to imperfection and sickness.36 Barcellona goes a step further, taking the body’s weakness beyond the pattern of commercial transactions Derek Hughes identifies in Farquhar’s plays. The epic genre offered the chance to explore the painful extremes of bodily experience, whether through torture or the breaking of bodies down a precipice: in a nuance of Pyle’s fantasies of health, to represent his own slow, wasting illness as a violently heroic struggle, and the multiple dislocations of his own life as actual dismemberment. In a last flourish, Farquhar risks sentimentality but avoids it with a crushing simplicity of rhetoric that anticipates Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes: Unknown to Parents, here may Children die Unknown to Friends, there dearest Friends may lie. The Lover doubly chain’d may here expire, And th’unconscious Maid still hope with warm Desire.37 It is a vision of a migrant’s bitter end, alienated and unredeemed: the darker consequence of having a ‘Free born Mind’ destined to wander. The answer to Guiscard’s misery was the same as for Farquhar in October 1706, and for his widow in 1709, but it draws an altogether less assured poetry: To Anna, the Asylum of Distress, Whose great Endeavours distant Nations bless, To Anna, the Afflicted all must sue; Thither my Course, when I fell in with you.38 It was the perfect cue for Margaret’s petition.

(iii) Seeking to publish Barcellona, her natural course would have been to approach the bookseller-publishers who had worked with her late husband.

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She might have tried Benjamin Bragg, who had published The Stage-Coach and a defence of Mordaunt. But the prestige choice, the one likely to earn the most money, must have been Bernard Lintott. Farquhar had done moderately well by the man who capitalized with calm efficiency and greater success than Margaret on the playwright’s death. In 1708, two years before a new copyright act invested ownership of literary production in writers, Lintott made some timely acquisitions and published the first collected edition of Farquhar’s plays. Margaret had no say over the matter. Although it has been argued that the prestige of the dramatic author grew significantly during the Restoration period and that a sign of that growth is their presence in print, there was no increase in the number of professional playwrights accorded the tribute of complete collections, such as Ben Jonson’s 1616 Works or the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays.39 A tiny number of Restoration playwrights (and none of those now recognized as the best) received folio treatment, largely through connections rather than talent. Sir William Davenant’s works appeared in folio in 1673, prepared by his widow. Sir Robert Howard’s heroic plays were so honoured twice in his lifetime, once in 1664 and again in 1692. It took the most successful and prosperous bookseller of the age, Henry Herringman, to carry out what were essentially vanity projects. Herringman had for years been associated with the only professional playwright of the period to gain the accolade of a folio collection: Dryden, whose plays appeared in two volumes thanks to Jacob Tonson in 1701. Even Congreve, regarded by discerning contemporaries as the finest living writer of comedy, did not see his plays emerge in a folio collection: the fine 1710 Tonson edition of his work is set out in a columned folio format, but to a humbler octavo scale. A lesser tribute was paid to two other Restoration playwrights, by way of memorializing the long or recently dead. In 1695, the bookseller Richard Bentley bound together existing copy of the plays of Nathaniel Lee, who had spent time in Bedlam and died drunk in the street ten years earlier. And in 1708 Bernard Lintott did the same for the recently deceased George Farquhar. Lintott was probably the nephew of Joshua Lintott, who kept a shop just round the corner from Farquhar’s deathbed. Uncle and nephew co-published William Bohun’s Collection of Debates for the House of Commons in 1708–9, for Joshua was printer to the House, but it was Bernard who had already achieved significantly greater eminence.40 His was a textbook career: apprenticed to Thomas Lingard on his fifteenth birthday, he then transferred to John Harding, achieving freedom of the Stationers’ Company after the standard seven-year term, in March 1699. He was precocious, named as co-publisher of three plays the year before his freedom: John Crowne’s last, Caligula; a piece thought to be the work of the actor George Powell, The Fatal Discovery; and, more significantly Vanbrugh’s The Relapse, published from the Cross Keys, again in St Martin’s Lane. Lintott would move on to better surroundings: the Cross Keys and Crown, by Nando’s Coffee House off Inner Temple Lane. His early partners were Richard Wellington  – a

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reasonably prolific collaborator in play publication  – and the relatively unknown Percival Gilborne; with Wellington alone he published Motteux’s musical adaptation of John Fletcher’s The Island Princess in 1699. Business was sufficiently promising for him to get married the following year to Katherine, a woman eleven years his senior. It was in partnership that he first published Farquhar’s The Inconstant, in 1702, together with Robert Strahan and James Knapton, the latter a successful publisher of plays over many years. In 1701 Knapton had published Farquhar’s previous play, Sir Harry Wildair, elevating him from the less auspicious outfits who had seen his first two plays into print: Richard Standfast and Francis Coggen for Love and a Bottle in 1699, and Ralph Smith and Bennet Banbury for The Constant Couple in 1700, none of whom published a single other significant play or playwright of the period.41 Knapton was perhaps put off by the relative lack of theatrical success enjoyed by Farquhar’s next play, The Twin-Rivals, but at any rate Lintott moved to acquire sole rights to it. In 1705 he overlooked The Stage-Coach, but in the two years following published both The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux’ Stratagem. He paid Farquhar reasonably well but placed him in the second rank: between £15 and £30 for individual Farquhar plays, compared with £43 for John Gay’s The Three Hours after Marriage and the dizzying sums of £50 15s. and £75 5s. respectively for Nicholas Rowe’s Jane Shore and Lady Jane Grey.42 After Farquhar’s death, Lintott bought the rights to those plays he had not published, with the exception of The Stage-Coach, and included them all in the 1708 volume of Comedies, which runs to 501 pages. He paid Farquhar the unusual tribute of writing a dedication himself. Setting the dead playwright in a tradition of humours comedy from Ben Jonson to Thomas Shadwell, Lintott praises his ‘Liveliness and Vigour’, likening his characterization to the painterly skills of Van Dyck and Lely.43 Lintott’s focus is the work, not the man. We might have expected a tribute to the recently dead playwright; instead, Lintott puts the case for his immortality through his work. ‘It is my Interest to wish they may remain to Posterity’, he wrote, leaving the reader unsure whether the said interest is personal or commercial. There is no mention of Farquhar’s family; no special pleading for the distraught wife and children of the dead author – in fact, no reference to the man at all independently of the plays. If Margaret Farquhar did embark on what Kenny calls her ‘fiercely intense series of attempts to make money from her husband’s reputation’, she had a lot to learn from Bernard Lintott. She may even have tried him with Barcellona only to find he ignored her. He was perhaps too business-minded to bother with personal niceties and developed a reputation for ruthlessness that landed him an ignominious slot in Book II of Pope’s The Dunciad.44 The deceased playwright Farquhar had been and remained low risk and low maintenance: all in all, a tidy bit of business. So why should Lintott now be interested in a scratchy, incomplete epic from a man known for comedy?

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(iv) When Margaret turned instead to a partnership of obscure booksellers in the shape of John Smith and Richard Standfast, of Russell Street and Westminster Hall respectively, she was revisiting Farquhar’s first foray into playwriting. Standfast had co-published Love and a Bottle but was not known for publishing much else of significance; in the standard reference work, he is credited only with turning out a theological pamphlet by his own father.45 Margaret may have picked out his name from a personal copy of Love and a Bottle. Smith was also a known quantity, having entered the poem in 1707 without publishing it. On 11 May 1710 Barcellona was advertised in The Tatler for sale at one shilling, with a dedication to Mordaunt.46 A separate issue of the work, possibly an early presentation copy, states that it was ‘Publish’d for the Benefit of the Author’s Widow and Children’.47 There cannot have been much benefit, for no further editions were published. It is a fair assumption that Margaret’s gain fell below the ten guineas she had received from the Duchess of Devonshire. The dedicatee had every reason to feel grateful, and according to custom probably contributed another ten, whether pounds or guineas. It is another sign that Margaret knew what she was doing in publishing the poem that she caught Mordaunt at a time when his star had fallen. His ill fortune resembled hers. His wife and sons had recently died, the second of them in February 1710; Henry, like Margaret’s boy, had been in the navy. Controversy surrounding Mordaunt’s single-minded leadership style continued to run high. Two years before Barcellona he had narrowly escaped parliamentary censure. To be praised as a Homeric figure slicing through enemy lines and allied dithering was fine consolation, a hint that he might one day be mentioned in the same breath as the Black Prince, to whom Margaret sought to compare him. The dedication to Barcellona, signed by Margaret but almost certainly written with the assistance of the bookseller, fills gaps left by the unfinished poem.48 In the manner of an epic poet, it identifies Mordaunt as ‘the glorious Subject of the Song’, emphasizing that art is both defeated and enhanced by his valour. The poem would be, she writes, Happy, could it by Art represent what was really done by Your Lordship in that Expedition, so surprising, as not only surpasses all Poetick Description, but makes even Truth it self Romantick.49 She confronts Mordaunt’s reputation for arrogance, describing it as the ‘invincible Reason’ required to assure ‘Conquest to Your Sword’; like the poem, she emphasizes that the fight was partly in getting his allies to agree strategy. She even ventures to suggest that Farquhar’s poem might be the true ‘Lawrel’ celebrating Mordaunt’s victory. There is a touch of populism. The great general may have been rebuked in the House of Lords, but this ‘humble but sincere Hand’ tenders an unequivocal tribute. Then a risk: praising Mordaunt

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excessively might shine the light of glory away from its true bearer. But with the panache of a seasoned dedicator Margaret pays tribute to ‘that magnificent Vertue which hath restored the Foundation of the Austrian Spanish Monarchy, which none but our great Queen can establish and confirm’.50 What on the surface is an assertion that the King of France has no business poking his nose into European dynastic politics is a reminder that Mordaunt had acted only for Queen and country, deferring in grandeur accordingly. Observing convention, the dedication is followed by a different kind of address in a preface to all readers. Usually such texts show authors anxious to promote or defend the merits of their work. In this case, while the assumption is understandably made that the dedication is Margaret’s work, the voice is emphatically third person and inclined to objective description rather than widow’s pleading.51 The contrast could be a ploy, an attempt to make readers’ hearts bleed through sober, understated realism, but the preface reads more like the work of the bookseller working from notes supplied by Margaret. It casts significant light on the way the poem came to be written and the role Farquhar’s widow played – or didn’t – in bringing it to light. It begins with an explanation of how Farquhar (impersonally described as ‘The Author of this Poem’) came to know about the conflict. During the period when he is known to have written the poem, no printed accounts were available, so it makes sense that as an ‘Officer that Time in the Army’ he should have heard all about the siege from ‘an ingenious Friend’ who was there. Farquhar himself, the preface makes clear, ‘was not imbark’d in the Spanish Expedition’. What follows is an extended apology for the incompleteness of the poem. The ‘tedious Sickness whereof [Farquhar] dy’d, hinder’d him from making such Corrections which he design’d, especially in the Two last Canto’s’. If the poem reached its published state in May 1706, Farquhar must have been in his state of lingering illness for a year, forever putting off the labour that would bring it to a conclusion. Since the information found its way into the preface, he must have talked about his plans to Margaret. In a final gesture, the preface refers readers to Farquhar’s better-known work by flattering them. His comedies pleased ‘the Ingenious of both Sexes’, worth noting at a time when writers were mindful of gendered responses to plays.52 It was the obvious route to trying to gain acceptance for a mere fragment of an epic, to which it was hoped that ‘the Criticks in Poetry may not be too severe in their Censures’ – a hopeless cause if ever there was one. But the idea that Barcellona should be judged as an exercise in epic poetry does not get us beyond arguing for its competence or otherwise. The poem crystallizes ideas that had long preoccupied Farquhar during the many reversals of his life. Writing about Mordaunt, he contemplated himself in an epic tale of heroic success against a background of personal ostracism: the loyalist who, eying the heights of achievement, found himself spurned by the very people he sought to please.

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(v) After months of waiting, Margaret gained her wish. The Treasury Warrant Books show payments to her starting at £5 in December 1709, then £10 in January 1712 and the same in May, July and October.53 By 1713 payments were being made directly to her son Edmund Pemell and to Edmund Chaloner, family friend and dedicatee of Love and Business.54 Margaret’s final grant was recorded in March 1715, when she received £2 10s.; after her death that year, payments continued to Chaloner, ‘for Farquhar’s children’.55 There was some irregularity, since her late husband had resigned his commission. The first tranche came from the Secret Service Account, reserved for payments requiring less than the usual scrutiny. Within a year, however, the source had changed. Margaret’s pension was now being paid out of the regimental pension scheme, so formally acknowledging a status she did not appear to have: not an unusual arrangement, for it served the wishes of patrons who preferred to exercise bounty for private reasons. The reason for petitioning the Queen was her power of special warrant, which meant the money had to be found somewhere. In one of his more extravagant excursions, Willard Connely declares that in 1715 Margaret’s pension was investigated by the newly appointed Commissioners of the Chelsea Hospital.56 Fraud had been widespread and the rules were being tightened.57 There was plenty for Margaret to worry about, but not this investigation, which applied only to ‘such Widows whose Husbands did belong to the Regiments of Marines of Lord Shannon, Holt, Borr and Wills’.58 Rumour may, nevertheless, have been enough. A matter of months after the investigation, The Recruiting Officer was apparently performed ‘for the benefit of the orphan children of the late Mr Farquhar’, with the implication that Margaret had recently died.59 If the Farquhar who emerges from Barcellona is a mainstream Protestant Anglo-Irishman who revelled in stories of British military heroism even as he stood unnerved by their violence and futility, the Margaret who sought to make money from the poem was a woman of considerable persistence and acuity. She worked connections hard. Like Farquhar, she was drawn to imagining the heroic possibilities of military life. If she set out, for good reasons, to exploit his work, she did so from a position of understanding it. A serial petitioner, she carried into the world a conviction that she not only needed support but deserved it. The role such conviction played in her marriage to George Farquhar is the greatest enigma of her late husband’s life. But next to his death, and the lasting work he managed to write as he lay dying. The only account of what may have happened goes like this.

3 1707: Deathbed Comedy

(i) The Queen’s Theatre Haymarket. Robert Wilks, the actor, is looking for his friend George, who has gone missing. They had grown accustomed to meeting up after the show. George’s latest, The Recruiting Officer, had been a success at Drury Lane that April, with a satisfying ten performances in its first season. Wilks had played the lead. Cast and play would decant to the new Queen’s Theatre in the autumn. George would use the liberty of a free pass to the theatre and come round afterwards to mingle with other old associates. But he has not turned up for a while: ‘upwards of two months’ according to the story, and Wilks is concerned.1 George has been struggling for cash since leaving the army; the weather has been unremittingly depressing, one of the wettest years in memory.2 So Wilks makes his way to Charing Cross, then down Villiers Street to York House, recently developed by a property speculator and stretching down to the wharf, just along from a timber yard.3 No luck at York House. It looks as though George has moved out but no one knows where. Days pass and Wilks hears nothing. Then, at last, news. If he left a message at York House, it worked. He receives a letter from George: a simple note explaining that he has had to move, and that Wilks will now find him a short walk across the Strand and the knot of alleys that lead to his new home in St Martin’s Lane. In one last runaway act, Farquhar may have been avoiding his landlord: the burial register for St Martin-inthe-Fields gives his formal address as an alley ‘off York Buildings’. Wilks sets out as soon as he can. It is something of a journey into the past. York House was up and coming under the eye of property developers and with rents to show for it. St Martin’s Lane, leading into St Giles, was the haunt of ‘Irish and aliens, beggars, and dissolute and depraved characters’.4 For those members of London’s literary establishment who despised Farquhar, it was just where he belonged: if ever there was a location to confirm cultural origin and hack talent, it was this.

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An eternal optimist, even Wilks is shocked by what he sees of young George Farquhar, twenty-nine, penniless, slumped in a chair and on the edge: ‘in a most miserable situation, lodged in a back garret, and under the greatest agitation of mind’.5 Farquhar looks the epitome of the Distressed Poet portrayed by William Hogarth, seated amid a scatter of old clothes and manuscripts, staring frantically through his grubby attic window in the hope of discerning some fresh inspiration through the grime.6 Hogarth’s poet is at least trying, quill poised over some new piece of hack work called ‘Poverty’. His room boasts a cartoon of Pope thrashing the bookseller Edmund Curll and the engraving has lines from The Dunciad inscribed beneath.7 Farquhar’s agitation of mind will not let him focus on anything other than the thought that he has let down his former patron. The exlieutenant fears he has given grave offence to the Earl of Orrery by selling his army commission. Like Hogarth’s poet, Wilks only knows one way. Write a play, he says. George is incredulous. ‘Write?’, he replies, rising to remonstrate. In his situation? Dulled by poverty, how he could even think straight? ‘Is it possible that a Man can write common Sense, who is heartless, and has not one Shilling in his Pocket?’ he protests.8 In his familiar way, nurtured years before in Dublin, Wilks makes it sound easy. ‘Come, come, George’, he says, ‘banish Melancholy’. All he needs is the outline of a plot. ‘Draw your Drama, and bring it with you to Morrow, for I expect you to dine with me.’ He promptly leaves George some money – twenty guineas, it is reported – and so, from squalor, poverty, old friendship and impulsive charity, the last great play of Restoration England is born.

(ii) That, at least, is the story told by Wilks’s first biographer, Daniel O’Bryan, who claimed he was a school friend of the actor. One stark fact obtrudes. The burial register suggests Farquhar was interred five weeks after his death. If Wilks did discover him somewhere up St Martin’s Lane, he left him there to die once the play was complete. In the 1718 biography the trigger for his demise, if not his death, was alcohol.9 The dying man had trawled theatrical as well as personal memories for ideas. John Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife, a mordant comedy of a vile husband and a repressed wife, had been a hit in 1697. Richard Steele’s 1703 The Lying Lover had featured a laddish relationship based on disguise such as the one Farquhar would turn to in his new play. But the theme had multiple personal resonances too, and the play followed suit.

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Two young sparks, Aimwell and Archer, arrive at a Lichfield inn. Fresh from wasting their inheritances in London, they have travelled north to Staffordshire in search of some adventure – namely a wealthy marriage – that will repair their fortunes. Down to their last two hundred pounds, they agree that if they are to save money, Archer should pretend to be Aimwell’s servant, and Aimwell his own elder brother. The pretence is thin and the two strangers excite gossip. The landlord, Boniface, is convinced they are not what they seem and concludes they are highwaymen; in fact, he is running his own crime ring. Others in the neighbourhood share Boniface’s curiosity: Dorinda, daughter of the wealthy Lady Bountiful, instantly enamoured of Aimwell when she sees him at church; and Mrs Sullen, Lady Bountiful’s daughter-inlaw, miserably married to her drunken, snoring, wife-abusing son. Archer catches her attention, and she his. The two visitors prove their mettle when they fight off a gang of real highwaymen and Aimwell, now so in love with Dorinda that he can bear to delude her no longer, confesses his true identity in a scene of sentimental denouement. Enter Mrs Sullen’s brother, Sir Charles Freeman, to obtain a fantasy divorce for his sister and announce the sudden death of the elder Aimwell. So, the two sparks from London have their way: The Beaux’ Stratagem, to give the play its name, became a complete success for them and for Farquhar alike. It had taken him as little as four to six weeks to write, and the result was untidy, although not on the same scale as Barcellona. ‘The Reader may find some Faults in this Play,’ reads the advertisement, ‘which my illness prevented the amending of’.10 There was not even a final decision about the title. An advertisement in the February press referred to The Broken Beaux and by March it was first The Stratagem and then, less than three weeks later, The Beaux’ Stratagem.11 Bernard Lintott paid generously for the copy, handing Farquhar £30 for publication rights.12 The play was published on 27 March 1707 following a triumphant premiere at Drury Lane on 8 March. It had a good first run of eleven performances plus a further author’s benefit night on 29 April, later the subject of a dispute between the theatre and Margaret.13 The Recruiting Officer and The Constant Couple were revived as Farquhar lay dying, to assist, exploit or ignore his situation by naming other beneficiaries.14 It was attractive to draw a contrast between the living show and the dying artist: Daniel O’Bryan claimed that Farquhar died during his third-night benefit performance, but he was buried in St Martinin-the-Fields on 23 May.15 O’Bryan has him certain of death in January, ‘before he had finished [writing] the second Act’.16 The dying artist and the final masterpiece: Mozart hastening to complete his Requiem or Puccini his redemptive Turandot? Not exactly. For Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem was a garrulous, high-spirited, Irishwake of a farewell to writing, and with it a scattered reflection of memories and dreams. Two friends in a new city in search of their fortune: in 1699, Wilks and Farquhar to a tee. It would be satisfying to think that in the first production Wilks played Aimwell, the lordly superior of the two beaux, but

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he was Archer; his and Farquhar’s Dick Whittington adventure is reversed in the play. Fleeing London, Aimwell and Archer end up somewhere that seems a lot like a caricature of rural Ireland, with robber gangs, herbal remedies, consignments of ‘usquebaugh’ (Irish whiskey) and mile upon mile of mud. Mrs Sullen categorizes ‘Country pleasures’ as ‘Racks and torments’, consisting entirely of leaping of Ditches, and clambering over Stiles … drinking fat Ale, playing at Whisk, and smoaking tobacco; or … spreading of Plaisters, brewing of Diet-drinks, and stilling Rosemary-water, with the good old Gentlewoman my Mother-in-Law.17 To the fantasy of fortune-making add a fantasy – familiar enough to the dying – of a return home. Farquhar had been back since his arrival in London nine years before, but if The Beaux’ Stratagem is any guide, the prospect was not particularly appealing. Derek Hughes’s description of the typical Farquhar protagonist is apposite: His heroes are initially unfixed in place (and often in principles). His plays, however, depict a movement towards stability, an acquisition of estate and security that is often both reward and symbol of moral fixity.18 Hughes contrasts that quality with Southerne and Vanbrugh, whose work he imitated: theirs are ‘comedies of irremediable displacement’. Farquhar’s wanderers, obsessed with the act of counting as a means of imposing order on their fluid lives, always find their home eventually.19 That is as much of a fantasy as Mrs Sullen’s divorce: the imaginary resolution of one migrant’s tragic inability to be assimilated. ‘Home’ was a moving target for a writer repelled both by the land he had rejected and the one he had sought to adopt. The point is underlined by the fact that Farquhar did not need to think of Ireland to picture the ditches, stiles, ale and tobacco that for Mrs Sullen were the antithesis of civilized (that is, London) life. A parallel nostalgia was just as strong: for the ‘Friends Round the Wrekin’, to whom he had dedicated The Recruiting Officer. In Shropshire you could find no ‘better bodies of men, better inclinations for the service, more generosity, more good understanding, nor more politeness’; a ‘perfect stranger’, he had met with a ‘generous and hospitable reception’.20 To a man gasping out his last in a dismal garret down St Martin’s Lane, life in some friendly country town must have been a warm memory indeed, especially if it felt a little like the only home he had truly enjoyed. The twin heroes of The Beaux’ Stratagem offered a different kind of redemption. As Eugene Nelson James observes, ‘all through the play their actions are constantly being likened to those of thieves’.21 Boniface’s daughter

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Cherry tells him that it is ‘ten to one’ Aimwell is ‘a High-way-man’ but clearly not of their own ‘Gang’.22 Those suspicions are compounded in Act Two, and when Archer attempts to seduce Mrs Sullen in Act Five her natural reaction is to cry ‘Thieves! Thieves!’23 Labouring under the stereotype of a thieving roguery deemed characteristically Irish, and himself accused of plagiarism as a writer, Farquhar shows us two well-intentioned wanderers amid a host culture of real, organized thievery. In Mrs Sullen Farquhar would cast an oblique glance at his own marriage; Aimwell and Archer embody his reaction to the self-serving literary circles that had rejected him. If he is a little crooked, those who rejected him are positively depraved.

(iii) Hogarth’s depressed poet is not alone, although his companions offer scant comfort. His wife sits darning, her conversation with a visitor distracting him more. On a discarded piece of clothing sits a cat, startled from its sleep by the sight of a rodent. Under the rafters, asleep in bed and oblivious of the misery around, lies a small girl with a doll-like face, a chubby arm supporting her head. Farquhar had two such to look after, no more than five years old, plus the two Margaret had brought with her after her son’s death.24 He was doubtless concerned about what would happen to the girls, but in a way that makes Wilks seem more important to him and erases from the scene the children of Margaret’s previous marriage. ‘Dear Bob’, he wrote to Wilks as he was nearing the end, I have not anything to leave thee to perpetuate my Memory, but two helpless Girls; look upon them sometimes, and think of him that was to the last Moment of his Life, Thine, G. Farquhar25 If this was modest neglect of the plays anyone would think were most likely to perpetuate Farquhar’s memory, it also relegates the playwright’s family to a mere sign of himself, worth looking upon not for charity but as a substitute for a signet ring or some other conventional token of esteem. If Farquhar was tugging at his friend’s heartstrings or simply too ill to ‘write common Sense’, Wilks took the message in the right spirit. According to O’Bryan, Wilks’s own wife had been a maker of mantuas, or coats, and Farquhar’s daughters were found an apprenticeship with a family acquaintance. Mantua-making was no longer a matter of high fashion: in Love and a Bottle, the hero says he has left behind a woman who wore ‘a Silk Manteau and High-Head; but these are grown … little signs of Gentility now a-days’.26 But even Wilks’s kindness had its limit. The burial register for St Martin’s gives Farquhar’s

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funeral expenses in pence. Lintott’s £30 and the benefit night proceedings either went in paying off debts or were claimed by Margaret. Farquhar signally did not ask Wilks to look out for her. Pondering George’s marriage, Eric Rothstein sounds like a Restoration man about town: ‘At this ebb, Farquhar blundered badly. He married.’27 Early biographies portray Margaret as a scheming, passionate femme fatale, consistent with the woman painted by Kenny: His Wife, through the Reputation of a great Fortune, trick’d him into Matrimony. This was chiefly the Fault of her Love, which was so violent for him, that she resolv’d to leave nothing untry’d to gain him.28 The twisted connection to the plot of The Beaux’ Stratagem demonstrates Farquhar’s adeptness at inverting experience. Like Aimwell, Farquhar had been a gold-digger, but he found his Dorinda’s coffers empty. In the plot he forged on his deathbed he scripted a double compensation: not only is Dorinda a real heiress, but Aimwell inherits a personal fortune he thought he had lost, as though to satisfy in a single action his own and Margaret’s fantasies of salvation. If Margaret ‘trick’d’ him, she succeeded because he was ready to be tricked. Kenny argues that The Beaux’ Stratagem ends in dramatic ineptitude and that ‘for the first time in his entire career, Farquhar used a dance to cover the confusions of a sloppy conclusion’.29 But the dance was the only way Farquhar could reconcile such a peculiar conflict of guilt and wish fulfilment as he lay dying. For Derek Hughes the improbability of the conclusion is Farquhar’s distinguishing success: unlike Dryden, Etherege and Wycherley, he could at least conceive of ‘fair judicial representation and regulation of individual life’ as a living possibility.30 In such intimate transformations lies Farquhar’s quality as a writer. His covering and re-colouring of tracks combines imaginative sympathy with that quality of ‘Irishness’ commonly associated with reversals of the obvious and commonsense. Here, in his final play, the combination is perfected in Mrs Sullen. A disappointed husband, Farquhar knew what it was to be a disappointed wife. The Beaux’ Stratagem may recall the boisterous trickster comedies of Middleton, but its seriousness derives from sustained allusions to a source that failed to trouble most Restoration playwrights and which Mrs Sullen has imbibed as gospel: John Milton’s 1643 tract, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, which argued that incompatibility, not adultery, should be the prime ground for divorce (‘they shall’, Milton complained of the existing law, ‘be made, spight of antipathy to fadge together, and combine as they may to their unspeakable wearisomnes and despaire of all sociable delight in the ordinance which God establisht to that very end’).31 Barcellona shows that Farquhar’s immersion in Milton went further than a single tract, and Alan Roper has in turn unfolded how the language of the paradise myth features more widely in his work.32 If it is true that Farquhar’s

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interest in Milton was fuelled by his own anxious marriage, he spent a startling amount of time in The Beaux’ Stratagem on the question of how it felt for a woman to be trapped in the loveless provinces, as though the play were an eighteenth-century Three Sisters. Other dramatists, both Vanbrugh and Southerne in The Wives Excuse (1691), had attempted a sober look at the prospects of women oppressed by their husbands, but Southerne’s Mrs Friendall is faced with either imitating her husband’s sexual freedom or putting up with it and shutting up; the stalemate at the end of that play is arguably the result of the playwright’s own struggle to detach himself from the social sphere he satirizes. Farquhar’s Mrs Sullen enjoys the greater narrative impetus that comes of being an exiled urban sophisticate in a place where the entertainment is cheap and coarse. The better world to which she wants to escape is agonizingly real to her, and it is embodied in Archer. Speaking to her sister-in-law Dorinda, she adopts a typically Restoration language of natural law and uses it to illustrate her own disadvantage: Mrs S

Dor Mrs S

Dor Mrs S

Patience! The Cant of Custom – Providence sends no Evil without a Remedy – shou’d I lie groaning under a Yoke I can shake off, I were accessary to my Ruin, and my Patience were no better than self- Murder. But how can you shake off the Yoke – Your Divisions don’t come within the Reach of the Law for a Divorce. Law! what Law can search into the remote Abyss of Nature, what Evidence can prove the unaccountable Disaffections of Wedlock – can a Jury sum up the endless Aversions that are rooted in our Souls, or can a Bench give Judgment upon Antipathies. They never pretended, Sister, they never meddle but in cases of Uncleanness. Uncleanness! O Sister, casual Violation is a transient Injury, and may possibly be repair’d, but can radical Hatreds be ever reconcil’d – No, no, Sister, Nature is the first Lawgiver, and when she has set Tempers opposite, not all the golden Links of Wedlock, nor Iron Manacles of Law can keep ’em fast. Wedlock we own ordain’d by Heaven’s Decree, But such as Heaven ordain’d it first to be – Concurring Tempers in the Man and Wife As mutual Helps to draw the Load of Life. View all the Works of Providence above, The Stars with Harmony and Concord move;

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View all the Works of Providence below, The Fire, the Water, Earth, and Air, we know, All in one Plant agree to make it grow. Must Man the chiefest Work of Art Divine, Be doom’d in endless Discord to repine. No, we shou’d injure Heaven by that surmise Omnipotence is just, were Man but wise.33 The scene continues into the next act, where Mrs Sullen reflects on the injustice of her position in a country now ruled by a woman, the everglorious Queen Anne. Her words express a foreboding solidarity with (and guilt about) the petitioning Margaret: Were I born an humble Turk, where Women have no Soul nor Property, there I must sit contented – But in England, a Country whose Women are it’s Glory, must Women be abus’d, where Women rule, must Women be enslav’d? nay, cheated into Slavery, mock’d by a Promise of comfortable Society into a Wilderness of Solitude – I dare not keep the Thought about me.34 Mrs Sullen lends the rhetoric of Restoration libertines – derived in part from Thomas Hobbes’s deliberations on nature – a new resonance that casts nature not only as irresistible but unfathomable, a ‘remote Abyss’ of ‘unaccountable Disaffections’.35 Finding argument in Milton, Farquhar also took snatches of his grand poetry of space and emotion. Mrs Sullen rejects the prissy, pseudoPuritan language of ‘uncleanness’ to describe adultery, proposing with Milton that it is remediable, unlike ‘radical Hatreds’. But there are no devils in her universe: the world has been designed according to warped Deist principles, a work of endless concord upset less by Man than by men. She is the capstone of a preoccupation with what Derek Hughes describes as ‘the anomalies and inequities of the woman’s position as an unacknowledged moral centre in a world whose systems of authority are controlled by the less stable and principled male’.36 Farquhar focused in Mrs Sullen a range of personal and cultural preoccupations and transformed them in a species of (as Keats described such a quality in Shakespeare) negative capability, or the entertainment of ambiguity as a creative principle.37 Farquhar’s interest in Milton might be traced to his own marriage to a woman who turned out to be impoverished, but in Mrs Sullen’s lament he highlights the wife’s indignation at being ‘cheated into slavery’. She crystallizes what was most vivid to her creator. Reflecting one last time on the pain of exile, he wrote in pity for himself no less than for her. There is a compounding irony. Women in The Beaux’ Stratagem are repeatedly figured – comically and otherwise – as healers of men’s flimsy or fraudulent ailments. Natalie Cargill argues that medical practice in the

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period gave women the opportunity to be witty on equal terms with men. Against this, in the episode where Aimwell gains access to Dorinda by feigning a fainting fit, he may ‘feminize’ himself, but he nevertheless achieves his own goals.38 The argument is more convincing in one of the high comic points of the play. While Lady Bountiful dispenses old-world remedies to the local populace, Mrs Sullen advises a woman whose husband has a bad leg to lay it upon a Table, and with a Choping-knife, you must lay it open as broad as you can, then you must take out the Bone, and beat the Flesh soundly with a rowling-pin, then take Salt, Pepper, Cloves, Mace and Ginger, some sweet Herbs, and season it very well, then rowl it up like Brawn, and put it in the Oven for two Hours.39 That is how you cook: the suppressed violence of marriage finds voice in the conventions of the manual for good wives. If Mrs Sullen was partly a final gift to Margaret, it did not prevent Farquhar from making quips at her expense. Anne Oldfield, who first played Mrs Sullen, is said to have expressed mild shock at the play’s conclusion. In a message conveyed via Wilks, she thought ‘he had dealt too freely with the character of Mrs Sullen, in giving her to Archer without a proper Divorce, which was not a Security for her Honour’. Replying, Farquhar could not resist a bracing joke that carried a double twist for Margaret: To salve that, I’ll get a real Divorce – Marry her myself, and give her my Bond she shall be a real Widow in less than a Fortnight.40 If Farquhar’s wit had been a magnet for Margaret’s ‘violent’ love for him, he was not afraid to use it against her, however desperate the circumstances. Here, he sounds like the Vanbrugh’s anti-hero in The Provok’d Wife, Sir John Brute, who, asked what wrong a parson has done him, replies, ‘He has married me’.41

(iv) Immediately after Farquhar’s death there was general agreement that The Beaux’ Stratagem and The Recruiting Officer were his best work. Less clear was how good they really were. The announcement of his death in the May 1707 volume of The Muses Mercury is ripe with contradictions.42 ‘All that love Comedy will be sorry to hear of the death of Mr. Farquhar,’ the editor begins, before acknowledging that it had taken Farquhar time to achieve such acclaim: ‘[His] two last Plays had something in them that was truly humorous and diverting.’ There is a twofold hesitation. Everything before the last two was a forgotten prelude, but even The Beaux’ Stratagem and

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The Recruiting Officer could not lay claim to completeness. They merely have ‘something’, products of a talent not fully achieved. ‘Criticks’, the announcement continues, ‘will not allow any of them to be regular’, hardly a surprising announcement given Farquhar’s bitter assault on dramaturgic pedantry in his 1701 ‘Discourse upon Comedy’.43 Counterbalancing that quality, as when Shakespeare was judged against Jonson, was a ‘Genius … rather above Rules than below them’.44 But at that point any further comparison with the national poet vanishes in praise whose poise enacts its faintness: His Conduct, tho not Artful, was surprizing: His Characters, tho not Great, were Just: His Humour, tho low, diverting: His Dialogue, tho loose and incorrect, gay and agreeable; and his Wit, tho not super-abundant, pleasant. The author then suggests that the two plays, imperfect as they are, need to be seen in the round, ‘in the toute ensemble, as the Painters phrase it’. The raw and indefinable ‘something’ is rephrased as ‘a certain Air of Novelty and Mirth’. Whatever his hesitations, the editor cannot deny that Farquhar’s plays ‘pleas’d the Audience every time they were represented’, but then the audience was doubly undiscerning, first in being interested only in the broader kinds of comedy, and second in failing to recognize just how good Farquhar had been: ‘such as love to laugh at the Theater, will probably miss him more than they now imagine’. In September 1707 the same editor returned to Farquhar with the impression of regretting (or perhaps just forgetting) his earlier circumspection; he is now part of that laughing audience who did not know how much they would miss the dead playwright. No other comic writers had come to the fore ‘since Mr. Farquhar’s Death’. Congreve and Steele had retreated from the theatre (‘having Affairs of much greater Importance to take up their Time and Thoughts’), and ‘unless the Players write themselves, the Town must wait for Comedy till another Genius appears’.45 The idea that proof of Farquhar’s success lay in the reaction of his audience was undermined in The Tatler two years later. Reflecting on a performance of The Recruiting Officer at Drury Lane, Steele found the audience ‘fitter for representations at Mayfair, than a theatre royal’ and attributed the evening’s enjoyment to the acting rather than the writing.46 Alexander Pope could not see past aspects of Farquhar’s dialogue that he found ‘low’ and ‘pert’.47 Such views were symptomatic of a disdain not so much for Farquhar’s Irish origins as for the way he displayed them. His best-intentioned supporters had a way of endorsing his detractors. An anonymous author in 1740 found The Recruiting Officer ‘extremely diverting in the representation’ and likely to prove so ‘at least while there are military gentlemen in the kingdom’ or ‘ladies who delight in a red coat and feather’.48 However enjoyable a Farquhar play might be, it was not literary art but only successful ‘in the representation’, and in the case of

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The Recruiting Officer dependent on the country’s manifold appetite for war and its trappings. Yet the ‘something’ Farquhar possessed nagged at the minds of the most discerning readers and spectators. Samuel Johnson thought his ‘writings [had] considerable merit’, a view the editor of Pasquin maintained (not entirely correctly) was widely shared: No one will deny but that the late Mr. Farquhar had a great Share of Merit. The uncommon Vivacity of his Genius, the happy Sprightliness of his Fancy, the Easiness of his Style, the unforc’d Pleasantry and natural Humours of his Characters, will remain … long unmatch’d upon the British Stage.49 The appreciation is generic, situating Farquhar, like Shakespeare, at the latter end of a spectrum that reached from ‘correctness’ to ‘ease’. Poverty and ill luck prevented him from ever being worthy of the comparison, but did not diminish his potential to be so: Had this Gentleman been as happy in his Fortune as he was in his Genius, he might perhaps have been thought one of those Poetick Comets which are seen scarce in an Age. To a dying writer possessed by a half-completed epic and a barely finished comedy, the thought would have been familiar.

(v) Farquhar’s redemption lies in the continuing vitality of The Beaux’ Stratagem on stage and its appeal to contemporary preoccupations. But how to perform him? What may be at stake? Even an imperfect revival such as Simon Godwin’s 2015 National Theatre production, with additional material by contemporary playwright Patrick Marber, made a strong case for seeing the play as significantly more than the ‘romp’ envisaged by Bonamy Dobree and witnessed by a sour Daily Telegraph reviewer.50 It was a show whose shortcomings, as much as its strengths, served to highlight the abiding richness of the play. The following reading via Godwin’s production highlights the qualities directors, actors and designers might find in the play, so articulating Farquhar’s abiding preoccupation with displacement. The production was designed for the Olivier Theatre, a 1,150-seater conceived on Ancient Greek principles: the opposite of the more intimate space Farquhar had in mind, in which actors and audience sat cheek by jowl. Peter Hall, Director of the National when it first occupied Denys Lasdun’s building, has reinforced the Olivier’s ability to support a variety of repertory, but not always consistently. On the one hand he observed of a preview of Harley Granville Barker’s The Madras House that it showed how the space

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could adapt to ‘intimate, naturalistic scenes’; on the other he bemoaned the predominance of studio Shakespeare, with its substitution of intellect for passion and irony for emotion.51 Working with John Bury’s design for Wycherley’s The Country Wife in 1977, he sought a contrast between set and character: ‘If the setting itself were an island of attractiveness, the dirt, sweat and lust of the people on stage would present a greater contrast.’ Those people, he added, ‘must be grotesque, and express the characteristics signalled by their names: Fidget, Squeamish, Horner, Pinchwife’.52 Wycherley’s grotesques are a vehicle for satire; with Farquhar, the challenge for actors is to maintain high definition in individual performances but in the context of a more sympathetic vision of human behaviour. Shows in the Olivier typically challenge designers with height, with occasionally spectacular results, whether via a towering New York skyline for Guys and Dolls or a Renaissance palazzo for Antony and Cleopatra.53 For The Beaux’ Stratagem Lizzie Clachan offered something less sumptuous but perfectly attuned to the space and the play. Four levels linked by stairways; in the centre, a bar with a doorway, and exits to each side of the structure, turned diagonally towards the middle of the auditorium. It was a convincing, down-at-heel Lichfield inn, with a place for the swinish Sullen to order a drink, down it, and then collapse not very discreetly under the stairs. In the blink of an eye it was Lady Bountiful’s house. Painted paneling slid in to replace rough wainscoting. Chandeliers lowered as lanterns were raised. It all happened without the expense or distraction of a rotating drum stage, and served the play’s need to keep driving forwards. For Eugene Nelson James, Farquhar’s scenic transitions illustrate a dramaturgic movement from devising stratagems to implementing them: a well-established convention in Restoration plays.54 Clachan’s set hinted at an underlying personal preoccupation for the playwright. With its slick transitions from road life to high life and back again, it was as easy as Aimwell and Archer’s own restoration to riches, and as swift as the fall from grace that had propelled them to Lichfield in the first place. The set embodied Farquhar’s own lurching, reversible life and responded perfectly to the text’s relatively spare use of scene changes. In common with other comic dramatists of the period, Farquhar progressively restricted the number of scenes required for his plays, partly through understanding of production needs and economies, but more as a result of learning to move a plot forward through human interaction rather than changes of locale. Although the scenic possibilities of theatres became more complex during the 1670s, with the building of the Dorset Garden and new Drury Lane playhouses, the best comic writers learned to resist their temptations.55 The Beaux’ Stratagem requires only four settings, two of them subdivisions of another: the inn, a gallery in Lady Bountiful’s house, and a bedchamber and apartment in the same (such internal differentiation was usual and most likely achieved by the use of a single side shutter which could be removed to reveal fully the adjoining space). Farquhar’s earlier

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plays had been more lavish. Love and a Bottle required eight settings and The Constant Couple nine. With The Twin-Rivals he was beginning to focus on achieving greater unity of action and place; six locales are specified. Written after a break in output, and seeking to give London audiences a taste of the English Midlands, The Recruiting Officer went overboard again with ten settings, including some that would have taken a deal of repurposing for other plays. The Beaux’ Stratagem homed in on the memories that were most vivid to him from Lichfield, where he had enjoyed the hospitality of the local MP, Sir Michael Biddulph, and it is ironic that a play apparently conceived within the four walls of a sick room should have been the one most serviceable to the needs of the theatre.56 At the start of Godwin’s production, a lone fiddler played on Clachan’s roof: something melancholy, slightly Irish, a nod to the past Farquhar was desperate to escape and an evocation of Mrs Sullen’s lonely misery. The same device ended the show, when the dancing was done. You could take Mrs Sullen away from her husband, but the scars lingered. Here was no migration, no liberation, without pain. The wide stage gave scope to Farquhar’s natural opening. An innkeeper rouses his household from sleep to greet the arriving stagecoach: a flurry of knocking, shouting, ‘Trunks, Band-boxes, and other Luggage’.57 Wisely, Simon Godwin’s company opted for Birmingham accents rather than the Mummerset heard in some productions, so the first line (‘Chamberlain! Maid! Cherry!’) rang out fresh: Chimeberlin! Mide! Cherroi! It went down predictably well with a London audience programmed to find ‘Brummie’ an inferior brogue. As the stage filled it was clear the period had shifted fifty years forward to a world where full-bottom had given way to periwig. There were resonances of – and perhaps some recycling of costumes from – Treasure Island, a recent success in the same theatre that also began in a tavern.58 In the early years of The Beaux’ Stratagem’s life it was the Lichfield inn that caught the public imagination. Boniface became so popular that later in the eighteenth century the play acquired the subtitle of The Litchfield Landlord.59 His signature catchphrase was used for marketing purposes. A benefit performance for the actor who created the part was advertised in April 1707 as ‘For the benefit of Will Bullock, as the saying is’.60 ‘As the saying is’ balances knowingness and ignorance. It is the phrase of a man who believes he has charted human knowledge but has no words of his own. Depending on the performance, it might be a nervous tic or an assertion of false confidence; whatever the choice, the actor must make it mean something while finding a balance between predictability and variety. Assuming it will be funny by dint of repetition is dangerous; the risk is that the actor will play not the character’s intention but the intended effect on the audience. The National’s Boniface, Lloyd Hutchinson, veered more towards geniality than grotesquerie and lost some of the character’s monomaniacal singularity. Farquhar was also prepared to satirize by removing the public face that is the ‘humour’. He set Boniface up as Mr Hospitable only to reveal

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that he is really a crook. To bring it off, the actor needs to explore extremes of behaviour; this performance offered no particular surprise one way or the other, as though the actor had grown a little too fond of his character. The part also requires a physically commanding presence (witness the aptly named William Bullock). At the National, when Aimwell joked that Boniface must be a great meat-eater, it was not quite clear what he meant.61 Aimwell’s introduction to Lichfield is, as Farquhar’s may have been, through its beer. Something about Boniface’s description suggests the playwright’s personal acquaintance with the brewing traditions of the West Midlands: ‘smooth as oil, sweet as milk, clear as amber, and strong as brandy’, although his assertion that the brew he is about to serve up is approaching its fourteenth birthday is probably a joke.62 The National’s Aimwell, Samuel Barnett, underplayed his character’s reaction to the drink, pulling a face that could barely be seen in the expanse of the Olivier, remaining aloof to the obvious temptation to spout the beer back and double up. Farquhar’s resistance to the manners tradition represented by Congreve, his immersion in bodily experience that attracted him to translating a French farce as The Stage-Coach, invites a full-blooded response from the actor in the absence of a supporting intimacy in the venue.63 This Aimwell was a posh boy on the road, loudly acting out his superiority and tapping into the crisis of inequality that has characterized twenty-first-century Britain. Farquhar may be, as William Gaskill found, the most socially inclusive of Restoration dramatists, but it does not take much for this play to imply that inclusivity is a fantasy to suit the included. The balance between Aimwell and Archer is a challenge for any director. They are complementary but distinctive: the same aims, the same background and the same theatrical gifts, each as capable as the other of playing the master or servant as their rota demands. The difference is an inner one, as it is with Mirabell and Fainall in Congreve’s The Way of the World, vouched for by the nature of their feelings.64 Aimwell is prone to get distracted by his fondness for women, while Archer focuses on the main prize, the fortune they bring. So it is Archer who adapts better to the role of the servant: he becomes the scheming underling of ancient comedy, manipulating his master to ensure the two of them get the best results. Geoffrey Streatfeild played Archer the servant in RP, perhaps a missed opportunity since the two men glory in the art of performance, but it is not necessarily an opportunity the script calls for. Later in the play we learn about the London footmen who fetch up in Lichfield and function perfectly well as the most fashionable of dancing masters (further salt in the wounded pride of the West Midlands).65 Vocally, Streatfeild was the master of the stage, with a combination of heft, flexibility and precision his travelling companion did not possess. Detached from the manners tradition, Farquhar nonetheless demands irony and agility from his leading actors, an ability to deliver lines in a manner Simon Callow has described as ‘lapidary’, ‘ahead of each thought, in perfect command of the sequence of ideas’.66

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When Boniface reminisces about his dead wife, Ireland makes an unmistakable entrance. It’s a deadly foreign ingredient, a spy, a lethal infiltrator into homely English business. The change of gear is hard to manage. One moment Aimwell is comically ingesting fourteen-year-old beer and finding it ‘confounded strong’; the next, Boniface is telling him it killed his wife. But first the joke has to be on Aimwell. He is out of his depth. One man’s hospitality is another man’s poison. The late Mrs Boniface would not let the Ale take its natural Course … she was for qualifying it every now and then with a Dram, as the saying is; and an honest Gentleman that came this way from Ireland, made her a Present of a dozen Bottles of Usquebaugh – But the poor Woman was never well after.67 The National Aimwell did not register the obvious. He hopes it was the whiskey that did for her and not the beer (such is the prevailing suspicion of Irish imports, and his concern for his own health in this desolate Midlands outpost). Still, Farquhar moves on to further exposition so quickly it is hard to notice, and conceivably too complicated except for the most nimble actor. So, we run through Sullen – making an appearance at the start of the National production, unscripted, as a tavern bore who ends up flat out under the stairs – and his mother, Lady Bountiful, before arriving at the oddity of the other foreign menace, the French officers. This made perfect sense in 1707, when captives of the War of the Spanish Succession were released on parole in a variety of provincial towns. Boniface is happy to take advantage, for they ‘pay double’.68 Archer the servant releases Aimwell from this extended exposition, and Boniface leaves. This is the moment when we must sense a break into the real lives of the two beaux. Until then we have no more knowledge of them than Boniface has, so it is worth investing something in what should be a strong preliminary denouement. In that sense, a cockney or even Irish Archer as servant helps, because we then see the transition into the real man. But the break can be marked more simply, for example by Aimwell taking a good stroll round the premises in his public persona before lapsing into man-chat with Archer. It is perilously easy to focus on the words and miss the moment, a reminder that Farquhar has a natural gift of creating space within dialogue that actors and directors must attend to as carefully as they do the words themselves. There is a puzzle at this moment in the play which is easily skated over. Archer thanks his ‘dear brother in iniquity’ and Aimwell objects to the latter word as ‘canting’, telling Archer there is no need to change linguistic style with his dress.69 This supports the idea that Archer is acting up as the servant a little too much for Aimwell’s liking, perhaps to relieve the tedium of the role it’s his turn to play. Just as Aimwell is prone to giving way to his feelings, Archer falls into the temptation of enjoying the performance.

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But he is careful to correct Aimwell’s accusation, reflecting a little bitterly on their reduced means: ‘There is no scandal like rags, not any crime so shameful as poverty.’70 The line was from Farquhar’s heart. It opens up a section of dialogue cut from the National production, and wisely, but which underlines the two heroes’ hopes and fears for their future. They recall two apparent losers called Jack Handicraft and Nick Marrabone who are friends of the aristocracy and capable of making a good marriage, in the latter case to a Lady Manslaughter; Jack Generous, on the other hand, wanders the Mall alone because he is known to be poor. It is faith in their own ‘intrinsic value’ that rescues Aimwell and Archer from depression. Archer puts this in the libertarian, post-1688 terms of nascent capitalism: We are Men of intrinsick Value, who can strike our Fortunes out of our selves, whose worth is independent of Accidents in Life, or Revolutions in Government: we have heads to get money and hearts to spend it.71 When they come to reckon up their net worth – two hundred pounds plus personal possessions – an older language emerges that blends heroism with libertinism. They disguised their poverty from their friends, pretended to go on military service to Brussels, and now tour the provinces in search of fortune: a shadow of Farquhar’s own wanderings. Archer reckons they can spend a hundred on their current quest. If it fails, they will blow the rest on an escapade he describes in terms that would befit a suicide mission, a binge, or both: he imagines dying ‘as we lived, in a blaze’.72 The thought turns into praise for ‘London, London!’, a joke that went down as well with the metropolitan audience of 2015 as it must have done in 1707, and another index of a fundamentally divided nation.73 Then another exchange which, sensibly, was filleted: a reflection on the evils of being addicted to one kind of pleasure at the expense of the others (of which Sullen will prove an outstanding example). Archer reveals himself as the more footloose: ‘I love a fine house, but let another keep it; and just so I love a fine woman’, an impartiality Aimwell fails to achieve.74 Something of that vulnerability was missing from this performance. He opted for mere boasting instead, proclaiming that ‘the Fool in [his] Passion’ will win out over the ‘Knave’ who is Archer.75 The trick for the actor is to create a character who uses his vulnerability for strategic ends. Aimwell and Archer are not just a pair of lads on the make, but a complex couple who know each other well enough to understand the other’s weaknesses and trust each other in sustaining the social illusions they create. They are, in fact, the play’s most successful twosome, already better than married, as Wilks, the executor, obliterated Margaret, the widow, in Farquhar’s deathbed letter. Like any man and wife, they have their differences. Offered the best fare of the inn, Aimwell says he can’t eat beef, while Archer ‘hate[s] pig’. The National Aimwell earned a good laugh when he asked for his rabbit ‘fricasseed’, London manners invading the Lichfield kitchen.76 Such misunderstandings

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were stock in trade for a migrant playwright who saw comedy from both directions, the Londoner as arrogant as the provincial is unwitting. Just as ‘home’ was a fugitive concept for Farquhar, so his humour roved between targets, accepting no satiric vantage point as definitive. When Boniface and his daughter Cherry discuss the possibility that the two new guests are highwaymen, it is a shock that the landlord is prepared to pimp his family to find out.77 Lloyd Hutchinson did this as though it was the most natural request in the world: nothing broke the rhythm of his bonhomie. Farquhar wants us to see the scandalous hypocrite. The episode forces Cherry to disown him: he is merely ‘this landlord of mine, for I think I can call him no more’. In an orphaned cry that reaches back into some former, better life, it is her dead mother she remembers as the fount of goodness, a ‘generous, free-hearted Woman’ whose ‘good Nature’ would go to any lengths for the sake of her children.78 The transition to the scene that follows is stark but typical of migrant displacement: after nostalgia for home, a routine seduction of serving girl by city slicker. When she asks for his name, the author speaks from his deathbed. Archer forgets, and then comes up with ‘Martin’, which raised a titter in the Olivier for its dull modernity, but the original joke was prompted by something personal. Cherry asks where he was born, and Archer comes up with the place where his creator was dying: St Martin’s parish. In his New Mermaids edition of the play, Michael Cordner annotates with a very different point: An appropriate birthplace for Archer to lay claim to, it was well known as a centre for dealers in imitation jewellery. ‘St Martin’s ware’ had come to mean ‘counterfeit goods’. There is an obvious significance in the fact that, in adopting the name of Martin (with all its devious associations), Archer is abandoning his true Christian name, Frank.79 It would be careless of Archer to use his own name in the circumstances, so the idea of his ‘abandoning’ his true name seems theologically overwrought. More significant is the glimpse he gives us of the poverty that haunts him and his friend and was about to kill his creator. Not only was he born in the parish, but he claims to have no family to speak of (and there is certainly none to help him out of his current straitened circumstances). ‘What was your Father?’ asks Cherry. Same answer: ‘St Martin’s Parish’.80 So to Lizzie Clachan’s first ingenious scene change. The beaux’ dream comes true: tavern morphs into country house, and two beautiful women occupy the stage. The stage direction asks for ‘A Gallery in Lady Bountiful’s House’, an effect Farquhar calculated as an indoor panel drawn half way across the stage, creating an intimacy to contrast with the public space of the tavern.81 The monumental Olivier stage allowed the women only to stand at the front, speaking outwards in a slightly declamatory style. That was fine for Susannah Fielding, a bright, spontaneous performer who had the measure of Mrs Sullen’s distinctive blend of humour, frustration and protest.

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She achieved instant connection with the audience. Pippa Bennett-Warner, a less experienced performer, strained vocally to bring Dorinda to life. But it is a limited role, the very name indicative of Farquhar’s having conceived her as an object of someone else’s attention rather than the subject of her own (his distinctive talent for dramatizing women did not, it is worth remembering, extend to all his characters). Defending her awful brother Sullen is a thankless and futile task, and she can only feed her sister-in-law with better lines: ‘He never sleeps from you’, she says, standing up for his fidelity. ‘No’, replies Mrs Sullen drily, ‘he always sleeps with me’. So Dorinda moves to money. ‘He allows you a Maintenance’; but Mrs Sullen is outraged. ‘Do you take me, madam, for an hospital Child, that I must sit down, and bless my Benefactors for Meat, Drink, and Clothes?’82 There is an edge between them. They exchange ‘Madams’ before Mrs Sullen pulls rank, calling Dorinda a ‘Child’. That is in response to the bookish suggestion that Mrs Sullen’s tastes are over-refined and that since ‘Poets and Philosophers’ have found true pleasure in country life, Mrs Sullen must be wrong to find it wanting. But her response is curt, and a brutal assessment of Farquhar’s own chances in life. Poets and philosophers ‘wanted Money … to find out the Pleasures of the Town’.83 When she goes on, gamely, to praise the sexualized landscapes of classical art which give ‘fresh Alarms to Love’, she recognizes that she has made Dorinda ‘angry’. Mrs Sullen tries to calm the situation with some elder-sisterly advice (‘beware of a sullen, silent Sot, one that’s always musing, but never thinks’) before launching into a fine comic speech about her husband arriving home drunk at four in the morning. Here Farquhar’s instinct for farce and his ability to adopt the woman’s point of view serve him well. Mrs Sullen’s tale of her husband ‘tumbling over the Tea-table’, rolling around the room as if seasick, flouncing into bed, ‘dead as a Salmon into a Fishmonger’s Basket’ and then starting up ‘the tuneable Serenade of that wakeful Nightingale, his Nose’, builds up the character we are about to see into an uncouth slob who must surely strike the audience as revolting to the same degree that Mrs Sullen finds him.84 It helps if there is a sense of menace about the man. He would beat her if he could be bothered, hating her as much as she hates him. In a 1985 student production of the play at Oxford, Sullen was a borderline psychopath, his eyes bulging with contempt for this woman who drinks tea, hates hunting and likes to indulge in that most irritating pastime for a companion, talk. When he asked the servant, Scrub, to shave his head, it was as though he really meant to cut his wife’s throat.85 Richard Henders’s drunken toff of a Sullen suggested other qualities. No one would have wanted him in the house, and certainly not in bed, but this was a morosely harmless dimwit who exuded no particular threat or even sense of authority. Socially he was hard to distinguish from Aimwell and Archer. A more satiric view of the play’s class politics would have positioned him more clearly as a country squire out of Smollett, outdone by the smartness of his metropolitan rival: an ill-natured version of the sort

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of country cousin found in Congreve’s Sir Wilful Witwoud from The Way of the World. As with Boniface, this was a low-definition performance that searched after naturalism where what was called for was a feeling of the grotesque identified by Peter Hall. The subdued, almost Chekhovian quality of some of the National Theatre performances suggested a wish for social harmony not quite borne out by the play’s narrative. A fine exception was Pearce Quigley, in the small role of Sullen’s servant, Scrub. Here, a convincing inner life of lust, self-importance and anti-Catholic prejudice breathed through nasal, deadpan delivery. Imagine Alan Bennett declaring this news to be urgent and then announcing it as solemnly as possible: In the first place I enquir’d who the Gentleman was? they told me, he was a Stranger, Secondly, I ask’d what the Gentleman was, they answer’d and said, that they never saw him before. Thirdly, I enquir’d what Countryman he was, they reply’d ’twas more than they knew. Fourthly, I demanded whence he came, their Answer was, they cou’d not tell. And Fifthly, I ask’d whither he went, and they reply’d they knew nothing of the matter.86 To an audience who could describe in only the vaguest terms what he meant, his conclusion was equally funny in its opinionated, downbeat monotone: Why, some think he’s a Spy, some guess he’s a Mountebank, some say one thing, some another; but for my own part, I believe he’s a Jesuit.87 When he finished describing Archer’s appearance as a laced, fine-wigged footman, it was obvious that in addition to his other hang-ups he now carried the burden of social inferiority: ‘He’s clear another Sort of Man than I.’ If this served as a further reminder that Farquhar’s eye for actorly opportunity scanned the social horizon more broadly and ingeniously than any other Restoration dramatist, and as much with an eye for folly and cunning as an expression of genial sympathy, it also drew attention to his habit of reserving his finest comic writing for states of envy and alienation. Quigley fully justified the fame that originally attached to the role. Henry Norris, who created the part, referred to himself as ‘Scrub’ when speaking the prologue to a lost play by Vanbrugh two years after the premiere of The Beaux’ Stratagem.88 The vividness of Farquhar’s writing derived from personal observation. Lichfield MP Sir Michael Biddulph presided over a household that featured a servant called Thomas Bond. Half a century after Farquhar’s death, news broke of the old retainer’s death: Farquhar’s characters in the Beaux Stratagem were taken from originals then living in and near the city of Lichfield; and last Thursday se’nnight

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died there Thomas Bond, aged 82, who was the last surviving character, and the original Scrub in that play.89 Farquhar’s willingness to make Frenchmen, Irish liquor and Catholics the butt of humour and the agents of political menace reflects his upbringing in war-torn Ireland and a corresponding wish for assimilation into metropolitan culture, a desire to be more English than the English. But he also turned those inclinations inside out and made them ridiculous. Scrub laments the way Gipsy the serving maid has been ‘converted … and perverted’ by the French priest Foigard, who has ‘made her a Whore and a Papist’.90 It was his friendship with the supposed servant Archer that provided the best route to comic invention not predicted by the script. Archer’s third act ‘trifle’ song was no longer a prepared piece but one desperately improvised upon Scrub’s mischievous prompt.91 Archer’s skill no less than his attire persuades Mrs Sullen that he is better than a French count: like Dorimant in Etherege’s The Man of Mode, a true English person of fashion and as such several notches above any French or Frenchified interloper. Where she chose the Napoleonic-looking Count Bellair for ‘a Design upon her Husband’, she likes Archer ‘better in a Design upon myself’.92 At the National, Bellair was more impassioned but less adept at music than his rival. Where Archer dashed off a jaunty English tune about a trifle, Bellair belted out a ballad à la Jacques Brel, prompting another put down from Mrs Sullen which had the audience roaring. Its success was in Susannah Fielding’s carefully modulated delivery, the pauses used to the sort of deadly effect mastered by Maggie Smith in a succession of Restoration and other roles: There goes the true Humour of his Nation [pause]- Resentment with good Manners [pause], and the height of Anger in a Song.93 It was a perfect inflection of Simon Callow’s call for lapidary delivery; in this case the diamantine utterance came shivered into bright little shards. Then the tone turned serious, with Mrs Sullen’s Miltonic reflections on the slavery of unhappy marriage. The comedy of humours appealed only so far to Farquhar: he also demands of his leading performers the agility required to embody the lurching uncertainty of exile. The opening of the second half, in the same setting and with the same character alone on stage, generated in this production a rare moment of real rapport between actors and audience, so hard to achieve in the huge spaces of the Olivier, but indicative of the way Restoration theatres worked through adjacency of actors and audience. Mrs Sullen enters and risks a sentiment that might today be taken for Islamophobia. It turns straight into the neatly complementary position of British patriotism expressed by the ‘humble Turk’ speech.94 Farquhar had in mind the reigning monarch, Queen Anne; the audience of 2015 thought of themselves. Susannah Fielding

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did not get as far as ‘must women be abused’ because people cheered the reference to England’s women. Instinctively, she responded with a doublefist salute before carrying on. It was a perfect example of responsive, publicfacing Restoration acting, undaunted by the scale of the Olivier. Then the play accelerated into farce, thanks partly to Patrick Marber’s alterations. The highwaymen’s attempted robbery was played as pure knockabout, with Gibbet giving the sleeping figure in the bed a loving kiss on the mouth only to find that it was Scrub. Before that, Mrs Sullen dispatches the countrywoman with her treatment for his sore leg, and Aimwell is carried in under the pretence of being sick. He wakes in a transport of bliss to find Dorinda there, an ironic nod back towards Loveless, the hero of Cibber’s 1696 Love’s Last Shift, who wakes to find that the woman he has slept with is his loyal wife Amanda; Aimwell mimics Loveless’s sentimental rapture. The play does everything for the actor here, and Aimwell threw everything into his response. Then, a dazzling scenic invention: as Archer and Mrs Sullen survey the pictures in Lady Bountiful’s house, a collection of portraits is flown in, poised above the different levels of the set. Hero and heroine play a game whereby he lights upon the most erotically suggestive pictures and she deflects him. When they come to her portrait, he speaks the language of erotic courtship and Farquhar is frank in suggesting she desires him, but not in a way that demeans her. ‘Had it been my lot to have been matched with such a man!’ she confides in us.95 Susannah Fielding trod the knife-edge of desire and bitter irony with great skill, while convincing us completely that she knew just what Archer was up to. In the succeeding dialogue with Dorinda, the poignancy of her situation is reinforced. Like sisters in a romantic comedy, they share their experiences of being chatted up. For Dorinda it ends in the prospect of marriage to the man she thinks is Lord Aimwell; for Mrs Sullen there is no escape. ‘Long smiling Years of circling Joys for you, but not one Hour for me’, she weeps.96 The play engineers a conclusion with the arrival of Sir Charles, her brother, and the closing stand-off about Mrs Sullen’s dowry was managed by Simon Godwin forthrightly and with a genuine sense of narrative tension. Music, a strong companion to the production, finished the evening through a reprise of Archer’s trifle song – riskily characterizing the play as something less than it is – before everything ceded to the lone fiddler on the roof, as though to remind us that the happy ending was, as Tiffany Stern’s programme note explained, a legal impossibility founded on reading Milton, another radical Protestant who was, like Farquhar, both of and beyond his time.97

4 1706: Military Comedy

Only nine months before Robert Wilks’s fateful visit to St Martin’s Lane, Farquhar had been enjoying one of high points of his career. Wilks had every reason to believe his friend could rouse himself from his sick bed, banish melancholy, draw his drama and write. The Recruiting Officer had opened in April 1706. Propitiously, the premiere had been on a Monday; a Saturday opening was often a sign that companies were nervous about a play’s reception and banked on having Sunday to tinker with it.1 Planning a full week’s run was a sign of confidence which in this case was justified. The London Stage records six performances between 8 and 15 April with a further two later in the month. The 15 April performance was a benefit night for Farquhar in which he took the profits; on 20 April he enjoyed another. This promised the kind of success he had only enjoyed with The Constant Couple. Even so, success was tempered by timing. An April opening meant that the season would run out in two months, and people’s minds would turn to new fare in the autumn. Opening in November, The Constant Couple had run through the rest of the 1699–1700 season. The new play lasted. There were 512 recorded performances between the premiere and the end of the century.2 More than a quarter of them were benefit performances; another sign of successive companies’ faith in the play. Most were for actors, some for other theatre people, and twenty or so for those Kenny describes as various gentlemen, gentlewomen, and orphan children in distress as well as lying-in hospitals and other charitable endeavours.3 That was a reflection not just of commercial confidence but of what was believed to be its broadly moral and patriotic tone, judged suitable for Christian purposes. Not just Christian ones: Kenny counts thirteen royal command performances, two for dignitaries from Tunisia and one for a group of Freemasons.4 Farquhar’s children benefited too, some way into their lives. Performances as late as 29 May 1717 and 16 May 1729

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were mounted for their support, so giving Kenny further occasion to find something unseemly in Margaret, whom she judges ‘industrious in trying to profit from [Farquhar’s] service in the theatre as well as in the army’, even though the poor woman had died some years before.5 It re-made Farquhar’s career. The initial advertisements for The Recruiting Officer imply that his star had dimmed a little since The Constant Couple. The Daily Courant of 6 April 1706 promises only ‘a Comedy, never Acted before, call’d The Recruiting Officer’ without mentioning Farquhar’s name then or in the fourteen further advertisements that followed.6 Since The Constant Couple, flops had dented his fame. It is understandable that George doubted himself to Wilks so soon after the success that was The Recruiting Officer. The experience of The Constant Couple said that his chances of following up one big success with another were slim. Sir Harry Wildair was a coarse pastiche of its predecessor; if Captain Plume; or The Recruiting Officer Part Two was the obvious option when Wilks nagged him to write again, there seemed little point in pursuing it. Something more original was needed. One clue lay in The Recruiting Officer’s setting: the English Midlands, with its explicit reminiscence of Farquhar’s military career. If Barcellona was a heroic pose by someone who never saw action, The Recruiting Officer recounted less glamorous experiences he had, at least, undergone himself. His dedication of the play ‘To All Friends Round the Wrekin’ suggests he enjoyed himself as a recruiting officer in the Midlands, even if his praise for Salopian hospitality sits uncomfortably with the darker tones modern directors have sounded in the play: ’Twas my good fortune to be order’d some time ago into the Place which is made the Scene of this Comedy; I was a perfect Stranger to every thing in Salop, but its Character of Loyalty, the Number of its Inhabitants, the Alacrity of the Gentlemen in recruiting the Army, with their generous and hospitable Reception of Strangers. This Character I found so amply verify’d in every Particular, that you made recruiting, which is the greatest Fatigue upon Earth to others, to be the greatest Pleasure in the World to me.7 Farquhar worked from local observation – ‘some little Turns of Humour that I met with almost within the Shade of that famous Hill gave the rise to this Comedy’ – while remaining anxious not to ‘make the Town merry at the expence of the Country Gentlemen.’ A later correspondence between a bishop and a Shrewsbury resident provided a full-blown reading of the play à clef, with the character of Justice Balance identified as the town’s Deputy Recorder, Melinda as ‘Miss Harnage of Belsadine near the Wrekin,’ and Plume as Farquhar himself.8 The account is made more persuasive by the bishop’s confession that not all the originals could be identified and ‘the story [was] I suppose the Poet’s invention.’ Farquhar’s ‘originals’ are as

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much theatrical as they are Salopian, but local scenery remains conspicuous. Leigh Hunt described the play’s knack of making an audience ‘breathe the clear, fresh, ruddy-making air’ of the country (noting also the adjacency of ‘hospitable elegance’), and the effect is achieved through multiple references to rural life and through backdrops that must have had the Drury Lane painters asking Farquhar for details of ‘the Market Place’ and ‘the Walk, by the Severn side’ and the manager of the Drury Lane company, Christopher Rich, feeling relieved that those novelties were punctuated with standard issue scenes showing apartments and antechambers.9 In The Beaux’ Stratagem Farquhar would transform the paranoia of the home front into a narrative of belonging; or at least, a yearning to belong. Its underbelly of rural life is marked by crime, threats of subversion, and the nervous tics that accompany it. We might liken it to the British TV series Dad’s Army, in which the heroes are elderly bank managers and butchers preparing to repel a Nazi invasion, except here the heroism belongs to a couple of fortune-hunting, crypto-Irish lads mopping up the opposition and so proving their entitlement to a place in society. By a superficial reading, The Recruiting Officer transformed personal experience into a celebration of life nearer the front line: of a glamourized army life that caught the optimism of the post-Blenheim years. It is Farquhar’s boldest statement of assimilation; by contrast The Beaux’ Stratagem is a regression into anxieties of alienation and their compensating dreams of integration. But those personal dimensions are complicated by dramatic conventions that combine farce with moral reform: handsome young army captain (Plume) descends on provincial town, in love with heiress (Silvia) but distracted by comely maiden (Rose); his friend, meanwhile (Worthy), is troubled by a rich former fiancée (Melinda) who has turned against him and is now wooed by another man (Brazen); Silvia disguises herself as a man, then finds herself sharing a bed with Rose; everything is resolved when Plume, like any good sentimental hero of the nineties and noughties, gives up his roving life for marriage to Silvia. In Plume, Farquhar wrote another part for Wilks, the charming rover, the playwright apparently projecting a happy, successful identity for himself through dependence on his friend. In Plume’s rough diamond of a Sergeant, Francis Kite, he formed a character who would dominate the play’s later reputation. The play’s relatively thin plotting – effectively, a series of embarrassments befalling Plume – was a matter for trenchant criticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it reflects Farquhar’s immersion in experiences that were too various and real to be easily reconciled to a pre-existing narrative framework.10 Inconsistencies in the plot, whereby a signature is attributed to two different characters and a character is misnamed, are one sign of how Farquhar occasionally lost control of his narrative in the rush to transcribe experience into drama.11 Only in his last play would he find in the stratagem, or plot, a formal vehicle for the paradoxes of his life.

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Immersed in the mechanics of wartime enlistment, the first months of The Recruiting Officer took place in times of theatrical warfare. Conceived for Rich’s company, it served as theatrical ammunition. In the Haymarket stood the new Queen’s Theatre and there, on 8 April 1706, was scheduled the benefit night of Thomas Durfey’s Wonders in the Sun, ‘Comick Opera’ and dramatic realization of music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, and characteristic of the kind of ostentatious Francophile entertainment favoured by the actormanager Thomas Betterton in his later years.12 Durfey’s concoction boasted a huge cast of actors and singers pretending to be birds. The Preface to The Recruiting Officer implies that Durfey had accused Rich of damaging his takings by putting on a new play on such a topical subject. Farquhar reports that Rich has asked him to respond in order to ‘acquit him before the World’ of such a charge.13 The fun he has with Durfey’s piece suggests he is hardly sorry to oblige: He brought down a huge Flight of frightful Birds upon me, when (Heaven knows) I had not a Feather’d Fowl in my Play, except one single Kite: But I presently made Plume a Bird, because of his Name, and Brazen another, because of the Feather in his Hat; and with these three I engag’d his whole Empire, which I think was as great a Wonder as any in the Sun.14 The cheeky chap proud of his wit, outdoing the senior professional (Wonders in the Sun was Durfey’s twenty-seventh play): Farquhar spoke from a position of exhilarated relief, a second success to his name at last, crowing over a fellow professional’s thin benefit night and content to share with readers the sound of his own tongue running away with him. His high spirits seem less appealing when he is described by Derek Hughes as ‘an author who did not disdain minor plagiarisms from Durfey’.15 It was more than enough to have the approval of his military masters. ‘The Duke of Ormond encourag’d the Author, and the Earl of Orrery approv’d the Play,’ he concludes.16 Within months, theatrical rivalry led to the break-up of Farquhar’s original cast. Rich’s deputy, Owen Swiney, left his master and moved to the Queen’s Theatre. Plume (Wilks), Brazen (Colley Cibber), Silvia (Anne Oldfield) and five others followed, probably with Rich’s agreement; he had a history of falling out with senior actors, disliking their habit of demanding respect, artistic control and comfortable terms. Richard Estcourt, as Sergeant Kite, stayed put. In the history of the play he would be as big an asset as any. The dissolving of a successful cast might be thought damaging. In practice it multiplied the number of performances and made audiences curious to see how the rival theatres’ productions compared, at least until the union of the Drury Lane and Queen’s companies in 1710. As other companies emerged thereafter, further rivalries developed. The list of actors who succeeded Wilks as Captain Plume includes stars (David Garrick and Charles Kemble), unknowns (‘a Gentleman from Oxford’), amateurs (‘a Young Gentleman of

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the Temple’) and women (‘Mrs Charke’).17 Garrick also played the cameo role of the rural recruit Costar Pearmain, to the dismay of a concerned vicar.18 International – and nationalist – politics supported the play’s reputation and modified its presentation. The Daily Courant of 24 September 1706 records how lines were added to one of the play’s songs in celebration of Prince Eugene of Savoy, at the head of a Habsburg column, breaking the French siege of Turin. The following January a new prologue was added to mark a further French loss at Ramillies in Flanders. The play was performed at Drury Lane on 21 September 1714 to mark George I’s arrival in the capital, with a new prologue by Richard Steele.19 In a performance of November 1747, with Garrick in the lead, new material was added to reflect the British navy’s recent defeat of the French at Finisterre. War, social inclusion and theatricality have confirmed the play’s standing with modern directors and made it the most accessible of Farquhar’s works for audiences. The Beaux’ Stratagem has prompted reflections on acting styles; how directors may approach Farquhar is best exemplified by Max Stafford-Clark’s Letters to George, written as an accompaniment to his 1988 production of The Recruiting Officer. Stafford-Clark was drawn to that play precisely because it seemed untypical of the period: the uncourtly, unfoppish quality that had appealed to William Gaskill.20 Nevertheless, his book sets a standard for anyone wanting to understand how to achieve style through meaning rather than as an end in itself. Letters to George shows how amenable the text is to Stanislavskian analysis of objectives and actions, and part of the charm of the book is the way it pretends to open up this modern science of acting to Farquhar. Speeches are broken up into actions using transitive verbs (‘befriends’, ‘warns’, ‘pleases’, ‘snubs’ ). The effect is to highlight the remarkable degree of intuitive interaction and scenic shaping in Farquhar’s writing. What Simon Callow has called the ‘self-representation’ required of the actor of Restoration Comedy emerges as less important than the characters’ ability to work upon, succumb to or resist each other.21 For Callow, Restoration acting is individualistic; for Stafford-Clark, a group endeavour. The core of The Recruiting Officer, the part that appealed most to Gaskill and that seems both original and disturbing today, is the officer’s helpmate. Sergeant Kite is, the name suggests, partly drawn from the humours comedy tradition that found focus in the work of Ben Jonson and was re-enacted in the work of Dryden and Shadwell. Thomas Wilkes thought he had found another explanation. In the Earl of Orrery’s regiment, he claims, was a Sergeant Jones who lured recruits away from his fellow sergeants with ‘agreeable drollery and humorous songs’.22 Jones was found out and taken into custody, but the story ends happily. According to Wilkes, Farquhar persuaded the Earl to release him, and Jones then entertained the Earl with songs and stories so ably that Orrery gave him money and promised a commission. It was in part his trickery that earned him the nickname ‘Kite’.

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Certainly his namesake circles his prey, bribes and feasts upon them with a comic glee reminiscent of Volpone or Subtle in The Alchemist. He tempts a pair of local lads, Thomas Appletree and Coster Pearmain, with promises of what army life will bring, drinking them into compliance: Kite Thus we Soldiers live, drink, sing, dance, play; we live, as one shou’d say – We live – ’Tis impossible to tell you how we live – We’re all Princes – Why – Why you’re a king – You’re an Emperour, and I’m a Prince – Now – an’t we – Cos No, Serjeant – I’ll be no Emperour. Kite No! Cos No, I’ll be a Justice of the Peace. Kite A Justice of the Peace, man! Cos Ay, wauns will I, for since this pressing Act they are greater than any Emperour under the Sun.23 Pearmain is canny enough to see which side of the fence he should be on when governments force those ‘without visible Support’ into military life, as happened in successive Mutiny and Impressment Acts from 1703 to 1705 (the legislation produced the play’s best bad joke, when it is said that miners should be forced to join up since when they’re at work underground they lack visible support). But Kite inveigles him all the same. At the chilling conclusion to Act Two, Plume leads both young men off, singing ‘Over the Hills and far away’ and promising they will all return as ‘Gentlemen’.24 Still, Plume embodies the easy glamour of army life, likening his escape from injury in battle to his freedom from syphilis after a stay in London. Kite’s autobiography is a cheerful memoir of crime. Worthy praises him as ‘the most useful Fellow to [his] Captain, admirable in your way, I find’ (Kite is, in part, the ever-willing sidekick, a Leporello or Dromio who gets into unlikely scrapes to serve or save his master); in reply, Worthy hears a life story steeped in heroic parody that reveals what the salt of the earth is really made of: Kite

I understand my Business, I will say it; you must know, Sir, I was born a Gypsie, and bred among that Crew til I was ten Year old, there I learn’d Canting and Lying. I was bought from my Mother Cleopatra by a certain Nobleman for three Pistoles, who liking my Beauty made me his Page, there I learn’d Impudence and Pimping; I was turn’d off for wearing my Lord’s Linen, and drinking my Lady’s Brandy, and then turn’d Bailiff’s Follower, there I learn’d Bullying and Swearing – I at last got into the Army, and there I learn’d Whoring and Drinking – So that if your Worship pleases to cast up the whole Sum, viz. Canting, Lying,

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Impudence, Pimping, Bullying, Swearing, Whoring, Drinking, and a Halbard, you will find the Sum Total will amount to a Recruiting Serjeant. Wor And pray, what induc’d you to turn Soldier? Kite Hunger and Ambition – The Fears of starving and Hopes of a Truncheon, led me along to a Gentleman with a fair Tongue and fair Perriwig, who loaded me with Promises; but I gad ’twas the lightest Load that I ever felt in my Life – He promis’d to advance me, and indeed he did so – To a Garret in the Savoy – I ask’d him why he put me in Prison; he call’d me lying Dog, and said I was in Garison.25 If that is the grotesque of lived experience, Farquhar’s gift for comic obsession owes something to Molière too; his Captain Brazen has ‘the most prodigious, and the most trifling, memory in the world’, a supremo of military trivial pursuit who recalls how a soldier was killed in battle with a blue ribbon in his hat and an ox tongue in his pocket. In modern productions, shades of interpretation have often centred on the casting of Kite; the play’s early reception also indicates how the success of the play was linked to the performance of a brilliant mimic, Richard Estcourt, in the role. Gaskill’s 1963 production for the newly formed National Theatre featured the gritty Northern Irish actor Colin Blakely, already a veteran of the new wave of British drama mounted at the Royal Court; his persuasion of Coster and Thomas to join the army was described by the director years later as ‘a demonstration of jingoism’ in which the young recruits ‘fall for nationalism, sentimentality and violence as readily as soldiers going to the Falklands War’.26 In 1980, Pete Postlethwaite brought boulder-eyed psychopathy to the role in Adrian Noble’s production for the Bristol Old Vic, twinned with a Troilus and Cressida in which he played an earthy general among generals, Ulysses.27 This Kite set forth his history of canting, lying, impudence, pimping, bullying, swearing, whoring and drinking as though giving his name and pack drill, and the effect was both funnier and more chilling than any self-consciously genial reading. But geniality is a tool for an actor as well as an effect. By force of personality, and in the context of a production that otherwise fell under the spell of Gaskill’s, the Kite of Jim Broadbent in Max Stafford-Clark’s production for the Royal Court Theatre was a wheedling clown, put upon by his master but exploiting his natural hail-fellow geniality to enlist recruits.28 A different kind of comedy – zany, youthful and pushing the boundaries charted by Pete Postlethwaite – was provided in Josie Rourke’s 2012 version at the Donmar Warehouse, in which Mackenzie Crook suggested a man driven to the edge of his nerves, fanatically committed to the cause.29 This was a crazed, post–Iraq War Kite, but still in breeches; without overt modernity, the play served its historic purpose of setting before a London audience their country’s

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ambivalent relationship to the experience of war, with sentimentality pitched against anxiety. A more personal concern connects Kite with his author. The spectrum of anti-migrant prejudice is present in Kite’s sum of what it takes to be a recruiting sergeant: the lying, impudence, pimping, bullying, swearing, whoring, drinking and other habits are also those of the conventional Irish rogue. The army is the place where they can be swept up under a convenient banner of allegiance. If the tendency of the autobiographical tradition of Farquhar criticism has been to associate the author with the carefree heroes of his comedies, it has been at the cost of neglecting his personal investment in their grotesque sidekicks and alter egos: people who, like Kite, are tolerated only because of the brutal tasks they are required to perform within a wellestablished hierarchy. Other myths of Ireland surround Farquhar’s sergeant. Just as the Irish Roebuck in Love and a Bottle is construed by Lucinda as possessing the mystical attributes of a prophet, so Kite disguises himself ‘in a strange Habit’ and presents himself as a ‘cunning Man’ capable of predicting the future.30 The contrast between Plume and Kite maps a spectrum of responses to war that leaves audiences with space to draw their own conclusions: another feature of the species of ‘negative capability’ Farquhar exhibited in creating Mrs Sullen, and turning also on the writer’s own conflicted status as a servant of the state that rejects him.31 Such a capacity for entertaining doubt is related to Farquhar’s abiding popularity in the theatre; the classic work turns a different face to each generation because it is profoundly ambiguous. It is simplistic, then, for Eugene Nelson James to follow the angry eighteenth-century Bristol clergyman Arthur Bedford in characterizing The Recruiting Officer as an uncompromising satire of the army.32 James, writing in the shadow of the Vietnam War, applauds Farquhar for revealing a secret Bedford did not wish to contemplate. Where Bedford was appalled by Farquhar’s depiction of soldiers as drunkards and philanderers, seeing in such representation a threat to public morality, James applauds the playwright’s insight into the ‘immorality and cruelty of the system’, proceeding to chart the soldier’s progress from recruitment to service to injury and death in a collection of works, including The Recruiting Officer.33 In the battlefield descriptions of Barcellona he finds no balance of exhilaration and horror but only ‘hatred of war’; in the passage from The Twin-Rivals where the villainous Young Wou’dbe describes soldiers as ‘Fools that have only Brains to be knockt out’, he slides over the satire that rebounds on the speaker.34 A similar partiality characterizes James’s reading of key episodes in The Recruiting Officer. When Justice Balance asks Captain Plume to describe the Battle of Hochstadt (or ‘Hockstet’ as it reads in the text), he gets the following reply:

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The Battel, Sir, was a very pretty Battel as one shou’d desire to see, but we were all so intent upon Victory, that we never minded the Battel; all that I know of the matter is, our General commanded us to beat the French, and we did so, and if he pleases to say the word, we’ll do’t again.35 In James’s reading, Plume’s response declines to glorify war and instead belittles it. Against such literalism, Farquhar offers multiple opportunities to the performer and the spectator; the objectives identified by StaffordClark are always negotiable. Plume may be demonstrating soldierly modesty (it was nothing) or making light of trauma, the joke about not minding the battle an evidently hollow one; paying homage to his General’s orders, he is both literal and ironic, displaying the firm-chinned resolve of the honest trooper in the same breath as admitting that all soldiers are pawns in a larger scheme. If an audience receives this merely as satire, something has gone wrong with the production (such duality is the key difference between The Recruiting Officer and Trumpets and Drums). The same is true if the effect is too benign. In Kevin J. Gardner’s reading, the play is state-administered Valium, a means of calming public anxiety about conscription.36 But Farquhar does not either glorify or satirise army life. His singular effect is enabling us to experience the unstable continuum between the two. If The Recruiting Officer is atypical of Restoration Comedy because its abiding social relevance does not have to be trumpeted or drummed into an audience, it is also highly unusual because so professedly grounded in its author’s own experience. Given that we know Farquhar served as a recruiting officer immediately before it was written, it seems perverse of James to state that the play ‘owes more to [his] experiences in the theater than it does to his experiences in Shrewsbury’.37 Even in the very literal sense that relates to characters and episodes, such a view neglects the obvious. When Plume makes his first appearance he is embarrassed by his previous liaison with Molly but makes light of it by suggesting that a healthy birthrate is good for recruitment.38 In the records of the Shropshire Quarter Sessions for October 1704 (the very period Farquhar was there) lies the case of a man charged with fathering an illegitimate child on a woman called Anne Skett; the parishes who bore the cost of fatherless children took a less rosy view of such matters than recruiting officers. Skett was sent to the House of Correction, newly rebuilt in 1704, but the alleged father was found not guilty. His name was Francis Kyte.39 As in The Beaux’ Stratagem, Farquhar drew plentifully on personal experience without always re-casting it in the most obvious ways. It is indeed facile to claim that he portrayed himself as Captain Plume, but it is equally simplistic to dismiss the idea that he used dramatic form to address urgent questions of identity and affiliation. His inversions are, in part, an act of concealment played out in full daylight: to pursue a new identity means hiding an old one, but publicly. By the time he wrote The Beaux’

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Stratagem his confidence in the pose had fallen away. The real instability of The Recruiting Officer is rooted in its author’s paradoxical relationship to the culture to which he sought to belong, and in the circumstances it would be odd indeed not to ask what resemblance the play bears to Farquhar’s actual army career, which had begun two years earlier.

5 1704: In the Army

(i) Moments of comedy for the recruiting officer who was George Farquhar were few and far between. Robert Jordan’s meticulous study of army recruiting in the early eighteenth century, and specifically of the circumstances facing Farquhar’s regiment, concludes that Farquhar’s army career was neither long nor particularly glorious, and to Farquhar himself it must have seemed a disappointing interlude, promising security and leading only to financial embarrassment.1 Its value was in the opportunity it gave him to turn struggle and penury into theatre. Army life turned out to be pivotal in his writing career. Jordan continues: Looked at in terms of his development as a writer, however, the period may well have been crucial. Not only did his experiences provide him with the inspiration for his next play but the complete break from playwriting and the move into a different world may have contributed to the sense of freshness that characterizes his work thereafter, and raises him from the level of the talented hack to that of the significant comic writer.2 So what exactly were the experiences? The prompt was trouble in Farquhar’s homeland. After the brutal conflict at the Boyne in 1690, a series of treaties and laws attempted to regulate the position of Irish Catholics. On 3 October 1691 the Treaty of Limerick permitted the evacuation of the Irish Army to France and promised religious toleration. Four years on, the policy turned draconian in the face of further outbreaks of violence. The Penal Laws passed on 7 September 1695 restricted the rights of Catholics to education and forbade them to carry weapons or even possess a horse worth more than £5; an old

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nag could do no harm in a skirmish. The following year saw a conspiracy foiled thanks to information supplied by the turncoat Jacobite Thomas Prendergast, who was rewarded with a baronetcy, £10,000 a year, and the Gort estate. More of him later. In September 1697 a new Act banned Catholic clergy from Ireland, while two years later restrictions were placed on the Irish wool trade.3 Resistance, whether by pen or sword, was not countenanced. William Molyneux’s 1698 tract, The Case of Ireland Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England Stated, was a forensic dissection of recent legislation by a Dublin intellectual determined to uphold Irish sovereignty. The author escaped punishment but his work was denounced at Westminster and burned at Tyburn. Then, on 4 March 1704, the legislative knot was tightened further. A new Penal Law set out to ‘prevent the further growth of Popery’ by applying far stricter measures than had been introduced in 1695. Even though the Catholic share of land ownership had already fallen to a mere 14 per cent of the total, the new law made it almost impossible for Catholics to buy or lease property. Inheritance rights between Catholics were abolished. For some, that meant effective debarral from public office; for others, a new regime of sacramental tests and oaths of allegiance took care of their chances of advancement.4 The troubles of the past fourteen years meant no such legislation could pass without the threat of disturbance. For that, an army was required and young, needy, expatriate Irish Protestants such as Farquhar had the chance to return across the sea to defend the homeland and defeat the enemy within. No sooner had the new legislation passed than mobilization began. Impoverished and married to a war widow with no means of support, Farquhar had all the motivation he needed to join up. Whatever he lacked, Margaret could supply, stories of Pemell’s anti-papist heroics still fresh in her mind.

(ii) Dalton’s English Army Lists dates the founding month of the Earl of Orrery’s Regiment of Foot as March 1704.5 Charles Boyle, the Fourth Earl, had just succeeded to the title following the premature death the previous August of his elder brother Lionel. It was usual for the officer class to be assembled within the first month but the recruitment of regular soldiers typically came later, by budgetary sleight of hand. Strapped for cash, the Irish Treasury vired the first two or three months’ pay to the levy allowed to officers for each man they recruited.6 It was not until 5 June that the official recruiting instructions were sent to Orrery. He was ordered to raise a regiment of foot consisting of eleven companies of equal size that would ‘Rendezvous at Shrewsbury, Whitchurch, Namptwich, Wrexham, Chester, Leverpoole and Whitehaven’, with the date of embarkation to Ireland set at 14 September 1704.7

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It is not certain whether it was Orrery or the Duke of Ormond who commissioned Lieutenant George Farquhar; the answer could technically be both. Ormond, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, bore overall responsibility for recruitment to Irish regiments, while Orrery was charged with raising just one. Margaret’s petition to Queen Anne comes with Ormond’s reference certifying her late husband’s good character as a soldier. Yet Ormond may not have been aware of the precise means by which the young dramatist had come to his and Orrery’s attention, and the rival stories of Farquhar’s commission have different consequences for an understanding of how he came to join the army, and on what terms. Early biographies favour Orrery, a highly cultivated Fellow of the Royal Society possessed of sufficient education to have quarrelled publicly with the classical scholar Richard Bentley over the authenticity of the Epistles of Phalaris.8 Sympathetic to Farquhar’s talent and circumstances, Orrery ‘made him a present of a lieutenant’s commission in his own regiment’, according to Thomas Wilkes.9 That was some gift for a playwright whose recent work had not been a great commercial success. Orrery had allegedly seen ‘our author’s great merit [go] unrewarded’ and resolved to do something for him. Presumably he also saw a young man willing to play his part in defeating the enemy. An alternative account traces the commission back to Ormond, but indirectly. Mary de la Rivière Manley’s 1709 roman-à-clef, The Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, features a prince called Adario, his aristocratic mistress and ‘a poor poet’. A manuscript of the book survives in the British Museum. Its marginal notes identify Adario as Ormond, his mistress as Lady Mary Vere and the poor poet as Farquhar. According to Manley, Ormond ‘purchas’d’ Lady Mary from her mother ‘with a considerable Sum’ and agreed to settle ‘Two thousand Crowns a Year’ on his new mistress. Mary’s mother, sensing further opportunities, proceeded to exploit her new family connection by agreeing to intervene with Ormond on behalf of any suitor with the cash to buy her influence. That led her to take without shame ‘sixty Pieces of a poor Poet, (all the Profit that his Brains had ever been able to present him) to make him only a Subaltern’.10 Whether or not Ormond knew about the racket run by his motherout-law, he would have no particular reason to say more in support of Margaret’s petition than that he had given Farquhar his commission and heard the young man praised by his superiors. It was Orrery who would offer the more personal tribute while pointing to the damage army life had inflicted on the young officer’s finances. Here the alternative stories of Farquhar’s commission begin to converge, with equally unpleasant implications. If the money-grabbing mother-out-law didn’t get him, army terms and conditions did; if he paid nothing to Orrery for his commission, he may still have had to bribe Lady Mary Vere’s mother to get the chance; and if Orrery did grant him a commission at no immediate cost, financial traps still lay ahead. According to Orrery, Farquhar ‘was a Person of great

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Ingenuity’ who ‘behav’d himself with great Diligence and was also very serviceable both in raising and Recruiting ye s[ai]d Reigmt to ye great prejudice of his family’.11 Farquhar was faced with the dilemma of the payday loanee: the only way to help his family was the one guaranteed to get him into further difficulty. The ‘great prejudice’ to his family was a direct consequence of the deal for all recruiting officers, who were paid by results. According to official guidelines, it cost £3 to recruit a soldier, and that was the levy passed to recruiting officers: ten men, thirty pounds. But even Ormond knew it really cost more and drew up his pay savings plan for the period April to June 1704 on the assumption that his officers would need £4 per man, a proposal disputed by the deputies he charged with implementing it.12 A year later, a report into the actual cost of recruitment for the Irish service put it at £5 per man.13 The difference had to be made up by the recruiting officers themselves, and evidence survives of mutinous anger among them.14 In good years it might have been tolerable, but 1704 was not a good year. Recruitment in the largely rural areas listed in the instructions to Orrery was not easy at a time when England was preparing for an abundant harvest. The problem was reported in July and again in August. By mid-September (the time originally set for the conclusion of the recruiting campaign), it was necessary to declare an extension to the recruiting campaign of five weeks until 20 October.15 Willard Connely, influenced by the idea that Captain Plume was really George Farquhar, attributes to the playwright an invincible optimism. In the fiscal nightmare of recruitment he detects his man’s will to succeed: ‘present expenditure in aid of a big enrollment would expedite his promotion to a captaincy, with nearly double the pay’.16 But this only serves to emphasize the poignancy of the future. Shafted by the army pay system, Farquhar’s best option was the one he eventually took: return to playwriting and imagine himself the captain he was not. Robert Jordan concludes that he was simply ‘trapped into the expenditure by the obligations of office’ – thanks a million, in other words, to the generous Earl of Orrery and/or Lady Mary Vere’s greedy mother.17 Harvest was not the only imminent problem in the summer of 1704. Until the formal regimental muster, a recruiting officer was responsible for his men. If any deserted before the muster had taken place, the officer was liable for the full amount of the levy, regardless of how much he had already spent. Mustering was supposed to take place at Whitehaven before departure for Ireland; Ormond’s deputies calculated it was better to collect as many recruits as possible in one place and then put them on a big boat to Ireland. The officers disagreed. If all the recruits had to hang around in their own country waiting for official transport, they were more likely to quit. So, they petitioned for an alternative arrangement: get smaller groups of recruits more quickly onto smaller vessels, send them to Ireland and have them mustered there.18

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The flaws of that arrangement are so obvious that it is a wonder it was ever devised, let alone agreed, unless officials construed it cynically as another opportunity to save money. If the logistics of recruiting an army with insufficient funds were challenging, the problem of organizing supervised small-scale transport across the Irish Sea as and when new recruits arrived was overwhelming. Large numbers of unmustered men congregated in Whitehaven. Ormond applied for subsistence so that they could be housed and fed. Sorry, came the inevitable answer. They had to be mustered first: no muster, no subsistence. After a prolonged argument during which the officers probably had to surrender yet more of their own money simply to keep their recruits alive, subsistence funding was provided.19 The harshest consequence of desertion would greet Farquhar once he had made it back to Ireland. On 27 July 1705 he sat in Dublin Castle with twelve other officers of the Earl of Orrery’s Regiment for the court martial of James Lloyd, a soldier in Cutts’s Dragoons who had run away and been captured. Lloyd’s defence was vague and fearful. Had he heard the Act of Parliament against mutiny and desertion, which was read out to all recruits? He might have heard it read once, he said, but a woman was to blame: the ‘over persuasions of an ill woman’ that led him to travel the forty-five miles to the town of Mullingar ‘to endeavour to get some money due to him for breaking Horses for some Gentm in the Country thereabouts’. All the while, he said, his firm intention was to return to his regiment. He even wrote to his captain to say so. The captain could not swear to having received any such letter but ‘express’d a good opinion’ of the prisoner and said he always believed he would return. It was the evidence of Corporal Dowly of Cutts’s Dragoons that swung it. He had come across Lloyd at Mullingar. Informed of the desertion by a bystander, Dowly challenged Lloyd and arrested him. Instead of resisting, Lloyd ‘seem’d not at all surpris’d but very freely & quietly went along with him’. Still, the verdict was not easily reached and it was only by a majority vote that it was decided ‘the prisoner should suffer Death by being shott’.20 On which side of the fence did Farquhar sit? If only we knew. Jordan wonders whether the playwright ‘whose biographers comment on his tenderheartedness, was of the dissenting minority’.21 He even ponders the possibility of the verdict weighing on Farquhar’s conscience. Turn the question the other way round and what comes to mind is Farquhar’s most explicit attempt at a self-portrait, the ‘Picture’ he included in his 1701 anthology of poems, letters and essays. ‘If ever I do a willful Injury’, he wrote with the pumped-up assurance of a professional soldier, ‘it must be a very great one’.22 The events of summer 1704 had, after all, left him with every reason to nurse a grievance against deserters, but professional assurance could be feigned as easily as the glamour of being a recruiting officer. Facing Lloyd, he beheld the familiar figure of a runaway. In the event, whichever way he cast his vote proved irrelevant. Lloyd was pardoned a month after the court martial.23

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Cutts’s Dragoons may have had a deserter or two, but Lord Cutts himself looked with horror upon the new regiment that carried the name of Orrery: ‘weak’ and ‘indifferent’, he complained to Ormond, with ‘some very incapable Officers … which (I am told) were not of my Lord Orrery’s choosing’.24 As Jordan notes, this may simply have been a polite ploy to excuse Orrery – scarcely a professional soldier – for the shambles that was his regiment.25 However, it carries the less comfortable implication that since Farquhar himself may have gained his commission courtesy of Ormond’s mistress’s mother rather than directly through Orrery, he was one of those ‘incapable Officers … not of my Lord Orrery’s choosing’ (in which case, Cutts may unwittingly have caused Ormond a blush or two). Certainly there were some dubious characters in the regiment. The rot started at the top. Lieutenant Colonel Sir Thomas Prendergast owed his fortune and his place in the regiment to his betrayal of former Jacobite friends. Managing his good fortune was not one of his talents, which Swift listed as corruption, perjury and seduction; Swift further sensed an over-turning of the natural order of things in Prendergast’s elevation to a baronetcy from former careers as a shoeboy, a footman and a coachman, which might be considered respectable options for the son of a sheepstealer.26 He was hardly someone to inspire loyalty among his troops or junior officers. In 1708 one of his captains, Peter Pennant, tried to challenge him to a duel but resigned instead.27 Prendergast’s death the following year revealed that he had blown his fortune and was deep in debt. Other captains of the regiment make one wonder how on earth Farquhar came up with such an idealized instance of the type as the genial, gentlemanly Plume, unless he could not see past Robert Wilks. A Captain Sankey joined the regiment with a particularly murky past, having been court-martialled in January 1704 for an offence that would have appealed to the most riotous libertine. Confined for threatening a lieutenant and then the duty officer with a drawn sword, he broke out of his cell and persuaded others in the company to storm the guardhouse.28 His colleague Captain Henry Harris, described during his 1706 court martial as ‘a person of brutish Temper and behaviour & ungovernable passion’, had attacked a fellow officer with a candlestick and drawn his sword on the guard who tried to arrest him.29 Captain Jeffrey Gibbons graduated from accepting bribes to ‘abusing and beating’ civilians, among several other ‘extraordinary Practices’.30 All in all, the motley captains of the Earl of Orrery’s Regiment of Foot bear less resemblance to Farquhar’s Plume than to his Sergeant Kite, with his life of ‘canting, lying, impudence, pimping, bullying, swearing, whoring, [and] drinking’.31 If the regiment was an oblique prompt to comedy, its equipment was more straightforwardly a joke. In the summer of 1705 Farquhar almost certainly attended the annual encampment of the army, which that year took place at the Curragh of Kildare, a 33-mile march from Dublin. Orrery’s regiment left on 12 June.32 The encampment, for all eleven Irish regiments

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less the skeleton crews left behind for local emergencies, had a fourfold purpose. It allowed the Duke of Ormond to undertake a formal review of his regiments and to check up on officer absenteeism in particular – a sign that his delegated authority could not wholly be trusted. In the summer of 1705 it facilitated the transfer of men to Portugal who had sided reluctantly with Britain. This was a further cause of dissatisfaction among recruiting officers, who had to find new troops for those sent abroad. Finally, it enabled the army to put on a fearsome display of firepower through a mock battle.33 The resulting spectacle would have warmed the heart of any Jacobite rebel. Two regiments, including Farquhar’s, possessed such poorly maintained equipment that most of the muskets, clogged with dirt, burst when they were fired, causing minor injuries and major embarrassment. Orrery’s regiment of foot turned out to have no fewer than 195 dysfunctional weapons. Fearing that there would be a shortage of muskets to display, never mind fire, senior officers called off the entire event and Orrery’s regiment made its humiliated way back to Dublin, arriving on 10 July 1705.34 For Farquhar there was the prospect, two weeks ahead, of the court martial of trooper James Lloyd. After his period as a recruiting officer during the summer of 1704, Farquhar spent almost exactly a year in Ireland with his shambolic regiment; as far as the records show, most of the troop movement took place towards the end of the extended period for recruitment, into October 1704. He may have begun with an assignment in Kilkenny, family seat of the Ormonds, and he may even have returned to England for another recruiting round in the winter, now the harvest had passed.35 But it was on 12 March 1705 that four companies of his regiment marched into Dublin, followed by the remainder two weeks later, for review by Ormond on 26 March.36 For all its attractions, Dublin was regarded as one of the less pleasant assignments in Ireland. In a city under constant threat of mob violence, guard duty was intense and prolonged. There were no official barracks, so soldiers were billeted on a series of dispersed lodgings of dubious quality and safety. Those factors, and the need to prevent men from enjoying the city too much, were responsible for the rapid turnover of regiments manning the garrison. In Farquhar’s case, however, the regiment stayed for longer, which gave him leisure for a more familiar pursuit.

(iii) Without mentioning the military context, Thomas Wilkes reports that Farquhar ‘came to Dublin to see his friends, and lodged at his brother’s who kept a bookseller’s shop, in Castle-street’. That brother was called Peyton, and he was Farquhar’s junior by two years.37 An offer of accommodation from the family was doubly welcome when officers were scratching around for places to stay. Peyton had opened a shop following the death in 1701 of his master, Jacob Milner or Miller, and had probably helped publish the

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1704 Dublin edition of his brother’s farce, The Stage-Coach. He would go on to modest success, organizing subscription publication of works of Irish history such as Raymond’s Authentick History of Ireland and O’Sullivan’s Account of Dr Keating’s History of Ireland. On 14 August 1724 he would put his name to the declaration against Wood’s halfpence, thought to have devalued the local currency. Swift famously did the same.38 Those activities suggest a man at odds with the ideology embodied by the occupying army and his brother George. Peyton outlived him by nearly twenty years, marrying late and seeing two sons into the world. The elder, John, born at Castle Street on 26 July 1724, was named for their father; Peyton’s widow, Catherine, would remarry and live out a long life making ink powder in Newry, where she died in 1760.39 Whatever their implicit ideological differences, George hoped to do more business with Peyton. He had in mind the sort of project Lintott would realize only after his death, but in this case before he had achieved anything of real significance as a writer: a complete edition of his works, and by subscription. Wilkes expresses Peyton’s reply delicately: ‘not meeting with encouragement according to expectations’, he was advised to look for other means of raising his profile in Dublin and, presumably, augmenting his purse.40 The natural alternative was a ‘benefit Play’; less so, the suggestion that Farquhar should take the opportunity to resurrect his undistinguished acting career. The story smells of deflated ambition. Farquhar senior comes back to his home country, thinking of himself as the famous author worthy of that rare tribute, a complete edition; no wonder the London establishment thought of him as uppity. Instead, his brother argues he should stick to what he knows best, or rather doesn’t. By then, George knows what a real actor looks like, and it isn’t him. But money and fame call. It would be stupid to take on the risk of such a public event without permission. Farquhar’s knowledge of other cases of desertion had probably led him to conclude that a publishing venture was a much safer bet. However, in Wilkes’s account he not only obtained leave from Ormond, but also sparked his interest sufficiently for the ducal presence to grace the performance. Robert Jordan demonstrates that this could have happened in late March, May or June 1705; at other times Ormond was either touring the northern provinces or residing at his Kilkenny estate (while Wilkes gives the year as 1704, that could have meant 1704/5 – until 25 March 1705 – in the old calendar). Whether Ormond thought the entertainment worthwhile is another matter. Wilkes concludes: The Play was the Constant Couple, in which our author attempted the character of Sir Harry Wildair, but failed greatly in his performance. A more immediate need was nonetheless satisfied: Farquhar ‘made near 100l by his Benefit’.41

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Farquhar performing – and failing – as Wildair on his theatrical return to his home country: one of the more complex performance events of his life, or even his lifetime. The Constant Couple had seen ‘Pit, Box and Stage so crowded’ that it went through three editions soon after its November 1699 premiere at Drury Lane.42 Doubts were expressed about its appeal to ‘People of tolerable Sense’, while modern appraisals characterize it variously as ‘slight but entertaining’ and a skillful cobbling of four distinct theatrical styles, which perhaps explains its popularity with such a wide social range in 1699.43 Farquhar’s cobbling suggests a tone of playful disrespect for the conventions he adopted; one critic goes so far as to suggest that it parodies Nathaniel Lee’s baroque tragedy of 1677, The Rival Queens, still in the repertory in 1699.44 Shirley Strum Kenny describes the part of Sir Harry Wildair as a ‘model and exemplar for many of the heroes of goodnatured comedy’ – the more so before the revisions that filleted the grossly sentimental language he uses to admit Angelica’s hold over him (‘I cannot view you Madam. For when you speak, all the Faculties of my charm’d Soul crowd to my attentive Ears – desert my Eyes, which gaze insensibly’).45 But it is Kenny’s reference to another critical tradition that is key to the failed Dublin performance. Is Sir Harry, as Kenny describes him in the face of anti-biographical critique, ‘a self-portrait of Farquhar’? His attributes may differ from those of the classic libertine, such as Dorimant in Etherege’s 1676 comedy The Man of Mode: ‘he is much more laughable’, continues Kenny, and is ‘addicted to … petty vices’. Listed as ‘fashion’ and ‘skirt-chasing’, those vices make him sound more like Dorimant than not, while his ‘French affectations’ suggest that Farquhar tried to roll Etherege’s hero and his rival, Sir Fopling, into a single character.46 Sir Harry’s dramatic DNA draws Kenny away from the question of how he relates to his maker, thus sidestepping two alternative histories. The first is that a closer resemblance might be found to the actor who first played the part, Robert Wilks. The second, building on that connection, is that Sir Harry embodies the fantasies and insecurities of being an Irishman in England, channelling the shared experience of migration. Our first introduction to him involves a rapid shifting of perspective. First, he crosses the stage like a carefree rover, singing. But his ‘footmen after him’ suggest an informal version of Sir Fopling, an impression deliberately confirmed when the character Vizard remarks that he is ‘newly come from Paris’.47 Standard, described in the dramatis personae as a ‘disbanded Colonel, brave and generous’, is quick to correct any impression of effeminacy or disloyalty. ‘Did he not make a Campaign in Flanders some three or four Years ago?’ he replies. Farquhar muddles the dates, referring to a battle fought at Landen six years before, but the important point is the connection formed between Sir Harry and the general disbandment of 1699, the homecoming of heroes. Having defended him, Standard finds it difficult to square valour with adherence to French fashion. ‘Dost think Bravery and Gaiety are inconsistent?’ asks Vizard. If the portrait that follows is of the

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playwright as much as Sir Harry, it is one that encapsulates every economic fantasy Farquhar could have entertained: He’s a Gentleman of most happy Circumstances, born to a plentiful Estate, has had a genteel and easy Education, free from the rigidness of Teachers, and Pedantry of Schools.48 As a view of Farquhar’s background and schooling, that sounds pleasant but is remarkably inaccurate: unhappy circumstances, no estate, a modicum of rigidness, and plenty of pedantry would be more like it. The rest of Vizard’s description fares little better: His florid Constitution being never ruffled by Misfortune, nor stinted in its Pleasures, has render’d him entertaining to others and easy to himself – Turning all Passion into Gaiety of Humour, by which he chuses rather to rejoice his Friends than be hated by any.49 That is not the Farquhar of the autobiographical ‘Picture’ he had published in 1701, but it is a plausible impression of the carefree, gregarious Wilks (it is also a perfect vision of the self-fantasy described by Leigh Hunt). Sir Harry sounds like a combination of country squire, easy-going Irishman and instinctive comic actor, turning passion into gaiety for the sake of an admiring audience. John Downes, forty years a company prompter, described Wilks as Proper and Comely in Person, of Graceful Port, Mein and Air; void of Affectation; his Elevations and Cadencies just, Congruent to Elocution: Especially in Gentile Comedy; not inferior in Tragedy.50 With the exception of the last clause, others agreed; the consensus was that Wilks was a little light and strained in tragedy but the perfect elegant gentleman in comedy.51 The Preface to the first edition of The Constant Couple provided the opportunity for an official endorsement: ‘Mr Wilks’s Performance has set him so far above Competition in the Part of Wildair, that none can pretend to envy the Praise due to his Merit’.52 The part became his by legend. He played it himself in Dublin in 1711, for eighteen nights in a row, and eventually began to insist he would give it up, only to play it again.53 Sir Harry’s cultural credentials become clearer once he starts talking. What has brought him back from his travels is a woman, and one evoked in a distinctive way: Such a Woman! I had rather see her Ruell than the Palace of Lewis le Grand: There’s more Glory in her Smile, than in the Jubilee at Rome; and I would rather kiss her Hand than the Pope’s Toe.54

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The references are hard to ignore: Sir Harry talks so much like a Catholic that he could almost be mistaken for one. Something of that rapt veneration he brings to Angelica at the end of the first version speaks of the worship of female icons. What is going on here? Kenny notes that audiences delighted in but rejected the foreign excesses of characters such as Etherege’s Sir Fopling in favour of the native English virtues of Dorimant, the man of true mode. Sir Harry’s foreign excesses are more than sartorial. His ideology is the enemy’s, defeated at the Boyne but victorious at Landen, the obvious referent of his ‘campaign in Flanders’. Returning from the front, he has the whiff of the turncoat about him. In Restoration Drama the founding figure of the Irish rogue serves multiple political causes: pillaging cavalier, routing Roundhead, royalist exile. Here, it is the contradictions of Irishness itself that come to the fore. While Sir Harry’s exploits make him a hero, his origins make him a suspicious outsider. He is the sign of Farquhar’s failure of assimilation into London society but transposed onto the figure of the brilliantly charming Wilks. So, here is soldier Farquhar playing Sir Harry Wildair to an audience in Dublin who were living in fear of the Catholic mob. The best actors, as he knew very well from rubbing shoulders with them in London, imitated their peers and predecessors, so it is safe to assume he was playing not just Sir Harry Wildair, but Wilks. It was an act of homage to the man who had taken him out of the provincial dead-end of Dublin theatre, an opportunity to embody the economic freedom and creative innovation so many of his fellow countrymen craved. But Peyton’s proposal was in every way except financially a failure. George could not measure up to Wilks. He could not get the measure of a part into which he had poured so many of his contradictory feelings about his origins and their effect on his London audience. Portraying the contradictions of the exile abroad, he found himself, like Pip in Great Expectations, an exile at home.

(iv) If the Earl of Orrery’s regiment arrived in Ireland in poor condition, their stay made it worse. Men were lost to the Portugal mission, to sickness and to desertion, and on 23 October 1705 Orrery received orders for another recruiting drive in England.55 Whether Farquhar was handed that thankless task again is not known, but his name does not appear in the substantial list of officers who oversaw a series of court martials in Dublin through November and December.56 This, Jordan speculates, may well have been the time when Farquhar undertook the final recruiting trip to Lichfield that inspired The Beaux’ Stratagem; the regiment was certainly represented in neighbouring Derbyshire during that period. The experience of Summer 1704 had not inspired officers to take on the liability of recruiting more men. Before the October orders were published in October 1705, some in the senior ranks were arguing that there should

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be no further drive until the following Spring; the regiment’s finances were simply too stretched. Lord Cutts complained to Ormond about the time he had to spend cajoling his officers into making the trip.57 When they did agree, their work would be micromanaged to extract every penny of value. On 1 March 1706, Farquhar sold his commission to a man called Richard Moor or Moore.58 According to early biographers, it sparked a chain of guilt that killed him. Yet it was far from an unusual occurrence for commissions to be sold as a way of paying off the liabilities of recruiting.59 Just as Plume woos his unsuspecting recruits with the bitter glories of battle, so Farquhar and others like him were sold false dreams of financial advantage that turned to ruin. He at least was able to spend the last weeks of his army service writing, for he sold publishing rights to The Recruiting Officer to Bernard Lintott on 12 February. As in Dublin the year before, when he had tried and failed to impersonate the de-mob-happy Sir Harry Wildair, army life and theatre life were interchangeable, equally laden with the risk of failure, and equally a matter of imagination rather than reality. The soldier’s life was a series of promises that for Farquhar turned neither into real money nor into real fighting: like the theatre, a life of parades, costumes and debt. The cruellest twist of all was recounted by Daniel O’Bryan. Ormond, he claimed, had promised Farquhar a captaincy ‘and ordered him to dispose of his Lieutenancy’. Farquhar obliged and paid off his debts with the proceeds. But no captaincy was forthcoming. Farquhar pleaded with Ormond only to find that the office ‘had been given to another Gentleman at the Instigation of the Colonel’ of the regiment. So Ormond revised his offer: come to Ireland and take charge of ‘the first Company of Foot, or Troop of Horse or Dragoons that should become vacant’. Although O’Bryan’s presumed dates are wrong, one key event in his story makes sense if we imagine it happening late in 1705 or early in 1706, once Farquhar was back in London. It would not be surprising if, in the general desperation to recruit, Ormond resorted to thin promises; Farquhar may well have raised an eyebrow at the hypothetical vacancy. Luring a potential officer to Ireland on the offer of future promotion was a more likely way of securing his services than submitting him to the grind of another round of rendezvous in the English provinces. For O’Bryan, the alleged episode is an opportunity to paint a stricken Farquhar as the tender, generous and slightly naïve soul portrayed by biographers: Mr. Farquhar, who was naturally of a tender Constitution, laid the Duke’s Words so near his Heart, that they occasioned his Death soon after.60 He would have been hardy indeed not to feel that the multiple failures and false dawns of his army life had finally caught up with him. In 1937, James Sutherland discounted O’Bryan’s story as a fabricated slur against Ormond; in 1974, Robert Jordan found documentary evidence of its likelihood. Farquhar was, in all probability, badly let down.61 Although Margaret bent

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the truth when she said Farquhar had died in service, it was arguably service that killed him. If he thought of the army as a good cause, he had joined it in flight from another. Trying his hand at a play that would please the moral minority among London’s theatre audience, he had failed and been forced to look for some other means of supporting Margaret and the children. The Irishman who had migrated to London in search of success found himself running away from the commercial disappointment of The Twin-Rivals and separated from his family. Still, what better way of proving his credentials as a loyal subject than taking the oath and saluting the flag? Equally, what clearer sign of his alienation from literary London? The experience of the previous two years showed one thing: he could not make a living as a hack writer, whatever the genre and however hard he strove to create an English identity for himself.

6 1701: Moral George

(i) His plays were not Farquhar’s only attempt to make sense and capital of false dawns and lost opportunities. In 1701 Bernard Lintott paid him £3 4s. 6d. for the right to publish a collection of assorted writings, including poems, songs, an account of a trip to Holland, an essay on comedy and some letters. Love and Business appeared in December of that year. The two addressees of the letters are believed to be the actress Anne Oldfield, for whom Farquhar entertained something of an obsession, and Margaret Pemell, identified by Kenny as the ‘Lady in Mourning that sat upon my Right Hand at Church’.1 A memory of that event re-surfaces in The Beaux’ Stratagem, but characteristically reversed: it is Dorinda who spots Aimwell at church.2 Challenged to describe himself midway through his sequence of letters to the Lady in Mourning, Farquhar comes up with a verbal ‘Picture’ truer, he claims, than any portrait by Van Dyck or Kneller, partly by virtue of its novelty: ‘[y]ou are the first Person that ever had it’, he assures her.3 However suspect such claims, a professed self-portrait must be of interest; as much, at least, as the only visual image of Farquhar by those who knew him. The frontispiece to Lintott’s edition of his comedies (and the frontispiece to this book) shows him being presented to Apollo by Ben Jonson. The engraver had no idea of Jonson’s appearance; the famously rotund poet cuts a spindly figure as he ushers his inheritor into the divine presence. Farquhar himself is as lean, with one hand nonchalantly on hip and the other holding the symbol of Irish Bard-dom, a harp, which optimistically mirrors Apollo’s lyre. He has been redeemed from poverty, his fine coat, full-bottomed wig and neatly turned stockings rendering him every inch the presentable courtier. An attempt has been made to make the face individual. Slim, angular, with a prominent chin tilted downwards in deference to authority, this Farquhar seems uncertain of his right to be there at all. The insistence is Jonson’s: a pointing finger and a hand round Farquhar’s waist propel him towards fame.

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The hint of awkwardness is elaborated in the verbal portrait in Love and Business. He makes play of being unadorned, ‘neither better nor worse [physically] than my Creator made [me]’, but because divinely made, pretty much as it should be: it would be presumptuous to ‘find many stroaks amiss’. His summing up sounds like chatting up: ‘I have a Body qualify’d to answer all the Ends of Creation, and that’s sufficient’, the latter both a gesture of modesty (let’s not harp on about my body) and capability (I’m up for anything you propose). This is a confident, breezy Captain-Plumish Farquhar, his tone shot through with religious discourse serious enough to be treated lightly. When he turns inward the image darkens, the ‘Picture’ achieving a psychological particularity unmatched in his plays. He dresses in black, the colour of his mind: ‘[m]elancholy is its every Day Apparel’ and the ‘Holidays’ are few when it turns a different colour. He takes steps to hide underlying tendencies to both ‘Splenatick’ and ‘Amorous’ thoughts, fearing he will give offence or ‘incommode’ himself. Every last drop of reason goes towards keeping them in check. The result? With men, easy-going, confident George; with women, ‘an ill-natur’d Clown’ inclined to run away from embarrassment.4 But that is only a way into a different George, a George who models himself on the rakes of Restoration Comedy. Sparing in his compliments to women, he is wary of making idols of them, and especially wary of making promises ‘upon that weighty Article of Constancy’. His reason reads like pure Rochester.5 No man can guarantee his fidelity any more than his health: it all depends on ‘a certain Constitution of the Body’. Confident, breezy George sounds ever like a fantasy drawn from the theatre. The impression is confirmed by his next move. No sooner has this rakish George emerged than he is overcome, like a hero of sentimental comedy, by a triumvirate of reason, honour and gratitude that may ‘prove too strong for all changes of Temper and Inclination’.6 Any such victory looks temporary when we go on to find that George describes himself as an ‘Epicure’, out for gratification and resistant to the general view that ‘long Expectation’ makes a goal more precious when it is achieved. Imagination is his gift and his enemy. Thinking about future pleasures makes them so vivid that the reality is a disappointment, like being stretched on a rack for so long that the ‘Springs of Desire … grow loose and enervate’. It is a version of carpe diem that defines the instability of the creative mind: to have the gift of ‘Creative Fancy’ is to prepare oneself for disappointment, so great is the imagination of the object, so paltry by comparison its incarnation.7 For a writer no less than a migrant, such an attribute is both necessary and tragic. Yet George is also a rational creature. Blaming your behaviour on your ‘Humour’ (that is, passing either whims or your character) is ‘an Ideot’s Excuse’. Correspondingly, if you want to hurt someone, don’t stoop to trifles (‘frightful Stories, malicious Lies’) but do it properly. Depression, however, will not go away. It is ‘Melancholy’ rather than anger that leads him to

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resent people, and deeply, and he knows he is a little naïve, ‘easily deceived’ when off his guard but ‘very diligent’ when ‘alarmed’. His sensitivity to social dislocation is plain. He is not entirely at ease in the world, by turns being taken in by people and then talking up his ability to fight back.8 The admission bears out his reticence with the genre of the dedicatory epistle. He knows he does not fit and imagines violent means of redress. He is prepared to admit to laziness. For study to succeed it must be pleasurable: hence his devotion to writing, although teasingly he calls it ‘Poetry’, and he would not be the first playwright to bemoan the drudgery of writing for the theatre, or its financial consequences: he has ‘very little Estate’ except for what lies under his hat. Of his intellectual gifts, however, he is proud. His is the meritocracy of the artist, maintaining his family and those of his theatre company on the basis of a mere ‘Three Hours Study’ each day. Whether that refers to the duration of a performance or the amount of time he spent writing scarcely matters. More revealing is the suggestion of a brag tendered for the sake of domestic reassurance and harmony. A conviction of superiority to the general drudgery of work makes him an awkward presence among strangers. Something he can’t quite put his finger on, a trick of his ‘outward Behaviour’ puts people off; with friends, however, their confidence in him buoys him up.9 We might read this as evading the question of his Irishness, so anxious is he to be accommodated. His circle is both broad and restricted: ‘many Acquaintance, very few Intimates, but no friend’ by way of a bosom pal to whom he can unburden himself or trust as a second. Not even Robert Wilks? Here, it seems not. He denies needing a confidant. He has no burning secrets, and the would-be soldier can look after himself if he gets into trouble. When it comes to love, he won’t get carried away. He would do anything to make a happy couple, but by the same measure refrain from any action that might produce endless misery. The connection to Farquhar’s marriage needs little spelling out. If he thought he was easily taken in, the story of Margaret’s phantom inheritance confirms it. His proposition to her – my wits can take care of themselves, and even support a family – sounds plausible. The artist’s ‘Creative Fancy’ made of Margaret something she was not and then, in The Beaux’ Stratagem, transformed her back again into the long-suffering wife of an uncouth man whose name, Sullen, announces his habitual tendency to melancholy. Farquhar’s awkwardness as much as his vocation led him towards friendships with female theatre people: artificers of experience such as the actress Anne Oldfield or the playwrights Susanna Centlivre and Catherine Trotter. Their femininity a counterpart to his foreignness, they embodied the floating identity he fell for in Margaret.10 Biographers have regarded Farquhar’s ‘Picture’ with a suspicion justified by attention to genre and context. He is, as in the letters in the same volume, writing an exhibition piece as much as a real reflection on himself. Yet the self to emerge is very far from a type. It carries shades of conventional types perhaps drawn from the fictive world of the professional theatre, and its

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self-descriptions are occasionally self-fantasies, yet its constant inversions and cross-questionings pose to us a writer poised, as in his other works, between bluff confidence and an undermining sense of belonging elsewhere and nowhere. As he says at the end of the piece: If ever, Madam, you come to know the Life of this Piece, as well as he that drew it, you will conclude that I need not subscribe the Name to the Picture.11 The contradictions of this ‘Picture’, in other words, dramatize its author’s dislocated sense of self. The abuse levelled at him for his vulgar Irishness is silenced and a more personal awkwardness invoked as a substitute. Inventing multiple alternative identities as soldier, writer and hedonist, he finds that none coheres with the rest. If the ‘Picture’ is testimony to the dislocations of migrant experience, it also speaks of a man in flight from himself.

(ii) Readers other than Margaret found the letters charming enough. In 1715 a student called Dudley Ryder commended their ‘sprightly ready fancy and wit’, the ‘freedom and ease’ that made you ‘think he was talking to you’.12 Farquhar’s ‘humorous turn’, added Ryder, allowed him to say ‘the most shocking things with a good grace’. The other letters in Love and Business portray a man who lives on the edge and enjoys looking over: I could not bear the Fatigue of putting off my Cloaths, but sat up all Night at the Tavern.13 He describes his hangovers with nauseating particularity: The searching Wine has sprung the Rheumatism in my Right Hand, my Head akes, my Stomach pukes; I dream’d all this Morning of Fire, and waken in a Flame.14 He has a way of finding out low dives that drive him to illness. Describing a ‘dark, chilly, confounded hole, fit only for Treason and Tobacco’ where, hot from being in the playhouse, he removes his wig, drinks cold cider and gets ‘such a Pain in my Jaws, that I shan’t be able to eat a Bit’.15 Predictably, this is a prelude to proposing that he must live not on food but love, of which he therefore requires a dose. Writing as from a more salubrious tavern called The Globe, he foresees a drink-fuelled voyage round the world and on to the moon, thence to a ‘Tour of all of the Planets’ culminating, inevitably, ‘in the Constellation of Venus’.16 But women, he repeatedly contends, are trouble:

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Fortune has always been my Adversary; and I may conclude that Woman, who is much of her Nature, may use me the same way.17 In a prescient passage, he recalls losing his way home and ending up at Tyburn: From the Thoughts of Hanging, I naturally entred upon those of Matrimony. I consider’d how many Gentlemen have taken a Hansom Swing to avoid some inwards Disquiets: then why shou’d not I hazard the Noose, to ease me of my Torment? Thomas Otway’s tortured letters to the actress Elizabeth Barry express passion in a more generalized sentimental tone.18 Farquhar thinks through specifics of time, place and physiology. He cannot get into bed without thinking of ‘stepping into [his] Grave’, while even the thrill of the hunt makes him conscious of writer-blocking infirmity: I have been a Horseback, Madam, all this Morning, which has so discompos’d my Hand and Head, that I can hardly think or write Sense.19 His constant harping about ailments complements the vivid unreality of his dreams of military valour. Even writing could be too strenuous, his deathbed exertions played out years before he died.

(iii) So who was Margaret? What was she? Willard Connely takes her at her word: the widow of an officer in Colonel Thomas St John’s Regiment.20 Exactly when Farquhar met her is not known, with the only lead the references to a widow in Love and Business. Some of the gaps, however, can be filled. Records of the Middlesex bench show there was a Margaret Pemell living in or around Westminster in 1701, the year of Love and Business, and probably without the protection a husband could afford.21 She had been burgled. In January 1701 Gerrard Stockton, a Westminster constable, presented a warrant at the door of Anne Walters, landlady to one John Andrew Hantswith, ‘in whose Lodging there being found Some Goods Pr[e]tended to have been Stolen from the Mrs Margt Pemell’.22 The zealous Stockton also removed from Hantswith’s rooms ‘divers other Good & Chattells … of a considerable value’. On 5 March 1701 Walters and Handswith were tried and acquitted, with Margaret’s belongings returned to her. Constable Stockton, however, refused to part with the additional goods he had taken from Hantswith. Walters and Hantswith petitioned for their release on the grounds that the latter was ‘not able … to Support himselfe’ without them.

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Throughout the record there is no mention of a Mr Pemell. Margaret, a victim of crime, was thrown back on her own resources. She had married Benjamin Pemell seventeen years before, when he was ‘about 22’ and she ‘17’.23 A marriage certificate issued at St Margaret’s in Lothbury gives 16 September 1684 as the date when ‘Beniamin Pemmel and Margret Symonds’ exchanged vows; Margaret was indeed, as early biographers wrote, at least ten years older than Farquhar. In the marriage allegation for Pemell, notified by Christopher Flower, Rector of St Margaret Lothbury, she is described as the ‘daughter of Valentine Symonds’, who was ‘also [a] Rector’. How did she meet her first husband? Benjamin Pemell was of solidly respectable London stock, his forebears staunch Parliamentarians and parishioners of St Mary Abchurch, where the new, pro-republican minister installed in 1646 was called Joseph Symonds.24 Benjamin’s grandparents, John Pemell and Hester Withers, were married on 29 January 1628 at All Hallows Church, London Wall.25 It was near the family business. John was a prosperous draper and civic leader with significant leasehold property to his name.26 Six children in nine years followed the birth of their first, Richard, on 3 April 1632; all were christened at St Mary Abchurch, one (Thomas) expressed a wish to be buried there, and the youngest or second youngest was Benjamin Senior, Margaret’s father-in-law, christened on 16 September 1641.27 He was, at any rate, the only surviving son when John Pemell died on 29 June 1682, two years before Benjamin Junior and Margaret married. When John Pemell drew up his will on 28 February 1681 it was in the shadow of loss.28 His son Thomas, a highly successful entrepreneur who owned a plantation in Barbados, had died the previous August. Thomas’s widow Susanna was living with her father-in-law in what by inference had been the parental home in the parish of All Hallows by the Wall. John wanted her to stay in the house after his death ‘for her habitation but not to let out or otherwise dispose of’, allowing her £6 a year to maintain it; her late husband’s business had left her the income she needed, as well as houses in Candlewick Ward and Barbados.29 So, even though Benjamin Senior, Margaret’s future father-in-law, was John Pemell’s only surviving son, it was his brother Thomas’s widow who inherited the family home, ostensibly on condition she remained unmarried (the will reads ‘shall and may during her widowhood have and enjoy the said house’). It appears Benjamin disputed the will at least ten years after Thomas’s death, but without success.30 John Pemell was extremely cautious in providing for Benjamin Senior, who had married a woman called Margaret Moulson (not to be confused with Farquhar’s wife Margaret).31 He left him the ‘rents and profits’ of a house on Cannon Street and did the same for his (John’s) widowed ‘only sister’, Susannah Crottenden, in respect of a further house in Basinghall Street; both properties were on long leases. In addition, Benjamin received £200 and Susannah £50. John was more generous when it came to his own

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funeral expenses, for which he provided £300. A resident of All Hallows, he planned to be buried at St Mary Abchurch, an institution at the core of Pemell family life. The allegiance was strengthened by disaster. The church had burned down in the Great Fire; the new building, an exquisite design by Wren, was not finished until 1686, at the cost borne by the parish of nearly £5,000.32 It appears to have been practice since 1669, however, to continue with burials either in the churchyard or – for wealthier patrons – in the vault.33 John’s generosity reached its height in providing £1,200 for an almshouse in Stepney, to be administered by the Draper’s Company. The money was not committed until twelve years later, by which time a further £546 had accumulated in interest.34 The most telling provision in John Pemell’s will that relates to Benjamin Senior is the statement that all debts owed to him by the latter are to be written off. For some time, evidently, Benjamin had been struggling, a man of forty still dependent on a father who did not trust him to maintain the family home. John Pemell was more generous to the next generation. Benjamin’s sons, Benjamin Junior and Edward, were left more leases and more money than their father: £800 and multiple leaseholds in the parish of St Dunstan’s for Benjamin Junior, and £400 to Edward with a reversion of Benjamin Junior’s leases to him in the event that the latter should die before the age of twenty-four. In the event it was Edward who died first, so improving Benjamin’s lot; but it appears Margaret was cut out because on the death of both the money would go to the children. John Pemell was determined to do what he could for his extended family while making every effort to marginalize a son whose career had been an embarrassment compared with that of the entrepreneurial Thomas. Newly married in 1684, Benjamin Junior and Margaret started a family. John, their first born and presumably the young sailor referred to in the petition to Queen Anne, was christened on 27 August 1685. The parish record of All Hallows, Bread Street, describes ‘Beniamine Pemell’ as a gentleman. ‘Mr Clownham’ officiated. A third and last son, Edmund, came along nearly ten years later: he was christened at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, on 3 January 1695; in 1712 he would receive money on his mother’s behalf. The Pemells’ addresses get smarter with each record. Lothbury to Bread Street to Covent Garden indicates a journey of rising prosperity supported by the terms of John Pemell’s will and consistent with Margaret’s claim to Queen Anne that her first husband had once had some kind of fortune. During this period either her husband or her erratic father-in-law maintained a respectable role in society. The Middlesex bench records for 1692 show Benjamin Pemell sitting as a Justice of the Peace in judgement on three ruffians named Jacob Broad, Stephen Overfield and James Ogleby who had assaulted one Edward Nourse. Pemell is described as a gentleman, and resident in Holborn.35 Generously provided for in his grandfather’s will, Benjamin Junior did indeed lose his fortune, apparently inheriting his father’s carelessness with

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money. At some stage after 1694 he joined the military and lost his life. No record of his service exists, but there is no reason to doubt Margaret’s account of his exploits. Like George Farquhar, he was a man driven by lost good fortune into the military, trying to put a brave face on domestic adversity while fleeing from it. So Margaret Pemell was evidently a woman prepared to argue her case on points of law, driven by acute and repeated hardship. A widow with children to support, she sought out the man who had robbed her and brought him to justice. She also saw in a young Irish playwright with one big success behind him the possibility of greater security, a pressing need which any untruth would justify. Now that John Andrew Hantswith had returned her goods, she could at least present an appearance of prosperity; to Farquhar she could be the epitome of London respectability, a stage in his own dream of assimilation – a dream so persistent that it made him, in the words of the ‘Picture’, easily deceived. Her first husband Pemell had spent what little there was left of an inheritance built on leases, leaving her, in her own words to Queen Anne, ‘reduced from a once very plentiful fortune to an extreme desperate one’.36 As George Farquhar sought redemption in her, so she did in him.

(iv) If Love and Business was an opportunity to reveal glimpses of the writer physically failing to work, it also included a significant reflection on what Farquhar thought he should be doing. His essay ‘A Discourse upon Comedy, in Reference to the English Stage’ is a writer’s intervention in a debate Farquhar characterizes as dominated by critics and scholars. The essay has been treated as symptomatic of a growing populism in theories of theatrical practice.37 It is also coloured by more personal concerns. Critical language Farquhar represents as institutionalized by social grouping, and therefore too diverse for any single writer or work to satisfy: The Scholar calls upon us for Decorums and Oeconomy; the Courtier crys out for Wit and Purity of Stile; the Citizen for Humour and Ridicule; the Divines threaten us for Immodesty; and the Ladies will have an Intreague.38 He saves particular scorn for classicists who turn their hand to writing and cramp the talents of actors: Then the Players go to work on a piece of hard knotty Stuff, where they can no more show their Art, than a Carpenter can upon a Piece of Steel. Here is the Lamp and the Scholar in every Line, but not a Syllable of the Poet.39

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To drive home the point Farquhar even deploys the alpha weapon of classical verse against its familiar advocates. Here is his epic simile in prose: Here is elaborate Language, Sounding Epithets, Flights of Words that strike the Clouds, whilst the poor Sense lags after like the Lanthorn in the Tail of the Kite, which appears only like a Star, while the Breath of the Players Lungs has Strength to bear it up in the Air. Such stuff, he quips, promotes more lewdness than the most obviously risqué play: without the attraction of ‘free Conversation’ to listen to, the audience makes its own entertainment.40 Farquhar cannot keep politics out of his argument, or personal history. The Anglo-Irish Protestant represents himself as a Martin Luther trying to ‘hew down the Cardinal’, and urges his reader to lay aside the ‘Superstitious Veneration for Antiquity’ that leads to an obsession with Aristotelian rules. Shadows of the unwilling undergraduate Farquhar are cast by his reference to the ‘Rubbish of old Philosophy’.41 Instead, he stands up for the professionalism of lawyers, doctors and shipwrights, who combine ‘Speculative Knowledge, and a practical Use’. Is it reasonable, he asks, ‘for any Person that has never writ a Distich of Verses in his Life, shou’d set up for a Dictator in Poetry’?42 Such a person, he adds almost blasphemously, was Aristotle. Not only was he not a poet; he was not English. His rules were devised for ‘the Play-house in Athens’, not Lincoln’s Inn Fields.43 It was a pragmatic argument, but less subtly so than the one posed in 1678 by Dryden in his Preface to All for Love. Like Farquhar, Dryden stood up for the practising writer as ‘the most proper’, but ‘not the only’ critic.44 The respect he accords Aristotle while denigrating modern critics makes Farquhar’s pronouncements sound like schoolboy rancour: Till some Genius, as universal as Aristotle shall arise, who can penetrate into all Arts and Sciences, without the Practice of them, I shall think it reasonable, that the Judgment of an Artificer in his own Art should be preferable to the Opinion of another Man.45 Farquhar’s facetious judgements cannot have played well when he arrived in London and sought to ingratiate himself at Will’s, but they ask interesting questions about the composition of Barcellona. What did he think he was doing in writing a modern epic in part imitation of Homer? Returning to the rulebook, or ransacking it for anything that would let him speak immediately to readers about contemporary events? The inconsistency of the unfinished poem may be read as a sign that Farquhar’s relationship to classical learning was more ambiguous than the ‘Discourse upon Comedy’ makes it appear.46 Indebted, he begrudged his debt and in trying to settle up succeeded only in compounding it: a mirror of the Irish past he could not forsake.

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Having dismissed ancients and critics, Farquhar turns his attention to the origin and purpose of comedy. He has not yet conceived of himself as any other sort of writer and sets out in search of his literary roots. For someone used to covering his tracks, it is a refreshing endeavour and the answer is surprising. Do not look to the stuff of the university curriculum – Aristophanes and Menander – for the ‘first Mover’ of comedy, he warns. Aesop’s Fables are where the heart of the form is to be found.47 What is comedy, after all? ‘A well-fram’d Tale handsomely told, as an agreeable Vehicle for Counsel or Reproof.’ It seems an unhelpfully neutral definition and not entirely in tune with the rewards handed out at the end of The Beaux’ Stratagem. However, both its cultural moment and its personal context are distinctive. His argument in the ‘Discourse’ is an attempt to reinforce a distinctively English identity for himself: in comparison with the pedants who attempt to write classical drama for the London stage, an English voice for English ears. Aesop he credits above all with command of the vernacular: ‘he made his Beasts speak good Greek’ while ‘our Heroes sometimes can’t talk English’.48 The end point of such argument is that there is no such thing as classical drama in the sense that no play written for another time or culture can really be understood. ‘Vices and Defaults’ – the proper subject for the corrective gaze of the playwright – are specific to their time and place, and what is true of the ‘Roman Commonwealth’ cannot be true of the English, whom Farquhar describes with an isolationist fervour that admits, conveniently for migrants like himself, an element of cultural hybridity. The English, he writes, are a People not only separated from the rest of the World by Situation, but different also from other Nations as well in the Complexion and Temperament of the Natural Body, as in the Constitution of our Body Politick: As we are a Mixture of many Nations, so we have the most unaccountable Medley of Humours among us of any People upon Earth; these Humours produce Variety of Follies, some of ’um unknown to former Ages.49 His ‘we’ is desired rather than experienced. New follies mean new remedies; new manners, new comedy. Farquhar takes some of his language from Thomas Shadwell’s indignant 1670s denunciations of the French drama from which he liberally stole, and in the background hovers the kind of Francophobia that informs Barcellona and the Queen’s Theatre prologue. The ‘Discourse’ was, after all, written in time of war. Amid this medley of humours, with all moods in the room at once, sits a model of individual behaviour that cuts against the fixed essences of humours comedy. Within an hour or two, anyone can exhibit ‘such Vicissitudes of Temper … that he can hardly be taken for the same Man’. If this is the Farquhar of the ‘Picture’, alternately charming and splenetic, it is also a George who has sought to transform his cultural identity from Dublin to

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London. But the problem with vicissitudes of temper is that they can draw a fellow back, or leave him in the black state described by the ‘Picture’: with ‘Vexation, and Discontent, as if he were making the Tour of Tyburn.’50 Farquhar portrays the theatre audience as a seething parody of his own instability: a mass of ‘Volatile Temper’ whose attention must somehow be fixed on a single object. A wish for English victory and prestige leads conventionally to a celebration of the modern canon over classical models. In the most-often quoted statement from the ‘Discourse’, Farquhar asserts that ‘the Rules of English Comedy don’t lie in the Compass of Aristotle, or his Followers, but in the Pit, Box and Galleries’.51 It is no appeal to the lowest theatrical common denominator, to any old crowd-pleaser, but an opportunity to praise ‘Hamlet, Mackbeth, Harry the fourth, and … Fletcher’s Plays’, a list that offers a microcosm of the still forming hall of writerly fame, with Jonson starting to drop out and Shakespearean masterpieces standing above a generalized mass of Fletcher.52 But after this straight-faced gesture – almost a self-conscious impersonation of the modern English writer at work – Farquhar slips into a garrulous digression about would-be playwrights with only ‘the Jaunty Education of Dancing, French, and a Fiddle’ and a knack of ‘witticising in [their] Cups’. The personage he imagines shares Farquhar’s aspirations and methods, and aims to emulate his achievements: I’ll e’en write a Play … by which means, my Character of Wit shall be establish’d, I shall enjoy the Freedom of the House … My own Intreagues are sufficient to found the Plot, and the Devil’s in’t, if I can’t make my Character talk as wittily as those in the Trip to the Jubilee.53 Farquhar wrote that passage having just attempted to do precisely the same: the explicit object of his 1701 play, Sir Harry Wildair, was replicate the success of The Constant Couple. So, in the ‘Discourse’, Farquhar describes an unprepared playwright starting all over again: a familiar feeling for any writer but in this case intensified by the veneer of English cultural confidence slipping away to reveal the dissonant gabbling of the new boy from Ireland. Faith in the English canon extends to faith in the taste of the average Englishman. You don’t need to be a critic, Farquhar claims, to spot ‘material Irregularities’ in a play when ‘Mother-Sense can censure and be offended’.54 Similarly, if you want to enjoy a play it helps not to be a critic, even if seeing an allegedly poor piece fifty times a year leads you to be condemned by aficionados as a native of ‘such an ignorant, self-will’d, impertinent Island’, an expression that sounds very like a popular caricature of a smaller island. The phrase and its context seek to bury Farquhar into a reassuring body of Englishmen only to give the game away. The boy from ‘ignorant, self-will’d, impertinent’ Ireland cannot be accommodated. Writing ‘Intreagues’ into plays, Farquhar knew as well as anyone the difference between life and fiction, and his strongest rebuke to scholastic

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critics is to accuse them of not noticing. Plays are full of improbabilities, he argues, and no one really believes their actions are true. He lights on a revealing example: The whole Audience at the same time knows that [Alexander the Great] is Mr. Betterton, who is strutting upon the Stage, and tearing his Lungs for a Livelihood. And that the same Person shou’d be Mr. Betterton, and Alexander the Great, at the same time, is somewhat like an Impossibility, in my Mind.55 The passage is often cited as an example of theatrical double-consciousness in the period: actor and role improbably co-exist in the audience’s imagination. The characteristic note of chippy scorn for traditional practice (as much Christopher Rich as George Farquhar) is unmistakable: ‘strutting’ and ‘tearing lungs’ are metonyms for Betterton’s pompous sense of entitlement. Yet there is an important relationship to Farquhar’s identity narrative. How can you act a role and retain your native identity? It is ‘somewhat like an Impossibility’. A man must move on and gain acceptance. But the impossibility is precisely what audiences learn to accept. Fortunately for anyone wishing to slough off his past, they lack ‘Power to raise the old Heroe from the Grave to act his own Part’.56 The cost is that the public and private identities remain equally in view. There is no sloughing off. When it comes to the Aristotelian requirement for unity of space, Farquhar brings a migrant’s enthusiasm for transition. ‘[Why] shou’d a Poet fetter the Business of his Plot, and starve his Action, for the nicety of an Hour, or the Change of a Scene’, he asks. Thought is free, and ‘flies over a thousand Years with the same ease … that your Eye glances from the Figure of Six, to Seven, on the Dial-Plate’.57 If that is an oblique tribute to the freedom celebrated in Barcellona, it also prompts the reflection that while thought may fly, bodies have a way of staying earth-bound and rooted, and will not easily ‘glide from the Cape of Good Hope to the Bay of St. Nicholas’.58 His own plays do not necessarily obey the prescription: representing wanderers, they are increasingly fixed in time and place, their accelerating classicism seeking the ‘home’ that for their creator remained elusive. Farquhar’s trenchant dismissal of Aristotle, shot through with a yearning to belong, only emphasized his separation from English culture. In 1702, the anonymous Comparison between the Two Stages skewered him with the accusation that he had ‘so much humility as not to expect that persons of understanding should be on his side’. Farquhar, says one of the characters in the dialogue, has no right to criticize the ancients because ‘he never read a line of Aristotle in his life’ and probably did not know ‘whether he writ in Greek or Latin’. He is a mere ‘schoolboy’ of limited ‘years and capacity’. Concluding with a reflection on The Inconstant (‘he vamps it up, and with some wretched interpolations of his own passes it for new’), the anonymous critic laments Fletcher’s misfortune in having written in English: otherwise

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‘he had escaped this highwayman’.59 The association of Irish migrant and criminal came all too easily. Farquhar did not forget the jibe, for the critic who so derided him bore the name of the man who would turn out to be the most objectionable character in all his plays: Sullen.

(v) Soon after Love and Business Farquhar subscribed his name to a work that strove for a different kind of conformity. The Twin-Rivals sought to capitalize on a notable theatrical success and a still more notable antitheatrical diatribe. Richard Steele’s The Funeral had premiered at Drury Lane in December 1701. Steele’s is an inheritance drama featuring an evil stepmother who attempts to deny her late husband’s son his entitlement. It was such a success that the normally tight-fisted Christopher Rich paid his actors ‘nine Days in one Week’.60 A blend of melodrama and anti-legal satire, Steele’s play has a slightly Jacobean feel, and Farquhar responded to his tone with a play that reached still further back: a tale of a scheming hunchback who has designs on his elder brother’s inheritance, a Duke of Gloucester domesticated to Restoration melodrama and played by Colley Cibber, the most conspicuous Richard III of his day.61 It was a conscious change of direction. By 1702 Farquhar had come to believe that the shenanigans of The Constant Couple and Sir Harry Wildair were no longer a route to success. Like Steele, he wanted to frame a play that would suppress vulgarity and appeal to audiences made nervous by the intervention of Jeremy Collier, whose work represented a threat to professional theatre itself. It is not necessary to dig far into Collier’s work and background to feel that Farquhar’s response to his ‘Severe and Reasonable Charge’ against contemporary playwrights was as opportunistic as his modelling of The Twin-Rivals on The Funeral. Granted, concessions to Collierites were not new for Farquhar. In the Preface to The Constant Couple, he described a play that had neither ‘displeas’d the Ladies, nor offended the Clergy; both of which are now pleas’d to say, that a Comedy may be diverting without Smut and Profaneness’.62 However, references to Collier in the Preface to his new play suggest a subplot consistent with the concerns of Farquhar’s other work. Collier was, to all intents and purposes, the ‘Enemy’.63 His views were diametrically opposed to Farquhar’s. It was not only that A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage of 1698 led to actors and playwrights being hauled before the Middlesex bench for promoting ‘debauchery and blasphemy’.64 Collier was a confirmed classicist, a Cambridge graduate who revered the ancients in a fashion Farquhar mocked in the ‘Discourse upon Comedy’. Worse, he was a closet Jacobite, frequently under surveillance by the authorities for his defence of James II and opposition to William III.65 He summoned up ghosts of Farquhar’s childhood.

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Accordingly, Farquhar used the first edition of The Twin-Rivals to deploy tools of military propaganda: There is an Advantage to be made sometimes of the Advice of an Enemy, and the only way to disappoint his Designs, is to improve upon his invective, and to make the Stage flourish by virtue of that Satyr, by which he thought to suppress it.66 There is a conciliatory attempt, similar to one made by Dryden, to admit that the clergyman’s attack was ‘Severe’ but ‘Reasonable’: had Collier ‘Arraign’d the Stage only to Punish it’s Misdemeanours, and not to take away it’s Life’, he would have ‘done the Drama considerable Service’.67 But as the Preface unfolds it becomes clear that any attempt to accommodate Collier would be riven by contradictions. Having made his concession, Farquhar explains that his intention was for The Twin-Rivals to appeal to the audience imagined by the ‘Discourse upon Comedy’: ‘the greater share of the English Audience; I mean, that Part which is no farther read than in Plays of their own Language’. With a dig at Collier’s Jacobite sympathies, he deduces a natural affinity between the English love of ‘the old Poetick Licence’ (that is, before the neo-classicists and academicians started pronouncing on theatrical taste) and a post-1688 allegiance to ‘the Liberty of the Subject’. What follows, however, is a reflection on the English audience that could have sprung from the most diehard Francophile. ‘They take all Innovations for Grievances’, he complains: A Play without a Beau, Cully, Cuckold, or Coquet, is as poor an Entertainment to some Pallats, as their Sundays Dinner wou’d be without Beef and Pudding.68 His tone gets even spicier. Thinking to appeal to the moral middle-class majority by punishing the gentry for their evil ways, he claims to have underestimated the hypocrisy of the Collier-frenzied do-gooders: A certain Virtuoso of that Fraternity has told me since, that the Citizens were never more disappointed in any Entertainment, for (said he) however pious we may appear to be at home, yet we never go to that end of Town, but with an intention to be Lewd.69 He sounds like one of Collier’s particular bêtes-noires, William Wycherley, satirist of upper-class morality. It was a natural step from cultural conspiracy theory to suppose a real plot. Farquhar complains that ‘ladies were frighted from seeing it’ because a malicious rumour spread to the effect that the play featured a graphic representation of a birth (anxieties about paternity figure prominently).70 He reviews other objections to its characterization and design before lighting on

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what had become the mainstream counter-argument to Collier. If people found the raw material ‘too grave for Diversion’, they simply misunderstood the purpose of comedy, which is to ‘ridicule Folly’.71 For all those reasons, Farquhar lamented, the ‘galleries were so thin’.72 His consolation was twofold and a little dejected. ‘Some of the greatest Persons in England, both for Quality and Parts’ thought better of the piece than the general public – rubbing shoulders with the social and intellectual elite, Farquhar pretended to out-English the English. So doing, he sought to portray himself as the most indigenous of writers, owing nothing to Molière and other totems of continental fashion: ‘I must do myself the Justice to believe, that few of our Modern Writers have been less beholden to Foreign Assistance in their Plays, than I have been in the following Scenes.’73 The transparent borrowings from Shakespeare in The Twin-Rivals align him with the national tradition. He sought elevation beyond the ‘pert and low’ dialogue of Pope’s Irishman into the respectable domains of Steele’s drama: an elevation into the canon of English writing. Farquhar’s evident disappointment with the play’s reception is out of kilter with accounts of its early stage history. Thomas Wilkes maintained that the first run had been for thirteen days; another early biographer described it as a ‘very good success’.74 The play is advertised in editions of The Daily Courant separated by eight days, although the first performance on 14 December 1702 was disrupted when two members of the audience had an altercation on the stage, leaving a Mr Fielding ‘Wounded’.75 The following night there was a fatal duel near the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, a succession of events that might well have thinned out the galleries for The Twin-Rivals.76 Whatever the length of the first run, it was insufficient to persuade the company to repeat the experience. There was no revival until November 1716, when a decent run led to a modest rise in its reputation, with 117 known performances over the next sixty-three years – sufficient for Kenny to describe it as ‘a dependable staple of eighteenth-century repertory theatre’.77 Farquhar had some relief from Bernard Lintott, who paid a modest £15 for the rights in the week following the premiere. On 29 December, the play went on sale for the standard 1s. 6d. Absolute facts about box-office takings are less germane than the high hopes Farquhar pinned on the play. While Chetwood’s Memoirs painted him as a writer of perennially low expectations, in this case he seems to have had a lottery player’s belief that rather than accumulating modest successes he would hit the jackpot in one go; this is the dreamer portrayed in his autobiographical ‘Picture’.78 Thinking to seize the moment defined by Steele’s The Funeral, the aftermath of the Collier controversy, and the March accession of Queen Anne, he came up with what should have been a perfect play for middle England: a distillation of national traditions into a moral fable about legal rights wrenched from the grasp of tyranny. The Twin-Rivals was a play without frills. Although William Crofts, composer for The Funeral, supplied the music, there were no songs. There is no sign either of bespoke costumes or of scenery; instead, the

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company drew on stock. Such economies were consistent with Farquhar’s wish to impart a clear moral message and to allow the company to derive maximum profit from the takings. Yet the play took some of its actors, many of them ‘completely familiar with Farquhar’s [previous] plays’, into new territory.79 The part of Young Wou’dbe asked Colley Cibber to draw together his experiences of playing Richard III and Lord Foppington, with an initial dash of impoverished rakes such as Valentine in Congreve’s Love for Love. The Elder Wou’dbe required Robert Wilks to dispense with smiling Irish charm and take on the tones now of a Reverend Collier, as when he refers to the ‘debauch’d and riotous Swarm’ of friends that surrounds his brother, and now of the high-falutin hero from some love and honour drama: No, perfidious Man; all Kindred and Relation I disown; the poor Attempts upon my Fortune I cou’d pardon, but thy base Designs upon my love I never can forgive, – My honour, Birth-right, Riches, all I cou’d more freely spare, than the least Thought of thy prevailing here.80 The passage even carries ghosts of the heroic couplets that featured in many love and honour plays (disown/pardon, spare/here). What appeared to be a sure-fire appeal to moral sensibility turned out to be a catalogue of artistic risks and inflected conventions. It is just such risks that have made the play interesting to modern audiences. John Caird’s 1981 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company evidently made a powerful case, persuading a number of critics that this was genuinely a forgotten masterpiece and providing rich opportunities for the two leading men.81 This is the plot.

(vi) Benjamin, by forty-five minutes the Younger Wou’dbe, schemes to defraud his elder brother Hermes of his inheritance. He employs a lawyer to draft a fake will, declares his brother dead while he is actually travelling overseas, and connives with a midwife, Mandrake, who claims that he was really the first one out of his mother’s womb. A subplot shows a conventional rakish type, Richmore, forced into marrying a woman he has made pregnant – the routine stuff of sentimental comedy. From the outset Young Wou’dbe’s dialogue crackles with revolting intimacy. ‘Here is such a plague every morning with buckling shoes, gartering, combing, and powdering’, he complains, in an inversion of the ‘dressing scene’ in which comic libertines such as Etherege’s Dorimant prepared to devastate society.82 He has the waspishness of the self-loathing failure. When Richmore puts his bad mood down to losing money at cards, he replies, ‘No, Fortune took care of me there – I had none to lose.’83 Like

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Richard III, he descants on his own deformity: ‘I have but two eyesores in the world, a brother before me, and a hump behind me.’84 To one Duke of Gloucester, Farquhar adds a Shakespearean aspirant to that title. When Young Wou’dbe reflects on the misfortune of coming second he sounds like Edmund in King Lear. Unlike Edmund, who revels in the fact that illegitimacy has not made him any less perfect a physical specimen than his brother, Benjamin finds in his bent spine an embodiment of his sub-lineal fortune: Curst Fortune! I am a younger Brother, and yet cruelly depriv’d of my Birth-right of a handsome Person; seven thousand a year in a direct Line, would have straitn’d my Back to some purpose – But I look, in my present Circumstances, like a Branch of another kind, grafted only upon the Stock, which makes me grow so Crooked.85 Although Farquhar adds the curious touch that Benjamin’s father was also a hunchback, his main interest is in showing how it is, in Benjamin’s eyes, really his elder brother who is to blame: ‘’twas his crouding me [i.e. in the womb] that spoil’d my Shape.’86 Like Sir John Brute’s in Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife, his sarcasm is winning. Asked why his brother doesn’t ‘care a Farthing’ for him, Benjamin replies, ‘A very odd Reason – because I hate him.’87 Imitating Richard III’s hauntedness, he yields instead to comic psychopathy. When a vintner called Balderdash appears with an outstanding invoice, Benjamin reflects that he has ‘villainously murdered [his] Fortune, and now its Ghost, in the lank Shape of Poverty, haunts [him]’.88 Learning of his father’s death ten lines on, his compressed response is a gift to any performer: ‘My Father; – Good night, my lord; Has he left me any thing?’89 His cynicism extends to those he needs. Mandrake, his partner in crime, understands ‘the Right-side of a Woman, and the Wrongside of the Law’.90 As his plans advance, Young Wou’dbe opens up with a soliloquy that makes him sound evermore like Shakespeare’s Edmund, or perhaps a Hobbesian libertine like Etherege’s Dorimant, but begins also to sound notes from Farquhar’s own life: The Pride of Birth, the Heats of Appetite, and Fears of Want, are strong Temptations to Injustice – But why Injustice? – The World has broke all Civilities with me; and left me in the Eldest State of Nature, Wild, where Force, or Cunning first created Right. I cannot say I ever knew a Father; – ’Tis true, I was Begotten in his Life-time, but I was Posthumous Born, and Liv’d not till he Died – My Hours indeed, I numbred, but ne’er enjoyed ’em, till this Moment.91 He speaks metaphorically – he really did know his father – but there is an eerie resonance with the myths and realities of Farquhar’s upbringing,

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which will unfold in a later chapter. In his early novella, The Adventures of Covent-Garden, Farquhar had sought to imitate the polio-damaged novelist Paul Scarron, whose contorted form he made a metaphor for a marginalized species of creativity.92 Young Wou’dbe’s invocation of scripture is similarly twisted, glorying in its witty irreverance. ‘What is Brother?’ he asks. ‘We are all so; and the first two were Enemies.’93 When Benjamin holds court in Act Three having acquired his brother’s fortune, he inverts the very advice Farquhar gave in his Preface. A poet called Mr Comick attends his levee in a reversal of the debt-ridden opening scene of the play. Mr Comick has, in addition to an elegy on Hermes and a panegyric on Benjamin, written a play which has been ‘rehearsing these Three years and a Half’, probably a nod towards the rather chaotic management of the rival Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre in 1702.94 When Benjamin suggests there must be a lot of ‘Business’ or plot in the play, Comick says there is none, and that his next play has none either. The remedy is the one Farquhar condemned other writers for taking: ‘A Plot! You shou’d read the Italian, and Spanish Plays, Mr Comick’.95 Comick’s response encapsulates the helpless dependence of any playwright, plagiarist or not: ‘Now for Five Guineas at least’, he confides to the audience. It is typically Farquharian inversion; yet Mr Comick is a less nuanced view of the struggling dramatist’s life than his forebear, Lyrick, in Love and a Bottle.96 When the character Alderman enters and condemns his feckless son, he foreshadows a world of personal woe for his creator: ‘a Fellow that Drinks and Swears eternally … In short, he’s fit for no kind of thing but a Soldier’. This personage, the image of the one Farquhar projects in his letters, will suffer his fate. ‘I intend to throw him into the Army,’ declares Alderman, ‘let the Fellow be ruined, if he will’.97 The Elder Wou’dbe’s appearance is skilfully delayed until half way through the play. Robert Wilks enters with a paean to his beautiful betrothed, Constance, set to be beleaguered by the scheming Benjamin. Wilks, the traveller from across the seas, is accompanied by a sidekick in the form of a stereotypically thick Irishman called Teague (the equivalent of ‘Paddy’). He may have been in Germany, but he may as well have come straight from Dublin. Imprisoned thanks to his brother’s scheming, the Elder Wou’dbe finally wins out, consigning Benjamin to ‘Poverty and Contempt’. When Benjamin departs, he confesses with the certainty of the born rebel that he prefers that ‘milder Fate / Than Obligations from the Man I hate’.98 If Sir Harry Wildair is, as Fitzroy Pyle put it, a sick man’s fantasy of what it was like never to have a ‘florid constitution’ never ‘ruffled by misfortune or stinted in its pleasures’, Benjamin Wou’dbe is a darker, more complex projection of what it was like for a migrant writer to have a sharp tongue, a sense of injustice, a burden that cannot be dispensed with, and a future only of poverty and contempt.99 The play’s warring brothers are at once twins and conspicuously unalike, each vying for the other’s place since before they were born. Peter Brooks

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writes of the ‘double process’ of life writing, ‘the attempt to incorporate within an orderly narrative the more devious, persistent and powerful plot’.100 In The Way of the World, Congreve had developed a sophisticated tale of how Mirabell struggles to emerge from Fainall’s shadow by exhibiting a legally sanctioned form of deviousness. In The Twin-Rivals, the brothers Wou’dbe shadow the fortunes of migrants successful and failed: the one enjoying temporary luck, the other a permanent settlement. In contrast the optimism of The Beaux’ Stratagem is appealing but naïve, a regression into dreamland. For Benjamin and Hermes, we might read Farquhar and Wilks: Wilks’s success was partly dependent on Farquhar’s but equally survived Farquhar’s failures. None was more emphatic than Sir Harry Wildair, which had cemented Wilks’s identification with the title role but reminded Farquhar how easy it was for any writer, regardless of previous triumphs, to return to square one.

7 1700: The Irishman Abroad

(i) Eric Rothstein’s verdict on Farquhar’s attempt to clone the success of The Constant Couple could apply to many other sequels: Sir Harry Wildair tried to capitalize on the popularity of The Constant Couple. It succeeded only in boring its audience and its readers … Farquhar took those elements that had amused the public so long and so profitably, and expanded upon them without paying enough attention to the formal development of his play. Popular characters were doled out to a public presumably slavering for a new sight of their favourites.1 Rothstein goes on to describe ‘the main thematic grouping’ of the play as ‘France/frivolity/fashion/infidelity’, taken from The Constant Couple but in the new play inflated ‘like a bladder in thin air’ to ‘fill the whole fiveact comedy’.2 Back from his visit to Holland, Farquhar wrote a play about reversion: a response to plays such as Vanbrugh’s 1696 The Relapse or Aphra Behn’s 1681 The Rover Part II that dramatized the fragility of moral reform, and with it the promise of acquired identity. The Harry who once talked of kissing the Pope’s toe and embracing French fashions now turns his back on Southern Europe: Once I was a friend to France; but henceforth I promise to sacrifice my Fashions, Coaches, Wigs, and Vanity, to Horses, Arms, and Equipage, and serve my King in propria persona, to promote a vigorous War, if there be occasion.3 French manners become the stuff of jokes, but in a way that suggests France remained a dreamland for suppressed English desires. ‘Can’t we live together like good Neighbours and Christians,’ asks Sir Harry, ‘as they do in France?’

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I lend you my Coach, I borrow yours; you Dine with me, I Sup with you; I lie with your Wife, and you lie with mine.4 The political imperatives were strong, for European alliances had shifted since The Constant Couple with the preliminaries to the War of the Spanish Succession. Those events sat precisely between the success of The Constant Couple and the period when Farquhar must have started to write Sir Harry Wildair, which opened in April 1701. French troops were being sent to the Netherlands long before the formal declaration of war on 15 May 1702; English troops were in action alongside the Dutch, Prussians and Austrians in a so-called Grand Alliance against the French. In that light Sir Harry Wildair begins to look more than a routine commercial sequel. Its militant front is both a brittle pastiche of patriotism and an intensified attempt to kick over any traces of suspect Irishness. In the cycle of libertinism to penitence that characterizes the journey of the sentimental hero, Farquhar found a convenient metaphor for his own cultural journey from Dublin to London; in the regression of the reformed rake, an image of its frustration. Regression was certainly what one gleeful critic detected in the play: The same Changeable Fortune, that lifted ’em up unexpectedly from the Lowest rank of Writers to compare with Highest for Success, has sunk ’em again as fast into the Level which Nature design’d ’em for.5 The insult is palpable: get back to where you came from. Since The Constant Couple, and for all its popular success (or perhaps because of it), criticism of his work had been bitter and partisan. John Oldmixon wrote of the ‘dreadful War, with Wit and Sense’ undertaken by Farquhar’s ‘Irish pen’.6 Farquhar’s response, a new prologue for The Constant Couple, poked fun at Oldmixon’s own failures as a dramatist but declined to engage with the question of Irishness. In 1700 Daniel Kenrick expressed outrage at the idea of an Irishman enjoying a literary triumph in London, deploying couplets that fail to exercise any literary – still less moral – authority: It would much disgrace the Throne of Wit, If on’t an Irish Deputy should sit; And wonder’d why he’d no longer here remain, Who in his native Boggs might justly reign.7 He further laid upon Farquhar the charge of plagiarism routinely laid against other outsiders, particularly women.8 In an alternative interpretation of Farquhar’s presentation to Apollo, he imagines the purpose of the meeting as an inquisition (‘Apollo told him with a bended Brow, / He’d borrow’d, from his Saint, Sir George, his Beau’).9 Four years later he returned to the idea, ventriloquizing cocky Farquhar as a parvenu who had made everyone

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laugh ‘Without any ones help but my own’ and asserting his right ‘to carry / The Laurels away on [his] Head’.10 The persona Kenrick created bore the demeaning name Farquhar gave the Elder Wou’dbe’s servant in The TwinRivals: he is merely a ‘Teague’.11 Kenrick only allows Farquhar grudging credit for joining the army on the grounds that it’s nobler in Red to make a Campaign Than to Butcher an innocent Muse. Pope’s dismissal of Farquhar’s ‘pert low Dialogue’ seems mild in comparison.12 Personal pique and acquired English fervour led Farquhar to a series of radical revisionary stances in his subsequent work. In the dedication of Sir Harry Wildair to the Earl of Albemarle he lauded the icon of militant Protestantism, King William, a man said to have ‘asserted our Liberties at home against Popery and Thraldom, headed our Armies abroad with bravery and success, gave Peace to Europe, and Security to our Religion’.13 Farquhar compared the King to Emperor Augustus. To Nicholas Rowe, he was Tamburlaine, but not the wild Scythian of Marlowe’s imagination: instead, a man ‘mild, tractable, generous, humble, serene and compassionate; brave without ostentation, without superstition religious’.14 Still, the newstyle Sir Harry has more than a touch of Marlovian recklessness about him. His beloved Angelica, deceased and denied burial in France because of her Protestant beliefs, is avenged through her husband’s penis. He goes to a convent, rapes six nuns and leaves them ‘to provide for their Heretick Bastards’.15 A familiar weapon of racial ‘contamination’ deployed by many ignorant armies that clash by night, rape is here twisted into a violation that is at once personal, ideological and economic. It is the gesture of a writer riding a wave of crude hatred and currying favour at any cost, success gone to his head. Critics tend to beat about the bush in referring to the episode; some even try to outdo its attempt at humour while diverting attention from its ghastliness. Robert D. Hume drily refers to Sir Harry ‘roar[ing] through the country impregnating nuns’ before chastising Farquhar for writing a flat, structurally weak play.16 Bad dramaturgy is evidently a worse sin than tasteless humour. Audiences were turned off by the new play’s virulence as much as by its weary repetition of motifs from The Constant Couple (even the cast was similar, with roles reprised from the earlier play).17 Desperate for material and eager to move on, Farquhar turned from raiding his own dramaturgic past to looking about for other work to adapt. It was an attempt at deception in plain sight. With charges of plagiarism ringing in his ears, he chose to recycle an acknowledged source, as though to say he knew the difference between inventing and stealing. He probably lighted first on, of all things, a French play. Jean de la Chapelle’s Les Carrosses d’Orleans had premiered in 1681. A routine farce, its own crude nationalism demanded an idiot Dutchman whom Farquhar duly transformed into ghosts of his

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own past in The Stage-Coach.18 Here is the stereotypical Irishman abroad, Macahone, introducing himself, scrambling niceties of sequence in words and time as he asserts his ancient dignity: My name is Torlough Havwer Macahone of the Parish of Curoughhabegely, in the County of Tiperary, Esquire, where there is my Mansionhouse, for me and my Predecessors after me.19 Farquhar’s partnership with the French Huguenot writer Pierre Anthony Motteux was natural, for Motteux was the successful, assimilated migrant Farquhar yearned to become. Here was a French Protestant teaching an Irish Protestant how to cover his tracks and emphasize the political divisions of his homeland. The most distinctive feature of The Stage-Coach is not its exorcism of its author’s past but what may be its uncanny prophecy of his future. There is, granted, a dispute about the date of the piece. The consensus favours late 1701 but publication came up to four years later. The reason it makes a difference is stark. Dumb Macahone’s personal mission is Farquhar’s: he wants to marry a woman he believes to have a substantial fortune, but who is really an actress of slender means. Macahone misinterprets every suggestion to the contrary. If the play was written after Farquhar married Margaret, he used the opportunity to kick himself in public, lashing his own poor judgement with every crude stereotype available, sinking himself back into the ‘Boggs’ invoked by Daniel Kenrick. Before the marriage (more likely), and the play reveals Farquhar hoist by own petard. The fate he crafted for a stupid Irishman came back to bite him, a revenge exacted by cultural denial. His next borrowing, unequivocally from 1702, reworked Fletcher’s 1621 play The Wild Goose-Chase as The Inconstant. Here, he tries to set the record straight. The play is dedicated to Sir Richard Tighe, a fellow alumnus of Trinity Dublin described as ‘a Credit to my Country’, a phrase Farquhar uses with an appearance of pride that seeks to separate the residents of the Pale from the egregious Macahone and his brethren.20 But in the Preface he refers to his ‘English Brain’ struggling to cope, as English brains traditionally have, with French culture.21 The contrast might be read as a calculation of what it meant to be successfully Anglo-Irish: proudly rooted in the Protestant Pale but transplanted to England. But the struggling brain points to the imperfection of the transplant, a yearning to be more simply assimilated, just another English bloke with the usual anti-Continental prejudices. The Inconstant preaches anti-Catholicism less ambiguously. As he had referenced Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in The Beaux’ Stratagem, so he nodded towards another great Miltonic tract when he inserted this denunciation of monastic life into Act Four of his new play:

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I don’t understand this Imprisoning People with the Keys of Paradise, nor the Merit of that Virtue which comes by Constraint … Don’t you know that Religion consists in a Charity with all Mankind; and that you should never think of being friends with Heaven, till you have Quarrell’d with all the World.22 It might be a colloquial paraphrase of the famous passage from Areopagitica: I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.23 From direct preaching in The Inconstant, Farquhar returned to cultural stereotyping in The Twin-Rivals of 1702. In the servant Teague he created a character whose upside-down humour equates to stupidity. His master the Elder Wou’dbe has been reported dead, and Teague senses danger: ‘Now they know you are dead … they may kill you,’ he observes. His first act is to drag in a portmanteau and, exhausted, sit on it. Why, asks his master? ‘By my shoul, maishter’, he replies in the speech patterns his name demands, I did carry the Port-Mantel till it tir’d me; and now the Port-Mantel shall carry me till I tire him.24 That trick of the tongue yields a crasser joke when he compares London to home: ’tis the Bravest Plaase I have sheen in my Peregrinations, exshepting my nown brave Shitty of Carick-vergus.25 If ‘peregrinations’ carries a taint of Catholic pilgrimage, his master’s reflections reinforce the idea that some identities just can’t be sloughed off: ‘Tho’ this Fellow travell’d the World over,’ says the Elder Wou’dbe, ‘he would never lose his Brogue nor his Stomach.’26 In one of Farquhar’s grossest stereotypes lurks the undermining suspicion that while you can take the boy out of Ireland, you can never take Ireland out of the boy. If travelling the world can’t do it, travelling to London won’t. Like Macahone, Teague is made to sound ridiculous for expounding his lineage: ‘My Grandfader was an Irish poet. He did write a great Book of Verses concerning the Vars between St Patrick and the Wolf-Dogs.’27 Like the first Sir Harry, he nurtures a yearning for Papal blessing, but has to spell out its theological flaw:

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I did travel France, and Spain, and Italy. Dear Joy, I did kish the Pope’s toe, and dat will excuse me all the Sins of my Life; and fen I am dead, St Patrick will excuse all the rest.28 For all his benign loyalty, Teague has the diminished conception of violence usually associated with Irish thugs. When he takes another character by the throat to the cry of ‘An assault! An assault!’ he dismisses it as ‘nothing but choking’.29 In The Recruiting Officer, Farquhar had no need for such blatant prejudices since the whole play reflects on preparations to subdue it in the name of a Protestant monarch. Come The Beaux’ Stratagem, they return with a vengeance. Foigard, ‘a priest, chaplain to the French officers’, turns out to be a dim Irishman called MacShane on whom the best Protestant education had no influence; we can presume he had to disguise his own allegiances to get it in the first place.30 MacShane inherits Macahone’s habit of stating the obvious in pastiche brogue: The gallows! Upon my shoul I hate that saam gallow, for it is a diseash dat is fatal to our family.31 The Irishman’s pride in ancestry is reduced to dumb criminality.

(ii) The autumn before Sir Harry Wildair, Farquhar had visited Holland. Two letters published in Love and Business record his impressions of the Brill (10 August 1700) and Leiden (15 October 1700). A third, written from The Hague on 23 October 1700, is largely preoccupied with its addressee, a woman assumed to be Margaret Pemell; the former two are addressed to the bookseller Samuel Briscoe, who worked within the charmed literary circle from which Farquhar was excluded.32 Collectively they both compound and confound the connection between a visit to the heartland of Protestant Royalism and the increasingly anti-Catholic and anti-Irish tone of the works that followed. They also show a young man flush with cash and determined to travel both to broaden his horizons and to confirm some fundamental principles. Eric Rothstein disputes the authenticity of the letters on the basis of alleged dating errors and a doubt that Farquhar could possibly have encountered Martin Lister, the messenger charged with taking King William, then in Holland, news of his nephew’s death.33 However, Lister was indeed dispatched on that mission on the very day Farquhar claims, and took the same ship from Harwich late at night on 30 July 1700.34 There being no sign of Farquhar in London during the autumn of 1700, it is safe to conclude that he did travel to Holland, that his impressions are first hand and that the letters are not, as Rothstein describes them, ‘works of fiction’.35

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Farquhar’s first impression was of the North Sea, and a tumultuous storm. His taste for inverting received wisdom prompts the observations that the crew’s greatest comfort was the lightning that showed them their way, and that thunder was not God’s work but the Devil’s. He found himself ‘never worse prepar’d for Death’ because he ‘never had so much Money about [him] at a time’.36 If this was routine traveller’s provision, it reflected his relative prosperity after the success of The Constant Couple. At Harwich he had stayed in ‘one of the cleanest, best-funish’d Inns in the Kingdom’ but was still conscious enough of money to complain about the cost of the sea passage and excise charges.37 Seasickness excited his habitual attention to the grosser motions of the body: the passengers’ ‘stomachs ebb’d and flow’d like the Element’.38 Land would always be a relief in such circumstances, but Farquhar immediately saw in Holland a challenge to homegrown mythologies. But whose home? Foolishly, he had taken the poop deck to spy land and got drenched for his pains; that comic episode allowed him the conventional gag that he had been ‘seasoned [like] a Dutchman’. He continued the line in the letter of 23 October, observing of another storm that it made the whole country resemble ‘a great Leaky Man of War’ with the inhabitants ‘forc’d to pump Night and Day to keep the Vessel above Water’.39 However, the ‘Dutch Wave’ of his arrival washed out ‘an Errour that we Brittains are very fond of, that the Thames is the finest River in the Universe’. He had seen ‘England out of sight’ as the ship pulled away into the North Sea but now could only describe himself as a ‘Brittain’. Half-in and half-out by definition, he feels the pull of another cultural narrative entirely: ‘the Rhine is as much beyond it, as a Pair of Oars before a Sculler’.40 Seeing Holland, Farquhar looks in on himself: My Fancy in respect of Expectation has generally been so fruitful, that the dearest Part of my Hopes have frequently ended in Disappointments; and I have seldom found things come up to answer the Idea that I have usually fram’d of their Excellence; but here I must confess the Reality exceeds the Shadow, and I am pleas’d once in my Life to find a thing that can afford me substantial Pleasure in the Enjoyment. I have read much of this Place, fancy’d more, yet all falls short of what I see.41 If this is a tragic premonition of his marriage, it also feels like a memory of the relative disappointment of seeing England, or perhaps London, for the first time. He knows he is a dreamer, albeit a studious one, but for once, here in Holland, life is better than books. His admiration for Dutch townscapes, people and travel casts Londoners in a poor light. The comparisons are deliberately bathetic: ‘a Dutch Canal with a stately row of flourishing Trees on each side’ is more genteel than ‘the fairest, finest, full-bottom Wig’; ‘a lusty Dutch Woman’ scrubbing her doorstep until it shines is a more admirable sight than a valet and

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barber working away at a gentleman’s face. Compared with a ‘first rate Beau … lolling luxuriously in his Coach’, the skipper of a Dutch barge is a magician, commanding the ‘Wands and Waves’ and getting around from city to city with uncanny speed.42 Deflating the pretensions of the London types he had witnessed since his arrival from Dublin, Farquhar lets us know whose company he prefers. For true elegance, find a washerwoman or barge captain: Holland, in other words, helped fertilize the inclusive, genial sense of sympathy generations of critics and directors have found in his work. Concluding his first letter, he plays at being a conventional Englishman by begging Briscoe’s pardon for giving up ‘the Prejudice of Nativity’ along with the ‘Beef and Pudding’ he has had to forego on his travels (there is no particular indication that he misses it). But his most complete attempt at self-assimilation is made in order to express distance from English habits, the collective pronoun dissolving into the alienation of the satirist: Why we shou’d mention the Dutch with Contempt, and the French with Admiration, is a severe Satyr on the English Judgment, when the Bravery of the former attract[s] the Admiration of Men, and the Pageantry of the latter draw only the Eyes of Women.43 In a sentence, mild misogyny morphs into cultural conspiracy theory. Englishmen, he claims, are drawn into Francophilia by women’s love of all things French, but women are the fifth column by which the nation will be drawn into that nightmare for men of 1688, ‘universal Bondage to a Master’, Louis XIV. Dutch military prowess, the acme of masculinity, is the only plausible response. On this basis, Holland is for Farquhar both political utopia and natural home, free from the class divisions of Francophile London and imaginatively a point of completion for his wanderings. Two months on, mid-October in Leiden, the impressions hardened. Like the first, the second letter begins with Farquhar’s illness, this time not set off by the North Sea but ‘a very tedious Fit of Sickness’ which he jokingly describes as nearly fatal, likely to have ‘sent your Friend a longer Journey than he was willing to undertake’. Coming round, he concluded it was England that was sick, with diseases bought ‘in the Taverns in London’ at a price that would have kept the entire population of Holland well fed. For English ‘Luxury’ read Dutch ‘Industry’, the essence of a healthy Protestant nation equipped with a modest but effective standing army to combat the papist threat. An uglier observation threatens. The Dutch, Farquhar contends, spend less on their soldiers than the ‘civil Factions’ of England do on their lawyers, who ‘like the Jews … are tolerated in all Governments for the Interest of the Publick, while their main Drift is to enrich themselves’.44 Yet the letter then expounds the virtues of wider religious toleration. For now, Farquhar dwells on the ‘Casuists at Westminster’ (i.e. lawyers) who ‘dispute not so much upon the Legality of the Cause, as upon the Letter of

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the Law’. Such a ‘Burthen to the People’ prompts what for Farquhar was a familiar analogy with the body morbid: those who get entangled with the law are ‘Patients rather than Clients’.45 Mrs Sullen in The Beaux’ Stratagem, magically released from the tyranny of her marriage, is the product of such thinking. In this respect Farquhar is the diametric opposite of William Congreve, who showed how the inner workings of the law could work in favour of repressed and disappointed women like Mrs Fainall in The Way of the World. After his death, Margaret Farquhar portrayed her second husband as the child of a religious conflict that drove him into child soldiering. It may come as a surprise, then, to find Farquhar so warm in his admiration for the Dutch way of religious toleration. It was, he observed, ‘a pleasant thing to see Christians, Mahometans, Jews, Protestants, Papists, Armenians and Greeks, swarming together like a Hive of Bees, without one Sting of Devotion to hurt one another’.46 Although he introduces that remark with the quip that ‘Holland may contend for the Catholick Church with any part in Europe’, the belief that it represents a new world – an America of liberties in old Europe – is unmistakable. Like many children of conflict, Farquhar glimpsed the realization that one of his options was to rise above binary choices and reach an alternative understanding; and like America, religious toleration in Holland was, Farquhar understood, built on an ethic of free trade. The Dutch ‘all agree about the business of this Life, because a Community in Trade is the Interest they drive at’. Religion and society were built on the principles he expounded in the ‘Discourse upon Comedy’: a pragmatic, inclusive commercialism resisting the high-minded canons of the classicists. Here, there were ‘no Ingredients of Priestcraft … no Interest of Sects to be manag’d under the Cloak of gaining Proselytes to the Truth’. He is led naturally back to the ‘us’ he seems to feel part of only when he finds it wanting: ‘Tis a strange thing, Sam, that among us People can’t agree the whole Week, because they go different Ways upon Sundays.’ To feel at one with the English is to find Englishness a frustrating disappointment. ‘We’ exaggerate Dutch drinking habits; ‘we’ underestimate their charity; ‘we’ pass judgement on their wit without understanding their language, preferring to ‘travel under the Tuition of French Governours’; ‘we’ are ignorant of their superior ethics in business dealings.47 Necessarily, Farquhar pays implicit tribute to the Williamite regime while being shadowed by fear of Franco-Spanish power. In 1700, he states, it is in the interest of all Europe ‘that we shou’d be well with these People’, the Dutch. But the letters also show a migrant writer attempting to configure for himself what an ideal, accommodating community might look like: the kind of community he had so signally failed to find in London. When he returned to it, he would try harder to bend to its distinctive rules and prejudices with Sir Harry Wildair, configuring in the happy traveller the very antithesis of toleration.

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Amid the search for cultural bearings, there is little direct indication in the three letters about Farquhar’s immediate purpose in visiting the United Provinces. The third letter, presumed to be to Margaret, speaks of a letter from her transcribed for the benefit of the Earl of Albemarle, and a consultation with ‘Captain L___oe’ about her ‘Affairs’.48 The connections he made with army people have encouraged the idea that he was travelling on military business, but the more obvious conclusion to be drawn from those encounters as reported is that he was simply hoping to intercede on behalf of a war widow fallen on hard times. That was probably a secondary purpose; Willard Connely gets closest to the spirit of the letters, albeit in his characteristically jovial way, by entitling Chapter Nine of his biography ‘Holiday in Holland’, so calling to mind the rare holidays from his usual self Farquhar described in his ‘Picture’.49 Even if it could be so described, the trip was part of a pattern, its ideological tourism a species of flight: The Constant Couple had earned Farquhar money but not respect or acceptance. In fact, it had only intensified his alienation.

8 1698: Narratives of Arrival

(i) Sir Harry Wildair, pilgrim of the senses, returns from his travels to find Angelica. Having thought her a prostitute, he discovers she is the woman and the fortune of his dreams (the opposition is, of course, illusory). In a parallel plot, Lurewell, a lady whose name betrays her character, is reunited with Colonel Standard, the man who she wrongly believes abandoned her years before. In outline, the twin narrative might belong to any number of Restoration comedies: a little overwrought, with its nine scene settings likely to interrupt narrative momentum in any but the sparest of productions. So what explains the extraordinary commercial success of this ‘slight but entertaining’ play, The Constant Couple, that held the record for first season performances until 1728, when The Beggar’s Opera overtook it?1 And what led Farquhar to write it? It is as much a reflection of London life as the work that informed it, Farquhar’s own The Adventures of Covent-Garden, and the immediate prompts came only months after that book was published. An Act for the Disbandment of the Army in February 1699, a prelude to the Second Partition Treaty of June that year, reflected a brief outbreak of peace between England and France that had been nervously held since the signing of the Treaty of Ryswick in September 1697.2 Large numbers of troops returned home from Europe in the spring, short of money and looking for opportunity. In June, London newsletters carried news of the next Papal Jubilee, called by Pope Innocent XII in May and following the exhortation of Leviticus 25.10 to ‘sanctify the fiftieth year and … proclaim remission to all the inhabitants of thy land: for it is the year of jubilee’; by then, in fact, jubilees were being held every twenty-five years.3 The temporary diminution of the Catholic threat in Europe allowed Londoners space to imagine the splendours of Roman theatricality. Real though the event was, the play represents it as a distant ambition, likened by Simon Trussler to the ‘almost metaphysical quality of Pinter’s Sidcup in The Caretaker’, a destination longed for but

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never reached.4 The Irish rogue becomes the tramp: arriving in London, Farquhar almost immediately set his sights on the next stop. For one sour commentator, the play’s topicality was the sole reason for its success. Objecting to Motteux’s adaptation of Fletcher’s The Island Princess, a satirical poet wrote that the revision no more Sense contains Than he that wrote the Jubilee had Brains, Which ne’er had pleas’d the Town, or purchas’d Fame, But that ’twas christen’d with a modish Name.5 Hostility turned to sarcasm in A Comparison between the Two Stages. The play ‘did such Wonders’ that it was surprising ‘the Town did not just then bespeak the Bays’ for Farquhar. But this appreciative audience consisted largely of ‘footmen’. ‘If ever it diverted one Man of tolerable Sense’, observes the character Critic, ‘I’ll be hanged’, adding, ‘I would as soon consent to be poison’d as to hear that play read; it would be as offensive to my Nostrils as the turning up of a Dunghill’.6 Comically prim in his own right, Critic nevertheless voices reactions to The Constant Couple that were familiar among educated playgoers, and signals a preference for private reading over public performance. Farquhar’s friend Susannah Centlivre would have none of it. She leapt to the defence of his natural talent: I believe Mr. Rich will own he got more from a Trip to the Jubilee with all its Irregularities than by the most uniform Piece the Stage could boast of ever since.7 For the marginalized playwright, whether woman or Irishman, an enthusiastic audience was their best defence against – and the greatest provocation to – their critics, since it merely supplied proof of a general lapse in taste. Catholicism apart, other tensions found release in the play and contributed to its topicality. The year 1697 was one of financial strife. The Bank of England had been founded in 1694. Three years later the Goldsmiths’ Company, hostile to the new institution because it promoted paper value over the inherent worth of precious metal, tried to break the bank. The goldsmiths presented a huge quantity of new notes and demanded that the bank fulfill its promise to pay the bearer on demand the equivalent in gold. It never happened because the government prevented it, but the challenge was significant in its own right and as the culmination of prolonged national anxiety about what kind of assets gave a person status and authority. Throughout The Constant Couple, characters link personal worth to different concepts of wealth. Clincher Senior embodies the myth of the barrow-boy turned yuppy, ‘a pert London ’Prentice turned Beau’.8 Wildair feels his fortune entitles him to freedom from stress of any kind and stands

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in the way of anyone who questions his bravery. ‘Coward, Sir!’ he exclaims to Colonel Standard, ‘I have eight thousand Pounds a year, Sir’.9 Standard, a disbanded soldier, is impoverished both by military pay and the rigours of primogeniture; his ‘Father’s a Lord, and [his] Elder Brother a Beau’.10 Ultimately Standard’s bravery and Angelica’s breeding win out over new money: the blood that ‘for many Generations has run in the purest Channel of unsully’d Honour’ is the gold that trumps the proliferation of paper.11 These are financial instances of the broader counting habit Derek Hughes has noted as a feature of Farquhar’s writing, whereby wanderers try to fix a place for themselves.12 Wildair’s implication in this discourse makes him a less reassuring presence than some critics have assumed. Rothstein’s appreciation gets off to a shaky start, describing him as ‘what the seventeenth-century French called an “honnête homme”, a man who excels in a graceful and harmonious savoir faire’.13 But Wildair is some distance from the honnêtes hommes who feature in Molière, for example, whose Philinte (Le Misanthrope) and Chrysalde (L’Ecole des Femmes), classic instances of the type, exist to caution soberly against their respective protagonists’ excesses. They would have a word or two for Sir Harry. Rothstein nonetheless declares him ‘the central organizing agent’ of the play and ‘the ideal flower of a public system’.14 As Simon Trussler observes, Wildair is not the only character to link the two plots of The Constant Couple, and the crown of literary unity should be shared with his alter ego, the ‘villainous debauchee’ Vizard. Trussler prefers to see Wildair as ‘incompetent and ultimately tame’, successful only because he bends to the will of others and brings the combination of ancient line and money that Angelica’s family needs.15 His accommodation within mainstream society is therefore both pre-ordained and a fluke: none of his doing, in spite of his efforts rather than because of them. However dubious as a statement of artistic success, Rothstein’s description makes sense in the context of migrant experience. The vulnerability Roger Michell found in all Farquhar’s characters is vividly apparent in Sir Harry; his ultimate triumph, equally, is a vision of what it might mean for the arriviste to be at the centre, to rule the roost, to be indeed the ‘ideal flower of the public system’. But it is a vision as unattainable as the amicable divorce that concludes The Beaux’ Stratagem. The best that can be said of it is, as Derek Hughes observes of that play, that it shows Farquhar was at least capable of envisaging a better way of living, in this case for himself.16 If The Constant Couple was, in Rothstein’s words, ‘Farquhar’s dramatic comingof-age’, written soon after he passed twenty-one, it is also a young man’s statement of yearning to belong. Wildair’s singularity has been a subject of discussion almost since his first appearance. Was he Farquhar, Wilks or something else entirely? Daniel Kenrick alleged that Farquhar had simply transplanted Etherege’s Dorimant into a new plot (Connely prefers as a source Sir Frederick Frolick in Etherege’s first play, The Comical Revenge).17 The Preface to the Reader

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with which Farquhar introduced the first edition simply stated that The Constant Couple would be as good as unperformable without Wilks: Mr. Wilks’s performance has set him so far above competition in the part of Wildair, that none can pretend to envy the Praise due to his Merit. That he made the Part, will appear from hence, that whenever the Stage has the misfortune to lose him, Sir Harry Wildair may go to the Jubilee.18 Conceivably it did not occur to Farquhar to link his friend to Wildair so closely until he saw the performance; the actor contrived to make the part his own rather than being handed it by right. But it may well have been Wilks’s performance that resulted in some substantial textual revisions within weeks of the premiere. A new ending tones down the sentimentality of Sir Harry’s conversion, allowing him a modicum of characteristic cheekiness even in the face of the overpowering charms and claims of Angelica.19 Confronted with his error of mistaking his future wife for a prostitute, he ‘looks foolish and hums a song’ rather than engaging in platitudes such as ‘Beauty without Art!’ and ‘Vertue without Pride!’20 Eroding sentimentality, the revision has a parallel effect. Whether Sir Harry is Wilks or Farquhar or a composite of both, a generic Irishman abroad, the new ending is ambiguous. Wildair’s persistent cheek may signal the impossibility of his ever conforming fully, but in view of the play’s success it is more likely an optimistic signal that his difference can be accommodated. Wilks has charmed his audience; Farquhar has got his box office success; a revision can celebrate the fact that it is, after all, possible for two Irishmen to be themselves and yet succeed. It was a dream he would return to in The Beaux’ Stratagem.

(ii) Farquhar’s novella of urban life, The Adventures of Covent-Garden, was his first publication in the sense that it appeared between the opening and the printing of his first play, Love and a Bottle. Richard Standfast, who published that play, and to whom Margaret would turn in her search to make capital from Barcellona, put out The Adventures in December 1698. Farquhar’s name did not appear on the title page. As Kenny observes, it is impossible to know whether he ‘chose anonymity or was simply accorded it by the printer or bookseller’, but the simpler fact is that he was – and cast himself as – a nobody seeking to make a quick impression at a time when short fiction was easier to get into print than a play was into performance.21 It took time for the piece to be recognized as Farquhar’s work at all. In 1795, Isaac Reed took the opportunity to lambast him for plagiarism, pointing out the resemblances between The Adventures and The Constant Couple and finding the former ‘a piece without the slightest degree of merit’.22 Only when Leigh Hunt edited Farquhar in 1840 was the attribution firmly established.

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Hunt did so on the basis of verbal parallels, material directly recycled by Farquhar into later publications, and by declared autobiography.23 The tale does, after all, begin by focusing attention on ‘A Young Gentleman somewhat addicted to Poetry and the Diversions of the Stage’.24 The Dedication and address To the Reader indicate that Farquhar expected to be identified but as an outsider, an arriviste already sidelined after run-ins with more established figures. The dedication to his ‘Ingenious Acquaintance at Will’s Coffee-House’ jumps from the opening ‘Gentlemen’ to ‘I am Yours … ’ across a blank half page, adding sarcastic layers of humility with ‘most Devoted, most Obedient, and most Faithful humble Servant’.25 He has no words for them; they have no time for him. He presses home the dispute in the address to readers. ‘My Dedication looks very Blank upon the Matter,’ he jokes. No dedication ‘was ever less Fulsome and Tedious’, even though its emptiness is a perfect reflection – ‘a very fair Character’ – of the coffee-house set. He expects further hostility from ‘the Severe and Judicious’ for breaking with textual convention but tenders them in return a dose of Irish cheek by reflecting on Dryden’s own dedicatory practice: Since the greatest Critick of our Age has published a Dedication without denominating his Patron, so the least has ventured to ascribe his Patrons, and leave out the Dedication.26 Farquhar’s self-positioning is both a pose and a fact. He is nothing compared to the master wit of Will’s, so his anonymity, figurative and literal, is his best weapon. Writing himself out of the scene is his best hope of writerly selfassertion. Yet this outsider is also keen to reveal himself as an infiltrator, a ‘Person admired by the Ladies for his Discretion and Secrecy’, a cultural cuckolder. Such was the conventional image of the Irish rover exploited, among others, by Aphra Behn in her 1677 comedy of a cavalier addicted to rape. In the Adventures the ‘young Gentleman somewhat addicted to Poetry’ is named ‘Peregrine’, like Sir Harry a wanderer with a taint of the Catholic other, as though making himself the enemy from home. It is an attractive personal parallel, but complicated by another. Shared lines with Love and a Bottle are commonly acknowledged.27 A more obvious link is that play’s dedication to a man Farquhar admired from afar for ‘youthful Bravery and Courage’, Peregrine, Lord Marquiss of Carmarthen.28 So, we might think of Peregrine in the Adventures as a blend of role model, autobiography and fantasy. Yet the address to the reader sets a trail of clues to invite a process of ‘Negative Definition’ that leads inexorably in one direction. The author is neither Collierist nor Poet, neither Aesop of Tunbridge, nor Aesop of Bath, nor the Dragon of Bow, nor the Grasshopper at the Exchange; and for an Englishman not to belong to any of these Factions, is somewhat strange.29

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As strange as the estranging experience of being un-English in London: a mere Irishman whose identity can be defined only by what it is not. At the same time, the grammar of this negative definition allows a passing glimpse of accommodation, a momentary pretence of being English after all. In turn, this anxiety of estrangement hints at a claim of singular talent. Unclassifiable according to familiar categories, he presents himself – as in the ‘Discourse upon Comedy’ – as a writer who observes life by its own rules rather than those of critical orthodoxy. The book is, ‘for the most part, matter of Fact’ and ‘Transacted within these Three Months’, which appears to collapse his writing and the events on which it is based into a single episode. He expects criticism for stretching things out beyond a single month on the basis that classicists demand a year as the timespan of a heroic poem and a month for a novel. But he is not yet ready to mount a proper defence. Instead he lays a trail of what look like false clues, his habit of ‘negative [self] definition’ turning into a riddle for future biographers: I can urge enough in my defence: perhaps I was very Young when I writ it, or Recovering from a fit of Sickness; perhaps I was very Old and near my great Climacterick; perhaps I write it in haste, or perhaps ’tis my first Essay.30 But each ‘perhaps’ is largely true: at twenty-one he was very young; he had arrived in England sick earlier in the year but was nevertheless old in the sense of knowing what age felt like thanks to illness; everything he wrote he wrote in haste; this was his first publication.31 So, those perhapses are less false clues than the reflex of someone who knows he did not really apply himself to the task and therefore feels comfortingly distant from its shortcomings. The excuse of youth he offers is, he knows, no excuse at all. As in the ‘Picture’ he painted in Love and Business, he reserves his greatest ironies for himself. In the midst of his amorous adventures, Peregrine stumbles across a debate about the Collier controversy much as Farquhar might have heard at Will’s coffee house. The conventional positions are reversed by dint of the outsider’s ironic privilege: ‘Mr. Collier showed too much Malice and rancour for Church-man, and his Adversaries too little Wit, for the Character of Poets.’32 But in Peregrine’s subsequent encounter at the theatre with his mistress, Selinda, it is she who expounds the literary values we have learned to associate with Farquhar, and Peregrine who is cast in the role of the exacting critic. Selinda accuses ‘You Criticks’ of making ‘a mighty sputter’ about the importance of the unities, whose value she struggles to appreciate. Peregrine’s response is only to ‘smil[e] at her Female ignorance’. The line she pursues is, nonetheless, precisely the one Farquhar would develop in the ‘Discourse upon Comedy’: ‘The chief design of Plays is to please the People, and get the Play-house and Poet a Livelyhood.’33 Peregrine’s rejoinders are deliberately limp imitations of an establishment critic writing in the wake of Collier:

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pleasure by instruction, instruction by pleasure. Inhabiting the mindset of the self-appointed critical elite, he shows them floundering. Farquhar’s ventriloquism is double-edged: rejected and rejecting, his imitation remains a form of flattery, the sign of a frustrated wish to be admitted. The Adventures of Covent-Garden is itself a self-confessed imitation whose source, Farquhar claims, testifies to his own authenticity as a writer. The tales of Paul Scarron – themselves based on popular Spanish stories – were freewheeling accounts of wanderers like Peregrine and his creator. His Virgile Travesti (1648–53) had been translated into English by Charles Cotton in 1664, while Le Romain Comique (1651–7) is a sprawling collection of tales that provided plots for numerous playwrights and mythologized the actor in terms that appealed to Farquhar: a rootless, cheerful disrupter of high life and hierarchies, avenging through wit and imitation the indignities placed upon him by a rigid social order. The actual source for the Adventures may be Antoine Furetière’s Le Roman Bourgeois (1666), translated as Scarron’s City Romance, Made English and published in 1671 by an anonymous writer who sought to capitalize on Scarron’s popularity by attributing Furetière’s work to him.34 To imitate this popular new form was to fall into a familiar habit for London writers, yet Farquhar’s preface emphasizes the difficulty of doing so: There is something as Odd in this Gentlemans Writings, as there was in Person, which may puzzle an Author as much as a Painter to delineate him.35 Scarron was in all likelihood a polio victim. His distorted body could not, Farquhar’s argument goes, be accurately represented any more than his singular literary style. Farquhar claims not to repeat the exact twists of Scarron’s plots but to find inspiration in the idea that twistedness best represents life: There are some turns of Plot in the following Adventures that may seem incredible, but this very strangeness to any considerate Person will appear the most convincing Proof of their Truth; for unless they had really passed, I could never have thought of ’em.36 This is, first, a defence against the charge of plagiarism that would dog Farquhar throughout his career. But it is also a means to craft an identity for himself as a writer of authentic experience, set against those who found ‘Nature’ only in Aristotelian rules. Difficult to imitate, Scarron’s twisted form is nevertheless the perfect model for the aspiring author made to feel by the wits of Will’s coffee house his lack of normality. In the awkward posture of the frontispiece to Lintott’s edition of the comedies we may even detect a minor disability; in the efforts of the ‘Picture’ to talk up his physical prowess, a corresponding compensation.

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Farquhar’s preface ends with a direct address to the woman who inspired Emilia, the story’s female protagonist. It is staged blackmail: ‘She only knows the Author, whom if she discovers, he certainly discovers her.’ Farquhar describes her as he might some generic witty heroine of comedy. Love adds ‘a pleasing gloss to her worst Designs’; his depiction of her ‘will make her Cunning more admired than her Falsehood hated’.37 She is an impossible object of desire, symbol of a broader failure. Peregrine’s exile to London from an unnamed other ‘Kingdom’ was the result of her parents’ disapproval of their relationship. Reunited outside the Drury Lane Theatre (where Love and a Bottle was scheduled to play), they replay a painful past in which Emilia had broken her ‘Vows and Protestations’ in order to take a rich husband.38 It is a routine sentiment but with a twist both mercenary and prophetic, for Peregrine immediately has to decide what to do about Emilia’s rival, the other woman he had planned to marry, as Farquhar would Margaret, ‘to relieve his decay’d Estate’. It doesn’t take him long to decide that he prefers Emilia. Dreamer wins out over schemer.39 But the greater scheme is run by Emilia, who it turns out is merely in need of what she calls ‘a necessary Lover’, recruited as a kind of public relations assistant to spread favourable stories and dispel malicious gossip about her. She even employs Peregrine’s ‘Excellent Talent in Epistolary Stile’ to provide copy for her letters to the man who really interests her, an unnamed lord.40 At first Peregrine had thought well of himself for having such a rival, but history repeats itself: the ardent young lover is again a reject; the exile is compelled to relive the disappointment that forced him from home in the first place; the young writer ambitious for success in London represents himself as nothing more than the private secretary to someone else’s narrative. To the mischievous bustle of Scarron, Farquhar adds a melancholy, pessimistic narrative of false dawns in which the chances of success are withdrawn no sooner than they are announced. Taken together the tale, its preface and the pointedly blank dedication form a testament to the loneliness of arrival. There is a productive tension with the narrative voice of the Scarron tradition, defined by Rothstein as ‘objective, urbane, unillusioned, and unromantic’, the voice of knowing, pre-ordained disappointment.41 Even so, Rothstein’s formalist emphasis leads him only to reject the Adventures as a failed novel, incapable of sustaining a consistent point of view and of interest only because it points to Farquhar’s ‘considerable promise as a playwright’.42 Its representation of the Collier debate provides the critic with a rare biographical speculation: ‘in the midst of The Adventures, his mind seems to have turned’ in the direction of the theatre.43

(iii) One man, at least, was not suspicious of new talent, especially if it was cheap. Farquhar’s first plays were written for the company run by someone who made a living from the kind of anti-establishment thinking that

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must have appealed to newcomers with little respect for old hierarchies. Seldom in English theatre history has a man been more subject to abuse than Christopher Rich, manager of the Drury Lane and Dorset Garden Theatres for five years before Farquhar’s arrival in London. The author of A Comparison between the Two Stages wrote of ‘an old snarling Lawyer … a waspish, ignorant Pettifogger in Law and Poetry; one who understands Poetry no more than Algebra.’ Theatre historians since have largely agreed.44 Rich was another outsider who broke the mould: a Somerset boy who, contrary to the usual stereotypes of the Restoration Stage, out-thought his metropolitan associates. Rich is an important figure not because he represented a paradigm shift from one form of management to another, as though the theatrical economy passed from an ethos of royal service to one of commercial gain: an inglorious revolution to match the officially glorious political one that was happening at the same time. That was how his enemies liked to represent him. Rather, he brought into stark definition a set of practices on which his predecessors  – and indeed his bitterest rivals – had always depended, achieving power with tools they had created. He was his competitors’ parody, not their antithesis. Sir William Davenant had raised cash by selling shares in the early 1660s; his co-patentee Thomas Killigrew had defrauded his actors of their shareholdings and paid the consequences. They both had to cope with disciplinary problems, and with varying degrees of aptitude and willingness among their performers. Thomas Betterton, Rich’s principal antagonist, was a master at using share-dealing for personal gain. Such practices required theatres to accept the risk that they might one day be taken over by men like Rich. For all the irony of the Haymarket prologue in which he satirized Rich, Farquhar’s Preface to The Recruiting Officer shows he enjoyed a friendly enough working relationship with a man who was a fellow outsider, mistrustful of ancient privileges and devoted principally to the project set out in the ‘Discourse upon Comedy’: that of valuing the response of pit, box and gallery over the academicians. It was in Rich’s main playhouse that his career as a professional playwright began.

(iv) Farquhar’s first play, Love and a Bottle, stages a personal arrival; as the early critic said, he ‘exposed Roebuck … for his own character’ as a way of ‘establish[ing] his reputation’.45 Described in the Dramatis Personae as ‘an Irish Gentleman, of a wild roving temper; newly come to London’, George Roebuck appears in a riding habit, skint. ‘If I have one Penny to buy a Halter … may I be hang’d’.46 He has been ill for a month en route in Coventry, an oddly specific detail hard to reconcile with the widely held idea that the play was written before Farquhar left Dublin for London (but compatible

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with the alternative theory that he added to an existing draft after he had arrived).47 Roebuck’s first encounter is not, as per the stock openings of many comedies, with a fellow traveller or old acquaintance. That is his aim, but Farquhar chooses to defer the moment. Instead, Roebuck chances upon a distorted vision of his author’s future: a maimed soldier begging for cash. Roebuck has no truck with disability. When it comes to begging, the soldier’s bad leg and crutch give him an advantage because ‘the merciful Bullet, more kind than thy ungrateful Country, has given thee a Debent[ure] in thy broken leg’.48 Cheap wit and anti-establishment posturing go hand in hand. There is no advantage in being an ex-officer, for ‘they are all disbanded, and must now turn Beggars’.49 Years before his military experiences or the play he wrote about them, Farquhar gives in miniature a far more disenchanted view of army life than any that appears in The Recruiting Officer, let alone Barcellona. Roebuck’s intentions are those of Farquhar’s later heroes: to settle from his wandering with the right woman. But his first encounter with Lucinda, ‘A Lady of considerable Fortune’, points both to the prejudices that lie in his way and to his collusion in them. He claims to be ‘a very good Interpreter’ of dreams. ‘Are you then one of the Wise Men of the East?’ she asks. ‘No, Madam’, he replies, ‘but one of the Fools of the West … An Irish-man’. Only one response is possible: ‘Oh horrible!’ she exclaims. But the joke cuts both ways. While he may be a mere ‘Wolf-Dog’, he is as ‘well-natur’d’ as any English bulldog, ‘and a much more fawning Creature’ – the natural prelude to a grope. She puts him off by sustaining the canine comparison (‘keep off your Paws’) and asking for an account of the strange ways of the Irish, such as their rumoured taste for wearing ‘Horns and Hoofs’. But Roebuck has no difficulty in showing that Dublin’s moral dichotomies are remarkably like London’s, with Ladies, and Whores; Colleges, and Playhouses; Churches, and Taverns; fine Houses, and Bawdy-houses; in short, every thing that you can boast of, but Fops, Poets, Toads and Adders.50 The very quality that drove him from Ireland is the one that already has got his creator into trouble in England. There are no poets in Ireland, he says, because ‘nothing that carries a Sting in its Tongue can live there’. St Patrick, he jokes, ‘sent them a packing with other venomous Creatures out of Ireland’.51 He does little to dispel the impression that he is one of them. As he spells out the circumstances of his exile, a family saga emerges. He had got a woman pregnant with twins and his ‘unconscionable Father’ insisted he marry her. The woman was poor, her best possession ‘a Silk Manteau’. So, he decided to escape.

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Th’insulting Authority of an incens’d Father, the dull and often-repeated advice of impertinent Relations, the continual clamours of a furious Woman, and the shrill bawling of an ill-natur’d Bastard.52 Roebuck shows himself worse than venomous in his concluding celebration of the female twin’s fate: ‘Heaven was pleased to lessen my affliction, by taking away the she Brat.’ The abandoned mother, Trudge, duly appears with the baby boy. The sharpest sting in Farquhar’s tongue is reserved for the people he had literally blanked in the dedication to The Adventures of CoventGarden: London’s writers. Poets, Roebuck observes, are the ‘worst Company, for they’re ill natur’d’; their best defence is that they are, by definition, self-defeating: ‘these fellows that get Bread by their Wits, are always forc’d to eat their words’. His best hope of accommodation is that in this city, ‘a Collection of Monsters’, everyone is abnormal.53 But in his quest for the ‘honourable Mistress’ his friend Lovewell promises him, he can already feel that whatever natural milieu he might find in London is being quickly withdrawn: ‘I must first despise the honest jolly Conversation at the Tavern, for the foppish, dull, insipid Entertainment at the Chocolate-house.’54 Farquhar did not stop there in decrying more established writers. The poet whose lodging Roebuck had visited is revealed as Lyrick, a man given to ‘turning three or four of our most topping fellows into Doggrel’. So doing, he makes the originals sound as vacuous as his imitations are banal: Says Mr. Lee, Let There Be Not One Glimpse, One Starry Spark But Gods Meet Gods, and Justle in the Dark. Says little Lyrick, Let all the Lights be burnt out to a Snuff, And Gods Meet Gods, and Play at Blind-Man’s Buff. ‘They’re as noble Lines as ever were penn’d,’ he concludes.55 Lyrick is that hated species, a classicist. His inability to pay rent he attributes to the length of time it takes to write a play according to the rules: ‘the decorum of Time … the exactness of Characters … preparations of Incidents … Closeness of Plot … Opening the Catastrophe’ – all the requirements of the neoAristotelian dramatist mocked by the Irish migrant standing up for natural wit, and a rehearsal for the ponderous Mr Comick in The Twin-Rivals. The interjections of Lyrick’s landlady, Widow Bullfinch, compound his absurdity by highlighting the wreckage his pedantry leaves in its wake. Time he never observes, ‘for you keep the worst hours of any Lodger in Town’; his own ‘Character’ is ‘the most scandalous’; and the results of his care in ‘laying the Drama’ are those of a pillaging teenager. Bullfinch complains:

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You wear out my Sheets, burn my Fire and Candle, dirty my House, eat my Meat, destroy my Drink, wear out my Furniture.56 The counterpoise of high-mindedness and earthy denial was a rich vein for Farquhar and for other Restoration writers. It followed the pattern of the catechism, exploited by Wycherley in The Country Wife and again by Farquhar himself in both The Constant Couple and The Beaux’ Stratagem.57 In the former, Farquhar made it a tool of reformation for the wandering Sir Harry (‘Call then to mind your rude and scandalous Behaviour’, urges Lady Darling); in the latter, it is a means of seduction by which Archer aims to get his way with the maid Cherry (‘Where does Love enter?’ etc.).58 The first years of the Eighteenth Century would see a rash of catechisms. They might be serious, like The Historical Catechism published by Benjamin Bragg in 1706, or the 1707 textbook The Art of Catechizing. More frequently they were satirical but still strongly patriarchal, pointed at the behaviour of the sexes and with their inquisitorial manner frequently a vehicle for male domination.59 In 1707, on his death bed, Farquhar made his own contribution to the genre with Love’s Catechism, which borrows a number of lines from The Beaux’ Stratagem. It is an elaborated off-cut from that play, perhaps a desperate attempt to earn a bit more money for his family through exploiting a fashionable genre. Love’s Catechism was advertised as ‘by the Author of the Recruiting Officer’, which suggests it was in circulation before The Beaux’ Stratagem and not, like Barcellona, retrieved by Margaret after Farquhar’s death.60 Generic though the form was, Farquhar personalized it. In Love and a Bottle the targets are multiple and reach back into the ways the catechism had informed his life: the literary establishment, the educational norms of Trinity Dublin, his own upbringing in a church family. The device would turn against him too. He may have been an instinctive talent compared to the plodding Lyrick and his like, but he knew what it was to be a needy writer, and he would discover how much he depended on recycling existing work – often his own – to make any kind of showing. When Lyrick’s intended publisher, Mr Pamphlet, contends that an author ‘must write himself into a Consumption before he gain Reputation’, Farquhar’s satire becomes ever more personal.61 It is the acutest revenge of the natural writer to claim a natural disability: a threefold outsider by virtue of nation, constitution and talent, but successful all the same. Yet Pamphlet makes it sound as though talent is irrelevant. A capacity to incur pity is all a writer needs, just as Roebuck positions the soldier at the start of the play. When it comes to writing, Farquhar plays the disadvantage card and imagines his success. The arriving writer finds his double, after all, in the maimed trooper. The contradictions of the writing life, and Farquhar’s partly imaginary immersion in it, resurface when Roebuck courts Lucinda. ‘I suppose, Sir’, she says:

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You are some conceited young Scribler, who has got the benefits of a first Play in your Pocket, and are now going a Fortune hunting. He thinks she has picked it wrong because he looks too smart and healthy: But why a Scribler, Madam? Are my Cloaths so course, as if they were spun by those lazy Spinsters the Muses? … Do you see any thing peculiarly Whimsical or ill-natur’d in my Face? Is my Countenance strain’d, as if my head were distorted by a Stranguary of Thought? … Do my hands look like Paper moths? I think, Madam, I have nothing Poetical about me.62 The passage resonates with the ‘Picture’ in Love and Business. If Roebuck embodies a fantasy of the successful migrant, he is also clear about what failure looks like, and it looks like his creator. Later in the play, Lyrick reframes the argument about writers in a way that dangles the possibility of a much simpler explanation of Roebuck, and a more complex one of himself. As a rule, ‘the Hero in Comedy is always the Poet’s Character’, he observes, describing that ‘character’ as ‘a Compound of practical Rake, and speculative Gentleman, who always bears off the great Fortune in the Play, and Shams the Beau and ’Squire with a Whore or Chambermaid’. But this is ‘character’ as type, not individual personality, a fictional embodiment of fantasy. Another future – one that did transpire for Farquhar – is anticipated when Lyrick says that ‘as the Catastrophe of all Tragedies is Death, so the end of Comedies is Marriage’, the parallelism blurring one with the other.63 By this stage, Lyrick has changed from a ponderous classicist to a pungent satirist, his views of contemporary drama those of a dead-eyed realist and outsider. The lachrymose excesses of tragedy make him laugh: the wrung handkerchiefs of the female spectators are shrouds for dead heroes. Equally, men laugh at fools in comedy ‘when the mighty Originals’ are there in the auditorium.64 The more he talks in Act Four, the more he sounds like the ‘Discourse upon Comedy’. The idea that Roebuck represents not Farquhar but Robert Wilks has an appeal founded on the incorrect assumption that Wilks first played the role. He did not, at least in London. That actor was Joseph Williams, who had stuck with Rich’s company after Betterton’s secession. Farquhar, Wilks and Love and a Bottle are intertwined differently depending on the account. In 1732 Daniel O’Bryan described Farquhar showing the play to Wilks, who advised him to use what money he had left to get to London and market it there.65 By 1775, Thomas Wilkes had coloured in some details. The play was not Farquhar’s initiative but Wilks’s, who agreed with ‘all his acquaintance’ that his young friend was no actor and ‘much better calculated to furnish compositions for the Stage, than to echo those of other Poets on it’. In this account Farquhar is completely skint, so Wilks gives him ten guineas and talks to the Dublin theatre management about a benefit performance. By

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the time that happened a month later, Love and a Bottle had been written. Farquhar showed the play to Wilks, who liked it and sent him on his way to London the next day.66 This later account by Thomas Wilkes adds an overlay of sentimental appeal, with the Dublin public rallying to the cause of their impoverished and talented young playwright and the senior actor opening his own purse, but it chimes with Farquhar’s known writing habits, which were impulsive and hurried. Subsequent scholars have argued over whether the play was complete or only in draft when he left for London, the latter being the majority view, underlined by the detail previously mentioned about Roebuck’s illness in Coventry.67 In 1892 A.C. Ewald asserted that Wilks travelled with Farquhar and introduced him to Rich, but the actor’s life, as will shortly be clear, says otherwise.68 Shirley Strum Kenny writes as though very little of those narratives can be believed. Thomas Wilkes’s account is, she states, ‘pat and unsubstantiated’ except by O’Bryan’s ‘equally unreliable’ one, but no justification is given for any of those harsh epithets, which themselves therefore seem, on the face of it, pat and unsubstantiated, not least when we step sideways for a look into the life of Robert Wilks.69

9 1696: Dear Bob

(i) The arc of Wilks’s professional career is reasonably well established; his private life is another matter. He began acting in the mid-1680s as a young man of about twenty, falling in with Joseph Ashbury at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin as Farquhar would after him, and playing Othello. In 1689 Ashbury closed his theatre for two years and Wilks travelled to London to try his chances. O’Bryan states that he carried a recommendation from Ashbury to Christopher Rich; it was not unusual for actors to move between the London and Dublin seasons.1 But Wilks’s first foray at Drury Lane was not a success. Presumably a sprinkling of walk-on parts was not satisfying for someone who had played a leading Shakespearean role in Dublin. But he did find a moderately welloff wife, Elizabeth Knapton, about eight years his junior, whom he married at St Mary’s Church in Marylebone on 26 November 1691.2 They had a son, John, who was christened at St Martin-in-the-Fields on 28 August 1692, having been born ten days earlier.3 During Elizabeth’s pregnancy it appears that Wilks returned to Dublin to appear again for Ashbury as Othello, a role with personal resonance for a migrant actor recently married. The political resonance was less obvious; this was a production designed to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne, so perhaps the Spanish-sounding Iago represented everything devilish about the Jacobites. Whether Elizabeth accompanied him then is not known, but by summer 1694 the family had settled in Dublin and added to their number with twin daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, christened on 26 October that year at the church of St John the Evangelist. The girls lived for only a few days and were buried at the same church on 30 October.4 Another daughter, Frances (spelled ‘Fransese’ in the register), was christened at St John the Evangelist the following October when she was ‘17 days ould’.5 Amid personal triumphs and disasters, Wilks’s Dublin acting career was developing. In the 1697–98 season he played all of Etherege’s suave

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libertines: Sir Frederick in The Comical Revenge, Courtall in She Wou’d if She Cou’d, and Dorimant in The Man of Mode. At the end of the same season he travelled to Kilkenny for a summer engagement with Ashbury’s company, as recorded in John Dunton’s The Dublin Scuffle and therefore taking the ways of the city to country gentry and others, a pattern repeated between London and Hampshire.6 Late in 1698 or early in 1699, after his young friend George Farquhar had made the trip, Wilks returned to London with wife and family.7 It is easy to imagine that Farquhar’s decision influenced his own. He had failed once but would try again. It was unusual for an actor to slot into a company mid-season, and the absence of Wilks’s name from any record of performance prior to The Constant Couple on 28 November 1699 suggests he may have been reengaged specifically with that play in mind, perhaps even after some lobbying by Farquhar. It would have been a natural moment for one migrant actor to find his feet by embodying the more favourable stereotypes associated with his country. He had been settled in London some time before: a further daughter, Ann, was christened at St Martin-in-the-Fields on 12 July 1699.8 After the success of Sir Harry Wildair in The Constant Couple, Wilks became a naturalized presence in London, with a roster of routine aristocratic heroes in both comedy and tragedy. By 1702, when George Powell left Drury Lane for the rival company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he became the senior actor with responsibility for organizing rehearsals and some say in the repertory. He succeeded where Farquhar did not, becoming a trusted figure in his professional world; Farquhar could scarcely have hoped for a more influential friend, and the fact that he did not dedicate a play to Wilks may suggest he knew his friend was already being generous enough. Wilks’s fortunes grew: on 17 March 1703 a benefit concert in York Buildings; on 9 October 1704 a new contract worth £4 a week, putting him on a par with the most successful actors in recent memory. Two years later, with Rich’s deputy Owen Swiney he helped engineer a switch to another theatre, the Queen’s in Haymarket, sufficiently confident in his abilities to form part of a new management team and to carry the success of The Recruiting Officer with him. With almost as much energy as the now-retiring Thomas Betterton had shown in the 1670s and 1680s, he continued to act in a wide variety of roles, graduating to the living legend’s signature parts, including Hamlet, Jaffeir in Otway’s Venice Preserv’d and Castalio in the same author’s The Orphan. When Betterton had taken over roles from Charles Hart in the 1680s he had striven for exact imitation, the means by which he had learned roles such as Hamlet from Sir William Davenant, formerly of the King’s Men, no less.9 Wilks was in many ways diametrically opposed to Betterton as an actor, counterposing breezy charm against the latter’s crafted solemnity. Nonetheless, the protocols of theatrical tradition demanded that he honour the ways of the master, however alien they might be to his natural manner. In so far as he was reckoned more successful in comedy than tragedy,

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such judgements may be read as Wilks’s own failure of accommodation to mainstream theatrical culture. As Farquhar had striven and failed to imitate him in the Dublin Constant Couple, so Wilks fell short when it came to upholding a tradition that stretched back to Shakespeare’s own company. There may, equally, be a suspicion that it was a struggle for critics to accept that an Irishman could succeed in what was beginning to be defined as the core classical repertory. On his own terms, which he was increasingly able to define, Wilks remained a success. Between October 1706 and January 1708 he played twenty roles, or roughly one new one every six weeks. The benefit night he enjoyed at the Queen’s Theatre on 17 February 1707 was hard earned. For the next two summers he shared in the experience of the real theatrical aristocracy: with Betterton, Elizabeth Barry, Anne Bracegirdle and others he travelled to the Hampshire home of the MP Richard Norton to perform privately for family and friends.10 His successes would continue more or less uninterrupted until his death on 27 September 1732. Three years before then his salary was reported to be £753 6s. 8d.; he had the double recognition of continuing to play Sir Harry Wildair, a signature role that would forever link him to Farquhar’s memory, and of being asked to perform for the King at Hampton Court. His fertility as an actor was matched by the profusion of his family life. His daughter Frances gave birth to a son in July 1712, having married an army captain the year before. The following March his wife Elizabeth died; then Frances, buried at St Paul’s Covent Garden on 30 July 1714. The following April he married a woman called Mary Fell, who inherited his share of the theatre patent and outlived him by eight years. Wilks died in as great a state of respectability as any actor could, saving perhaps Thomas Betterton, whose extensive collection of books and pictures went up for auction after his death in 1710.11 But the most respectable actor could be accused of misdemeanours, usually sexual; Betterton himself, married for forty-six years, was alleged to keep a brothel, and it has been argued that this relentless sexualization of the acting profession was a reaction against the threat posed by performers’ emerging gentility.12 In Wilks’s case, the scandal broke just after his death, and with a force that shocked his family and one devious bookseller into publishing an immediate rebuttal.

(ii) Rarely has an actor’s personal life been the subject of such bitter dispute. In 1733 Curll’s Life of Wilks appeared, its title alone an emphatic rebuttal of Daniel O’Bryan’s Authentic Memoirs and the anonymous Memoirs of Robert Wilks, Esq of the previous year. ‘Memoirs’ were partial and subjective; ‘Life’, definitive. This 1733 Life opens with twin ‘Testimonials’, each an expression of outrage. ‘Two false and scandalous Pamphlets have

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been Published,’ complains Mary Wilks, the actor’s ‘Relict’, or widow, from her lodging in Bow Street.13 ‘Pamphlets’ is falsely demeaning when both memoirs exceeded in volume the new Life, whose purpose was to ‘assure the Public’ that this was ‘the only Genuine Account of his Life, Family, Marriages, Issue, &c’. But the term is underscored in the second testimonial (‘That very silly Pamphlet’), provided by Wilks’s brother-in-law, Alexander Knapton, who claims authorship of this new book based on ‘What Memoirs I could recollect of Mr Wilks (who married my Sister) from above 30 Years Acquaintance with him’. Knapton describes O’Bryan’s work as ‘full of Falsehoods’ and ‘a Libel upon Mr. Wilks’s Memory’, and even doubts whether the author existed, presumably on the assumption that O’Bryan was the invention of some professional or other enemy of Wilks. It came down to what happened before Alexander Knapton’s thirty-year acquaintance with his brother-in-law, and Wilks’s family history has remained part of the mystery. He is described in the old DNB as the son of migrant royalists in flight from Civil War and Parliamentary rule: a classic roving myth that revives memories of early Restoration actors such as Charles Hart and Michael Mohun who had actually fought in the war. Here is the entry: [Wilks,] a descendant of a Worcester family, the fortunes of which were seriously impaired by the civil war, was the second son of Edward Wilks, who took refuge in Dublin, and became a pursuivant of the lord lieutenant. The actor’s grandfather, Judge Wilks, is said to have raised a troop of horse for the king, which his grand-uncle, Colonel Wilks, who is mentioned by Clarendon, commanded.14 Followed by subsequent biographers, the description is based on Alexander Knapton’s account for Curll, whose Wilks was born in Rathfarnham, near Dublin, in 1665, the second son of Edward Wilks and brother of Edward and William, and descended from ‘a very good family in Warwickshire’ who had supported the royalist cause in the Civil War. The assertion of a judicial grandfather is dubious, unless that person was in the maternal line: no judges by the name of Wilks are recorded for Warwickshire or Worcestershire in the seventeenth century.15 According to Alexander, Wilks’s father left for Ireland after the Restoration when offered the post of Pursuivant to the Lord Lieutenant, a junior heraldic function requiring little in the way of talent. At eighteen, in 1683, Robert became a clerk in the office of Sir Robert Southwell, Secretary of State for Ireland, spending ‘some years’ – probably five – in that routine occupation before joining the army against the Catholic uprising. Alexander’s account, usually interpreted as a whitewashing of Wilks’s character, is actually more than a little disparaging. Where Farquhar liked to promote his military credentials during the wars of the Glorious Revolution, Wilks emerges as a draft-dodger. Alexander says he was ‘forced into the army by Capt. Bourk’ but that he was exempted from fighting duties and

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allowed to continue in his previous occupation as a clerk to the camp. Then, in 1689 or 1690, he escaped ‘by a stratagem’, which must be a euphemism for some form of desertion; afterwards he left the country, fleeing to London to work for Rich and a weekly wage of fifteen shillings, one sixth of which had to be spent on dancing lessons. While Farquhar dreamed of taking personal revenge on the Papists, Wilks was learning to do a jig. Alexander correctly dates his marriage at 1691: the young Irishman had been suitably polished by his encounters with Rich’s dancing master to marry someone Alexander describes as twenty-year-old Elizabeth, the ‘daughter of Ferdinando Knapton, Esq’, said to be Town Clerk of Southampton and Steward of the New Forest. As is already clear, however, neither Elizabeth’s age nor her father’s name fit such a description. Elizabeth was only seventeen and the only known Knapton who could have been her father was called Henry. Alexander notes the birth of their first son, giving the date as 1692 or 1693 and mis-calling him Robert rather than the John who was christened at St Martin-in-the-Fields in August 1692. Robert was a subsequent child who was buried at St Sepulchre on 8 September 1701.16 Alexander then has Wilks meeting Ashbury in London in 1693 and receiving a modestly attractive offer: £50 a year plus a benefit performance if he returned to Dublin. In monetary terms this was slightly better than his current deal with Rich (a rise of approximately £2 per year plus the promise of a benefit, assuming the dancing lessons continued). Family ties, in this account, were not overpowering. The child identified as Robert was left in the care of a Mr Bowen, and the Wilkses departed, man and wife, for Ireland. They may have been expecting a short trip, but according to Alexander it turned into four years. Then, in 1698, Rich dispatched Owen Swiney to offer Wilkes vastly improved terms: at £4 a week, almost a quadrupling of his Dublin earnings. Again Alexander represents Wilks’s journey to London as an act of escape. The Duke of Ormond, he states, had forbidden him to leave, but he went all the same. Alexander wrongly states that Farquhar went with him. His subsequent account of Wilks’s career is full of forgivable inaccuracies: the date of what he calls ‘The Stratagem’ is given as 1710 and The Recruiting Officer 1707. There is no evidence, either, of his claim that his brother-in-law’s first appearance on returning to London was in Pierre Motteux’s The Island Princess, which premiered in November 1698, one month before Farquhar’s Love and a Bottle but a whole year before The Constant Couple, in which Wilks did appear.17 Daniel O’Bryan claimed a different kind of association with Wilks: a ‘particular Intimacy’ that lasted ‘from our Childhoods to his Decease’.18 A suspicion of ambulance-chasing hangs over O’Bryan’s head: his biography was hurried out to mark Wilks’s death, as Charles Gildon’s of Betterton had been in 1710. His claim to lifelong friendship with the recently dead star of the stage may even seem like a stalker’s fantasy. Nevertheless, his account of Wilks’s early life cannot easily be dismissed, not least because it often agrees directly with Alexander Knapton’s.

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According to O’Bryan, Wilks’s father was from humbler stock, a Dublin ‘Stuff-weaver’ of Meath Street (to the west of the city) with several other children besides Robert, who O’Bryan says was born in 1666. Robert’s ‘sprightly Genius’ singled him out for the special attention denoted by attendance at the local grammar school, ‘where he made some Progress in the Latin Tongue, and had a Writing-master attend him thrice in every Week’. O’Bryan’s geography and demography have the ring of truth: St Patrick’s Grammar School was and is still in the neighbourhood of Meath Street, which was indeed associated with the trade O’Bryan cites, as the adjacent Weaver’s Street continues to attest.19 Moreover, in 1705 the Warden of the Dublin Weavers’ Guild was one Edward Wilks, plausibly the actor’s brother.20 The family’s plan was for Robert to study at Trinity College and take holy orders, but the boy’s attention began to wander. School was dull; handwriting, at least, remained attractive. So, Wilks Senior purchased the office of Pursuivant at Arms and Robert got a job as a clerk in the office of the Secretary for War, Sir Robert Southwell.21 Here O’Bryan gets into trouble. Robert may well, as per Knapton’s account, have been a military clerk, but it can’t have been because a post close to the Lord Lieutenant was purchased by a mere weaver, unless that man was, like Edward Wilks, a respected Warden of the guild. When the Jacobite War broke out in 1689, Robert was, both biographers agree, dispatched to the front to serve in King William’s army but continued in the less abrasive task of writing memos and dispatches. Once the Jacobite forces had been routed, copying government documents and writing letters in the Dublin office proved no more interesting than parsing Latin at school. Two distractions got in the way. The first of them, according to O’Bryan, was the daughter of a neighbouring Dublin weaver, to whom Wilks contracted a secret marriage. The unnamed girl lived at home until it became obvious she was pregnant. She confessed to the marriage in the hope of mercy. Her mother tried to intercede but the young Mrs Wilks was promptly thrown out. Where should she go? Her husband’s office, of course. There, ‘with swoln Eyes, and a Heart ready to burst with grief, she open[s] the melancholy Scene to her Husband’ (O’Bryan could not resist a theatrical metaphor). Wilks was unnerved but his resolve was both steely and generous. Any great ‘show of sorrow’ on his part might cause a miscarriage, so he left the office, guided his wife to a coach, and the two of them travelled to the Wilks family home.22 Mothers in O’Bryan’s story are kindly and concerned, tolerant and forgiving. They are also doomed to defeat. Mrs Wilks Senior is rather surprised to find her son has a wife, and that she is to be a grandmother. She foresees difficulty in reconciling Mr Wilks Senior to the situation, but promises to use her ‘utmost Efforts’ so to do. She hasn’t a hope. When Wilks Senior gets home and hears the news, he declares that he will not ‘suffer the young Couple to stay one Night in his House’. So they depart; but not before his distraught wife slips young Robert some coins (‘three pistoles’), making him promise to be good to his wife.23

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Inevitably things get worse, largely because of Robert’s second distraction. For a while he has been missing work to go to the theatre, spending his afternoons watching plays and talking afterwards to the actors. This is the company he dreams of frequenting: handsome men and women, not the crusty pen-pushers of the Secretary of War’s office. He brings plays to the office, spends time at his desk reading them and starts to associate with actors. Amateur drama follows and he plays Colonel Pedro in Dryden’s 1680 The Spanish Fryar, a play that swung from popularity to controversy in the decade that spanned Popish Plot anxiety and Glorious Revolution.24 But Wilks develops a particular penchant for the ‘most amorous Comedies’ which, O’Bryan implies, had been responsible for sending him off in fateful pursuit of his neighbour’s daughter. On his next appearance in the office following his eviction from home, he is summoned to an audience with the Secretary himself. The Secretary has observed Mr Wilks’s habits: his neglect of his duties, his way of reading playbooks when he should be attending to business. The Secretary wishes to inform Mr Wilks that he is, accordingly, dismissed. A new recruit has already been found to take his place. In O’Bryan words, ‘one Calamity is generally attended with another’. Wilks pleads with his master. He lays out the whole miserable story of his young, pregnant wife, of their harsh treatment by their fathers, of their being homeless and with only a handful of cash to live on. Southwell melts a little, but not enough to restore Wilks to his job. He gives the young man three months’ salary and tells him to leave: a settlement that at least will keep him off the streets.25 Wilks’s next concern is how to break the news to his wife. If he had worried before that a display of grief might cause a miscarriage, now he wonders whether this latest calamity might not kill her (the age of sensibility has dawned in Dublin as brightly as anywhere else). He need not have been anxious. ‘Magnanimity’ is the word in O’Bryan’s account that characterized her response. Friends would help; they would seek intermediaries to smooth the way to reconciliation with their fathers. It was another doomed enterprise. Old Mr Wilks was particularly spiteful, threatening his wife with separation should she ever again so much as attempt to assist or plead for their son. In gossipy, neighbourly Dublin news travels fast; specifically, across the half mile that separates Meath Street from the more prosperous Castle Street, where Cope, a goldsmith, hears the story of the unfortunate couple and tells his wife that they must take them in. Mrs Cope, in the best traditions of sentimental narrative, is ‘a Woman of singular Compassion and Humanity’ who needs no encouragement to warm to ‘her Husband’s charitable Design’. The Wilkses move in, have two children and are treated, at last, like family.26 Again, O’Bryan’s narrative is geographically plausible. Guild records show there was indeed a John Cope who worked as a Dublin goldsmith at this time, serving as Warden in 1672 and 1673 and rising to Master in 1679.27 Like the master-weaver Edward Wilks, Cope has been overlooked by those sceptical of O’Bryan’s account.

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So Robert starts to perform in earnest; hanging around the theatre and talking to the actors has paid off. His debut proper, in December 1691 in some accounts or March 1692 in others, is a mountain: the post-Boyne Othello, supported by a cast of amateur actors under the care of Ashbury as Iago. Wilks is greeted with ‘universal Applause’.28 The actors are put on a professional footing, and Wilks starts to draw a salary: according to O’Bryan, twenty shillings a week, rising to thirty when he takes on more and bigger roles. Here the timeline behind O’Bryan’s account becomes confused. It is now that the Jacobite War is happening, apparently, and Wilks begs leave to travel to London to escape ‘the Troubles’ that prompt many Protestant families to uproot to England. The Copes give his wife five guineas; old Mr Wilks finally thaws and parts with a gift of twenty; but there is no joy from the actor’s father-in-law, who, ‘divesting himself of all Paternal Humanity and Consideration’, wishes them a miserable life. Like any sentimental heroine, his daughter is not discouraged from praying every day for her parents’ welfare.29 Whatever the merits of this narrative, it shows that O’Bryan was not simply out to blacken Wilks’s name, as Knapton implies. For this period of Wilks’s life, O’Bryan weaves a story of sentimental loss and devotion; Alexander Knapton has him deserting from the army. The young couple travel through Chester and on to London, are received hospitably by the Irish ‘Nobility and Gentry’ there, and Wilks duly presents himself at the Drury Lane Theatre. The best guess is that this happened, in Knight’s words, ‘before 1695’, in other words when Wilks was in his late twenties.30 1695 was a watershed year, the last of the United Company that had enjoyed a monopoly over professional theatre for the past thirteen years. In March 1695, a group of senior actors led by Thomas Betterton formally broke from the United Company and its chief shareholder, Rich, leaving behind them the Drury Lane and Dorset Garden Theatres. It may not have been a good idea for a young hopeful like Wilks to associate himself with the older actors, who were accused by Rich and others of monopolizing parts intended for younger performers. When not monopolizing, they intimidated, however unintentionally. Willard Connely speculates that Wilks’s first Drury Lane appearance was as Lysippus in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, and that he hit the buffers in the final act when he had to address Betterton’s Melanthius. It was like being promoted from a rural church choir to sing with a star tenor and the experience left him parched and jellykneed.31 For Rich, the idea of recruiting a bright-eyed young actor from Dublin held the same appeal as engaging a bright-eyed young Farquhar: cheap migrant labour, unfettered by tradition and dignity. Here O’Bryan agrees with other accounts in describing Wilks’s terms and conditions: fifteen shillings a week less two and sixpence for dancing lessons.32 According to O’Bryan, he was limited to playing ‘low parts in Comedy’ for three years, no records of which have survived, although he allegedly performed well

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enough to persuade Dryden and others that he would one day be ‘the best Comedian that ever graced the English Stage’. Ashbury’s arrival in London might have spoiled his chances forever. Recruiting actors for Smock Alley, the old actor-manager persuaded him to return to Dublin, where, according to O’Bryan, he performed Lee’s Alexander the Great with such energy that he was seriously ill for three weeks.33 The energy he expended on women is an even more attractive subject for O’Bryan. It is hard to say whether what is at stake is Wilks’s actual behaviour or the preference among early theatrical biographers to spice their narratives as liberally as possible.34 According to O’Bryan, Wilks arrived in London with his secretly married wife, the unnamed weaver’s daughter, plus two children. Subsequent writers have him returning to Dublin with Elizabeth Knapton. Once back in Dublin, O’Bryan reports, Wilks performed in Henry VIII, recruiting for the role of the infant Princess Elizabeth his washer-woman’s toddler, who bore a remarkable resemblance to him. ‘No Limner could draw two Faces with greater Similitude’, writes O’Bryan, adding that Wilks claimed to be the girl’s godfather, but in a tone of voice that ‘seemed to imply a tacit Confession’.35 When Farquhar wrote for his friend an epilogue to mark ‘his first appearance upon the English stage’ he either did not know about or chose to ignore Wilks’s previous and somewhat unhappy experience. It is generally agreed that the epilogue dates from November 1699, by which time Wilks had in Farquhar’s eyes acquired sufficient experience to merit a singularly veiled description.36 He begins by evoking the migrant experience they shared, in revealingly double vision: As a poor Stranger wreck’d upon the Coast With Fear and Wonder views the Dangers past; So I with dreadful Apprehensions stand, And thank those Pow’rs that brought me safe to Land.37 Surviving the play, he has lived to speak the epilogue, just as the two men had made it across the Irish Sea to the ‘hospitable Shore’ of England; this serves to normalize both men to the extent that all actors and playwrights are, by such a metaphor, to be viewed as migrants. Then an ingratiating gesture: the charms of English women and the honour of their men are, he says, famous abroad, and are there to be copied by performers. ‘True Love, true Honour’ must characterize his playing. Customary tropes of praise writing, and especially of prologues and epilogues, they are also powerful signals of a wish to integrate and ‘mend’. Here the epilogue takes a turn into what Farquhar represents as Wilks’s past. Bound to imitate the ‘lively Patterns’ of love and honour among his audience, Wilks starts from a position of weakness. He has come from ‘a distant Isle’ that was ‘too kind’: ‘Loaded with Favours [he] was forc’d away’, suggesting that he was so overwhelmed by his reception at Smock

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Alley that he could never repay the kindness of the audience or, perhaps, the management (‘I wou’d not accept what I cou’d never pay’). Coming to London, he knows he must raise his game professionally: There cou’d I please, but there my Fame must end, For hither none must come to boast, but mend. (ll.17–18) The latter word introduces a note of moral reformation confirmed by the concluding couplet: Improvement must be great, since here I find Precepts, Examples, and my Masters kind. (ll.19–20) If Farquhar suggests his friend has something to be slightly ashamed of, an earlier line implies that the gossip which would overtake his life soon after it ended more than thirty years later was already a reality: ‘Void of Offence, tho’ not from Censure free’, he is on the run from a world in which his conduct was open to suspicion. We recall Roebuck, Farquhar’s first comic hero, who has escaped from a woman characterized by an item of clothing close to Wilks’s heart: a mantua, the very thing O’Bryan describes his humble, Dublin-born wife as having made.38 Free of the Meath Street weavers, Wilks is learning to fashion a new identity for himself. O’Bryan’s own narrative is not always clear or consistent, but Knapton’s has equally been described as one of the least respectable of Edmund Curll’s shady career as a publisher.39 It was often alleged that Wilks had an illegitimate child with the actress Jane Rogers; and the timeline Knapton describes is vague enough to allow plenty of scope for Wilks to have contracted a marriage to and then, like Roebuck, abandoned a woman from the weaving community of Dublin. He was after all, Knapton admits, a deserter, a runaway, and his friend George Farquhar knew it. He also knew just how it felt.

10 1690: Farquhar Family History

(i) Smock Alley Theatre: the alley in question linked Fishamble Street and Essex Gate and it was, in Connely’s phrase, ‘demoralizingly close’ to Trinity College as far as the tutors were concerned.1 But not to students like Farquhar. The theatre was the outcome of a conflict played out in London. When Charles II returned to England in March 1660, John Ogilby, whose lavish geography books would grace the tables of the wealthy, held the post of Master of the Revels in Ireland with a corresponding monopoly over Dublin Theatre. Thanks to his petition to the King to share the London duopoly with Thomas Killigrew, Sir William Davenant managed to secure the Dublin patent too, receiving the award in November 1660.2 Ogilby objected and was reinstated as Master of the Revels for Ireland in May 1661, with a new patent following in September which stipulated that he share the rights with Thomas Stanley.3 That was not the end of hostilities. In 1662 Ogilby was accused of enticing the actor John Richards away from Davenant’s Duke’s Company and employing him to encourage other Duke’s performers to migrate to Dublin. He was ordered to send Richards back to London and ‘forbeare to draw away’ any more of Davenant’s company.4 So, while London naturally exercised a draw on talent, there was always a risk that it would flow the other way for performers who could not satisfy their artistic or financial ambitions at the King’s or the Duke’s, each dominated by a relatively small cadre of senior or shareholding actors. It was possible to be successful and prosperous in Dublin. For Richards, the attraction was a senior position in Ogilby’s company as against a roster of roles for Davenant whose highlights were personally and theatrically neutered: the Ghost in Hamlet and Castruchio in The Duchess of Malfi.5 Ogilby completed his theatre in 1662, securing the appointment of Joseph Ashbury as Deputy Master of the Revels and his second in command. According to an early source, Ashbury was John Richards’s brother-inlaw.6 He would give his working life to Smock Alley, becoming Master of

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the Revels for Ireland in 1682 and taking over the running of the theatre. Connely’s assertion that Richards mentored Wilks and introduced him to Ashbury in 1690 or 1691 is impossible unless there was another John Richards, for the one referred to above had died in August 1683.7 But Wilks impressed Ashbury, and when he returned from London in 1695 or 1696, the Trinity sizar George Farquhar first set eyes on him. The effect on the young student is plausibly described by Connely. Wilks was not only a successful, charming and dedicated actor, but ‘a persuasive man of the world, a man who had seen London and profited’.8 Just as actors such as Charles Hart and Thomas Betterton embodied for London audiences the upheavals of recent royalist experience, so Wilks symbolized for Dubliners what it meant to go out into the world and return triumphant. Some such symbolism Farquhar himself would intend when he imitated his friend in the 1704 Dublin performance of A Constant Couple, and duly failed. Thomas Wilkes’s 1775 edition of Farquhar’s works introduced the idea, repeated by Connely, that Farquhar was at this time doing part-time work as a proofreader for the bookseller Jacob Milner or Miller, arranged for him by his brother Peyton.9 His straitened circumstances at Trinity certainly meant he could use the money. Ashbury had learned from Ogilby and Richards that the best way to find talent was to import it. Significant London-based actors such as Richard Estcourt, Benjamin Husband, William Bowen, Mary Hook, Charlotte Butler and Theophilus Keen all appeared at Smock Alley in the 1695–96 season.10 London actors had been cleft by Betterton’s breakaway in March 1695, on top of earlier grievances that needed redress. Butler, pregnant in 1692, appears to have found it difficult to break back into work.11 Farquhar would remember their contributions and stage identities. Estcourt would be the first Sergeant Kite, while Husband would play Richmore in The TwinRivals. But for all his success in luring actors from London, Ashbury was also interested in local talent. Casting the most gifted neophyte as Othello would be a bold move in any circumstances. Giving the part to a college student who, even with ‘the advantage of a very good person’ and an emotional intelligence in reading and memorizing, had a strikingly ‘weak voice’, seems like either a terrible misjudgement or some sort of dare.12 The coincidence with Wilks’s performance of the same role is hard to ignore, and may derive from a confusion in the sources. If it really happened, was it pert George claiming he could do it better? Or dear Bob urging him on, coaching him in all the particulars of the part? Imaginary or not, the performance was written up as a tepid disaster. To all the natural limitations of a nineteen-year-old Irish boy playing a Moorish general whose ‘young affects’ are ‘defunct’, Farquhar added lashings of stage fright.13 His next Shakespearean role was the rather less stressful Lennox, whose function in Macbeth is to stand apart from the action and wonder aloud about what might happen next: better suited, on the whole, to someone just out of college.

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The fact that he persisted in a series of middling roles suggests that his stage fright was not as crippling as it had been for the playwright Thomas Otway, whose first appearance ‘dash’t [and] spoilt him for an Actor’ to the extent that he never tried again.14 Farquhar’s passage to writing was less sudden, and the result of an apprenticeship in minor roles both comic and serious. This was the foundation that made the contemporary director Roger Michell so incline to the vernacular warmth of his dramatic world.15 To act around the margins of the great roles has its frustrations for all actors, especially if they have already failed in one of them. Its compensation is a heightened understanding of structure and pacing, of when to move a character on and off, and how to make the less strident voices speak in a way that demands to be heard. The gain for Farquhar was in the variety of minor characters he created, but in his acting career there is also a rehearsal of his half-hearted attempts to win patronage. Dedicating his plays to people of influence, he is apt to sound like a man convinced he has only a walk-on part in a play dominated by greater talents. Thomas Wilkes included among Farquhar’s Smock Alley roles middling and youngish parts in plays by John Banks, Beaumont and Fletcher, Sir Robert Howard and George Etherege – a range that tested his ability to master verse and prose, rhapsody and repartee, contemplation and action. In the latter task he appears to have struggled, constantly ‘subject to a timidity which precluded all boldness of exertion’.16 Timidity eventually got the better of him. When, in 1697, he seriously wounded a fellow actor in a stage fight during Dryden’s The Indian Emperour, the show was suspended and his acting career all but over.17 Ashbury evidently liked and felt sorry for him, allowing him a benefit performance calculated to have yielded over £50. If Dublin and London were relatively porous theatrical centres for actors, with regular traffic between the two, the same was less true for writers. In its early years Smock Alley did not spark as much innovation in writing as it did in performing talent and there were few instances of plays transferring from there to London. As Ogilby had been, Ashbury was content to constitute his theatre as a receiving house, taking established hits from London and so minimizing his financial risk. So, while Farquhar might watch the impressive Wilks and feel it was possible for a young man to build a career in the theatre between Dublin and London, he understood there were different rules for writers. He was at least contemplating Love and a Bottle, which did not reach its finished state until he arrived in London in 1698. It is not necessary to invoke cultural snobbery to explain why Farquhar left: the artistic policy of the Smock Alley Theatre alone does it. When the push of limited opportunity combines so vividly with the pull of fame and riches, and when the smooth man of the world Wilks was doing the talking, it is easy to forget that Farquhar was, for the second time in as many years, running away from an ordeal he could no longer face. Constitutionally timid and lacking ‘boldness of exertion’, he had nearly

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killed a fellow actor. Wilks’s acting career had set an example of worldly success; his army life, of how to cut your losses and run. But in accepting Ashbury’s invitation to join the Smock Alley company, Farquhar already knew what it was to run away.

(ii) His formal education had almost certainly begun at the Grammar School in Londonderry, an institution founded in 1617 for the benefit of Scots planters and co-funded by the Diocese of Derry. Its curriculum was steeped in Protestant divinity and partly taught by clergymen of the Church of Ireland.18 It was usual for boys to join at the age of seven or eight. They came from families with a career attachment to Protestant government: clergy and army, and the professions and gentry protected by them. Latin and Greek, abiding features of the grammar school curriculum since the sixteenth century, nevertheless occupied slightly less prominence in the planter schools than divinity. Detractors of Farquhar’s anti-Aristotelian ‘Discourse upon Comedy’ would query whether he really knew much Greek at all, his marginality as a writer construed as a failure of education. But the ‘Discourse’ asserts a long-standing admiration of Aesop, ‘the first and original author’, and one who featured in the third form of the grammar school curriculum. The same text, we have seen, argues that ‘Aesop made his Beasts speak good Greek’, unlike some of his playwriting contemporaries whose ‘heroes sometimes can’t talk English’.19 It is an outsider’s jibe that turns the tables on those who claim cultural supremacy over his Irish brogue as well as his allegedly poor education: who are they, he asks, to dictate in matters of proper language? Aesop provided a broader vehicle for subversion, as he would for Jonathan Swift, another Trinity graduate who, in the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels, would seek to ‘improve men by the policy of beasts’.20 Swift’s vision of a world led by horses with superior reason is a satire on humanity that looks back with horror on the beastly depredations of Irish Catholic rebels. Farquhar turns the lens the other way by aligning the ‘characters that crowd our Stage every Day’ with Aesop’s ‘Tyrant Lyon, his Statesman Fox, his Beau Magpy, his coward Hare, his Bravo Ass, and his Buffoon Ape’.21 For a real view of the human world as animal, in other words, look to London. Where Swift was able to extrapolate his Irish education into a philosophical vision that fed London prejudices against his countrymen, Farquhar used his to underscore his alienation from his recently adopted home. Early biographers believed that school reading translated into writing even before he was old enough to study Aesop. Chetwood’s edition of Farquhar’s works includes a solemn pair of quatrains on the vulnerability of youth, allegedly written ‘e’er he arrived at his Tenth Year’. The piece was chosen from ‘several Specimens’ and, the editor asserts, provides evidence

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of ‘a way of Thinking, as well as Elegancy of Expression, far beyond his Years’.22 Today the former quality is more evident. While the verses illustrate the editor’s preconceived idea of genius, which must ‘always shew some Glimmerings of … Fancy’ at an early age, they also speak of the mindforged manacles of Farquhar’s school education, which construed youth as a danger zone more likely than not to provide the foundation for a bad life:23 The Pliant Soul of erring Youth, Is like soft Wax, or moisten’d Clay, Apt to receive all Heavenly Truth; Or yield to Tyrant Ill the sway. Slight Folly in your early Years, And Manhood may to Virtue rise; But he, who in his Youth appears A Fool, in Age will ne’er be wise.24 Kenny lists the poem among ‘Doubtful Attributions’ but it has the merit of belonging in a preface informed by the recollections of Robert Wilks, who may have wanted it cited as evidence that his dead friend was not only a genius at birth but a good, upstanding citizen with a strong religious education. Barcellona shows that Farquhar kept unpublished papers; Love and Business included another item of juvenilia, discussed below, which was written at school. If 1687 was a year for Farquhar to discover his writing voice as well as the works of Aesop, it also saw the beginnings of political upheaval in Londonderry. A project to re-integrate Catholics into public life had been initiated by James II following his 1685 succession to the throne; his agent for achieving that aim in Ireland was his old ally Richard Talbot, made Earl of Tyrconnell and then Lord Deputy in Ireland in 1687. First the legal system and the army and then local government were subject to powersharing, with corporations required to retain equal numbers of Catholic and Protestant bailiffs.25 The ultimate destination was, in Roy Foster’s words, ‘what every Irish Protestant expected and dreaded: a planned reorganization of the land settlement’ that since the previous century had stripped Catholics of their ancient holdings.26 Those who did not resist or escape decided to switch their allegiance. In the world of Farquhar’s childhood, such evasion might be a matter of survival, a cultural habit enforced by violence. Peter Manley, recently arrived as the Dean of Londonderry, converted to Catholicism in 1687. The Bishop, Ezekiel Hopkins, did the same the following year. Motivated by personal safety, their decisions were nonetheless dangerous, since the city became a gathering point for Protestants from the north of the country. In December 1688, Catholic regiments led by Alexander MacDonnell, Third Earl of Antrim, advanced on the city. The gates were shut against

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them and in April the three-month siege began, with heavy artillery lining the defences.27 Farquhar’s headmaster, Ellis Walker, escaped to stay with his family in Yorkshire; at least one other member of staff, Joshua Pilott, stayed to fight. The school was closed and in all likelihood Farquhar was sent back to the family home. What followed in Londonderry was brutal: thousands of deaths and encroaching starvation. By July, a list of remaining provisions included ‘A Quarter of a Dog’ and ‘A Dog’s Head’ as well as a cat, a rat, and ‘a Handful of Chick-weed’.28 When the siege was lifted, it was represented as an act of divine deliverance, an inevitable triumph of the Protestant will.29 But Antrim’s army turned their attention elsewhere. This, in Margaret Farquhar’s 1709 narrative, was the time they went north, burned Farquhar’s father out of house and living, and so caused him to die of grief. School was still out a year later when William III landed and engaged James’s forces at the Boyne. In Margaret’s narrative, Farquhar joined him. There is a natural tendency to be sceptical of the story. However, boy soldiers cut loose from formal education, especially ones with a strong ideological upbringing and the suggestion of a grudge, are familiar figures in any war zone. In this particular conflict children certainly featured. Citing a previous study of the Battles of the Boyne and Aughrim, Connely notes that William Cadogan, a fifteen-year-old from Dublin, was at the Boyne to sound his cornet.30 A contemporary description of the Londonderry siege includes a remarkable account of the bravery of one boy put to extreme risk and discomfort: We received further intelligence in July by a little Boy, that with great Ingenuity made two dispatches to us from the Major General at Inch. One letter he brought ty’d in his Garter, another at his second coming within a Cloth-Button. We sent our swift answer made up within a piece of a Bladder, in the shape of a suppositor, and the same way applyed to the boy; Our second answer he carry’d within the folding of his Breaches, and falling among the Enemy; for fear of a discovery he swallowed the item and after some short confinement and endeavour to take same thing from him, he made his escape again.31 Going into battle might have seemed, by contrast, a soft option. If Farquhar was at the Boyne it is unlikely he was near the heat of the action. William’s front-line troops were, for reasons of training and personal loyalty, European: ‘Danes, Dutch, Germans, Huguenots, and a contingent from Finland’ bore the brunt of the fighting.32 But the young writer certainly heard enough about it to feel inspired to commemorate the death of one of the leading Europeans on the scene, General Frederick Schomberg, and thought well enough of the resulting poem to include it in the 1701 Love and Business. It is generally accepted that Farquhar’s ‘Pindarick’ ode ‘On the Death of General Schomberg Kill’d at the Boyn’ was written either when he returned

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to the Londonderry School, which reopened in 1691, or after his enrolment at Trinity in 1694. Either way Kenny finds ‘little incentive’ for Farquhar to have published the poem ‘more than a decade after the General’s death’.33 Public reasons may have been in short supply, but private ones were not. Reactions to the success of The Constant Couple and the failure of its sequel had left him exposed as a writer and indicted as a cultural interloper. A Pindaric ode to a loyal general elevated him in the former capacity and in the latter promoted him as a foundational loyalist of the national cause. Moreover, a juvenile poem would boost his claim, later sustained by Chetwood, to having a natural talent that had always been evident, but in the highly advantageous context of a classical poetic form: precisely the kind of thing his detractors implied he could not master. Placed at the start of Love and Business, the poem declares itself as both a junior work and a professional and ideological calling card. Its juniority is that of a teenager who dreams of violence. ‘Streams of Blood are lost in Floods of Tears’ as the poem charts Schomberg’s fall. Comparisons are pitched on the grandest scale. The General is first Moses (dividing, in a bad phrase, ‘This redder Sea of Gore’); then a ‘great rugged Tower’ and ‘Ancient Seat of Power’; then Samson, and finally Aeneas. The extended reference to Samson is one sign that Farquhar had already been reading Milton; another is the Miltonic diction and metaphorical turn of this epic evocation of a blind man’s anger: Like a black rowling Cloud involv’d in Night, Conceiving Thunder in it’s swelling Womb, Big with surprising Fate, and rushing Doom: No Flash the sudden Bolt must here disclose; The Lightning of his Eyes extinguish’d by his Foes.34 Farquhar ends with Virgil, imagining Schomberg’s ghost ‘moving in stately Triumph to the Shades below’ and subduing the spirits there in a passage reminiscent of Book Six of the Aeneid.35 If the violence of the poem reflects a still excitable or even traumatic response to the Battle of the Boyne, it is also a statement, like Milton’s Samson Agonistes, of victimhood. Schomberg is the foreigner who has fought the good fight for his adopted cause and suffered. His reward, like that of any writer unpopular in his time, is posterity. He will subdue his enemies in the next world, his weapon not Aeneas’s lofted sword but ‘the powerful Hand’ that serves the writer as well as the soldier.

(iii) The school at Londonderry reopened in 1691 with wholesale changes in personnel and old foes and collaborators in flight. Dean Manley and Bishop Hopkins, ideological turncoats in the lead-up to the siege, were relieved

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of their posts and replaced by strong Protestants: Thomas Wallis, formerly Dean of Waterford, and William King, who became Bishop. But this was not a time to reward loyalty for its own sake. When the school reopened, two men, Robert Bonner and John Dennison, were put in charge; Bonner was a Trinity graduate and Dennison a Scot. Joshua Pilott, the school usher who had stayed to fight during the siege, might have expected a promotion. Instead, on the instruction of Bishop King, the single position of headmaster was restored and offered to its previous holder, Ellis Walker, who had escaped to live with his uncle in Yorkshire while townsfolk in Londonderry were dying or contemplating dog’s head for dinner. Survivors were probably not comforted to find he had sought to reconcile himself to the horrors of their experience by translating a work by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.36 Walker’s verses are, notwithstanding, full of personal regret: But if from Sickness, Want, or Death, you fly, In Sorrow you shall live, with Terrours die.37 If survivors of the siege were traumatized so, on this evidence, were escapees. Connely states that it was Walker’s ‘probity, diligence and modesty’ that got him his old job: a knack of influencing boys for the better ‘without inflicting punishment’.38 Rather than appointing a battle-scarred partisan, Bishop King appears to have opted for a sophisticated healer of wounds prepared to admit his own vulnerability: a humanist rather than a disciplinarian whose pupils learned ‘much of letters and not too much of manners’.39 If, as Connely speculates, Walker oversaw Farquhar’s poem about General Schomberg, it was with a belief that the boy had not only talent but something to get out of his system. Walker’s learning in the classics was replicated in the curriculum. The later accusation that Farquhar was ignorant of Latin and Greek looks wild set against a regime that included works by Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Epictetus, Homer, Horace, Juvenal, Livy, Lucian, Martial, Ovid, Pindar, Plautus, Plutarch, Sophocles, Terence and Virgil, as well as what David Nokes, describing the Anglican college at Kilkenny, describes as ‘morality and prayers’.40 But Farquhar’s own writings, not least the ‘Discourse upon Comedy’, suggest deep frustration with classical prescriptions, however much he relied for inspiration on his reading of Latin in particular. A spirit of dissent (veering into sheer cheek, the excess of learning over manners that Walker was said to encourage) colours accounts of the next stage of his education, which would not have been possible without the grounding later adversaries denied he had. In 1694 Ellis Walker left Londonderry again; again he sought greater personal security, moving to the more prosperous and less traumatized grammar school at Drogheda. If Farquhar was looking for an example of what it meant to move on in order to survive and prosper, Walker provided it. Farquhar’s time at Londonderry was also up. Trinity College was the

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obvious move for someone of his intellect; how to afford it was another matter. Wilkes’s Life has him under the protection of Capel Wiseman, by 1694 Bishop of Dromore and both godson and chaplain to the Earl of Essex, former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.41 Appointed Dean of Raphoe in 1676, Wiseman had directly managed the Prebendary commonly identified as Farquhar’s father, John, and was in Wilkes’s words ‘related’ to John’s wife and Farquhar’s mother. Wilkes suggests that Farquhar’s talent was the greater draw. Wiseman noticed his ‘early genius for Poetry and the Polite Arts’ and decided to do something for him.42 That story is, however, completely absent from the 1728 ‘Memoirs’. There, Farquhar is simply one of a ‘numerous Issue’ of ‘parents that held no mean Rank’, whose finances were so stretched that they could run to no more ‘than a genteel Education’ for the boy, a description that could in theory run to enrolment at Trinity.43 On 17 July 1694 Farquhar did just that, parting with £3 10s. in caution money. His status as a sizar marked him out from the start as able but impoverished. The majority of students were ‘pensioners’ who paid an annual fee while ‘fellow commoners’ paid double and were allowed to complete in three years instead of four. Sizars, their title derived from the ‘sizes’ or portions of food they were expected to fetch for the wealthier students, paid nothing but worked for their education. Inferior status was etched in dress: for sizars, in red caps rather than black, in gowns cut from coarser cloth and sleeveless, and in the associated stains and smells that came of kitchen and cleaning duties. A later Trinity sizar and playwright, Oliver Goldsmith, expressed his opinion of the arrangement in terms that bordered on revolutionary: It implies a contradiction, for men to be at once learning the liberal arts and at the same time treated as slaves; at once studying freedom and practising servitude.44 The institutionalized humiliation of this academic underclass did have some favourable outcomes. A study of Cambridge University indicates that sizars had more chance of completing their studies, if only because their circumstances meant they needed to.45 And from their ranks – or even the one below – genius might arise, as it had when Isaac Newton began his Cambridge career as a subsizar in 1661. It was a system geared to encourage the lower-ranked students to outdo their more privileged counterparts by wit, or any other available means. Curricular and scheduling differences between Trinity and Londonderry Grammar School were slender but significant. The same regime obtained of chapel service three times daily, at six and ten in the morning and then four o’clock for vespers, but with the addition of Friday and Sunday evening lectures devoted to exploring a piece of scripture. If The Beaux’ Stratagem responds to Milton’s The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, its dwellings on true and false incarnations of matrimony are rooted too in the habit of scriptural exegesis Farquhar was forced to adopt as an undergraduate.

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Academic lectures were in Latin and, three times a week, in Greek. Students had to write a weekly commentary in Latin, responding to a moral or philosophical question that was accompanied by one right and one wrong answer. It was a highly prescriptive exercise, with a requirement to cite twenty-four arguments supporting the wrong answer and a further twelve in support of the correct one. David Nokes observes of Swift’s education that this tediously mechanical method proved good training for the inversions of his satire: for the studied adoption of extreme viewpoints in order to reveal to readers their own worst prejudices or find correspondence between apparently disjunct domains.46 In an epigram of Farquhar usually dated to his undergraduate years, the latter device is used to express a scathing critique of the church and a citation of scripture whose cheek verges on blasphemy: A Chappel of the Riding-House is made; We thus once more see Christ in Manger laid, Where still we find the Jocky Trade supply’d; The Laymen bridled, and the Clergy ride.47 Drama proved a more benign outcome, as it had since the Renaissance: to submit to the logical strictures of supplying opposite points of view was to understand what it meant to imagine and inhabit different consciousnesses.48 If this is a further clue to Roger Michell’s perception of Farquhar as a creator of ‘differentiated roles’, it provides further colour to his self-imaginings as a successful migrant who had met twelve criteria of achievement rather than twenty-four of failure. Trinity education was, in its mechanical routines, a route to thinking about life as it might be led. Supposing Bishop Wiseman was Farquhar’s sponsor, any support he was able to offer did not last long, for he died two months after the new sizar had enrolled.49 Thomas Wilkes incorrectly dates Wiseman’s death later, ‘sixteen months’ after Farquhar began at Trinity, in other words in November 1695. The dating was a subtle whitewash, linking Farquhar’s interest in the Smock Alley Theatre to his loss of financial support rather than any less blameless interruption to his studies. Wiseman’s death may well have put pressure on Farquhar’s purse, but it would not necessarily have led him to leave Trinity. As a sizar he was given bed, board and a small stipend of £4 a year. Wilkes has him leaving in poverty and taking up employment as ‘a corrector of the press’, plausibly in the business of Jacob Milner or Miller.50 It is likely that he undertook such work as a student needing more money. Either way, what Wilkes calls his ‘volatile disposition’ meant he was ‘soon tired of that employment’.51 Never a meticulous finisher of plays and poems, Farquhar was ill fitted to be a professional proofreader. Five months into his studies an opportunity for occasional verse arose. The death of Queen Mary in December 1694 witnessed an outpouring of rhyming grief from London poets and playwrights. Colley Cibber, William

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Congreve, John Dennis, Thomas Durfey and Nahum Tate all published commemorative poems, as did a clutch of lesser names.52 The late Queen’s personal virtues aside, a common theme of many of those poets was, in the words of an anonymous tribute, Mary’s part in delivering England ‘from Popery and Slavery’.53 It was an obvious subject for Farquhar, who, in a nine-line fragment, duly presented Mary’s death as a new kind of airborne defence system. The country was safer, he asserted, for having one monarch in heaven and the other still on earth: No need we fear the rash presumptuous Foe, Whilst she’s our Saint above, and he our King below.54 Like the ‘blessed memory’ formula preferred by other poets, the use of the word ‘Saint’ showed how hard it was to deliver language itself from ‘Popery and Slavery’. Although the poem was not published until 1701, its use of the present tense suggests it must have been written on the same wave of patriotic grief that enveloped other poets. The inclusion of so short-winded a piece in Love and Business underlines Farquhar’s desperation in 1701 to prove his ideological credentials. Obscure writers as Edward Arwaker and Samuel Cobb had run to fully fledged Pindaric odes, such as he himself had lavished on General Schomberg.55 With the latter poem in mind, even he may have wondered whether ‘On the Death of the Late Queen’ was, for all its patriotic fervour, somewhere near the bottom of his literary barrel. Two anecdotes about his dealings with Trinity tutors and students suggest a desire to be funny running well ahead of any wish to please. Heedless of the consequences of what he said, he relished the momentary triumph as much as he would in celebrating the success of The Recruiting Officer over Thomas Durfey’s Wonders in the Sun in 1706. Chetwood’s History of the Stage tells how he asked to borrow a fellow student’s copy of Gilbert Burnet’s History of the Reformation, an ultra-Protestant justification of the triumph of William III. No, replied the student; he did not allow any book to leave his room, but Farquhar was welcome to consult it there. When, a few days later, the same student asked for bellows to revive his dying fire, the reply was inevitable. No, Farquhar said; he did not allow his bellows to leave his room, but the fellow was welcome to use them there.56 There is no proof that it happened, but no particular reason either for anyone to invent it in the name of literary precocity. The mixture of cheek, Protestant loyalty and grievance at injustice is convincingly Farquharian. So is this account of Farquhar talking to his tutor. Required to complete a discourse on the subject of Jesus walking on water, Farquhar did not manage even to start the task before his tutorial, apparently trusting to his wits to get him through. His tutor (who may have been the same Dean, Owen Lloyd, whom Swift had insulted) made him write the piece on the spot. Farquhar’s response was to develop an argument to the effect that a man born to be hanged should have no fear of being drowned.57 Turning scriptural exegesis

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against its subject and coining quips without regard for the occasion or consequence were familiar and risky tools for him later in life. In this case, the incident appears to have passed without punishment. A record does survive of a further disciplinary episode. In May 1695 Farquhar accompanied four other students on an outing to Donnybrook Fair, at a riverside site about three miles from Trinity. Edward Smyth, the youngest of three brothers then at the college, was a pensioner in Farquhar’s class – evidently it was possible to make friends across the economic divide – and the others are named in the Trinity Register as Thomas Bayly, Peter Fenton and Gamaliel Fitzgerald.58 At least three popular songs celebrate the fair as an occasion where, depending on the version, (a) people dressed smartly and decided to get married on impulse, as at some early modern Las Vegas, (b) all social classes and trades mingled, raced, drank and fought, and (c) stereotypes of native Irishness were played out in carnival fashion.59 The Humours of Donnybrook Fair portrays an ‘Irishman in all his glory … With his sprig of shillelagh and shamrock’ who gets drunk and then bonds with his friend by giving him a knockout blow to the head.60 Expecting such friendly overtures, Farquhar’s friends went prepared, but with more than fists and attitude. They took knives and cudgels as well. Thomas Bayly and Gamaliel Fitzgerald (‘lads that are witty, from famed Dublin city’, in the words of one of the songs) duly got into an argument with a man who appears to have been a farm labourer. The argument ran out of control and the knives and cudgels came out. Fenton and Smyth, also armed, joined in. Locals began to gang up against the students and another undergraduate, Richard Jones, arrived on the scene and drew a sword. It took a serious wound to one of the locals for the fight to be brought to a halt. What was Farquhar’s role in the episode? It would be left for the college authorities to decide. They heard about the incident and met on 28 May 1695 to review the evidence and agree on the appropriate punishment. Their formal judgement survives, in Latin, in the Trinity College Register. The Vice-Provost and Senior Fellows began by stating the importance of all members upholding the honour of the College by demonstrating ‘purity of character’ and a sense of morality ‘earnest cultivated’, and so protecting the institution from slander.61 Bayly, Fenton, Fitzgerald and Smyth were deemed to have ‘sinned grievously’ on two counts. They had provoked the quarrel in the first place, and ‘armed with clubs and daggers they seriously wounded’ one of their adversaries – an offence against fair play as much as the good name of the College. Jones, the sword-bearer, had ‘joined them as a comrade’ without, it appears, actually fighting. The punishments signal further differentiation. Bayly and Fitzgerald had their scholarships permanently withdrawn, while Fenton and Smyth were fined a month’s portion of theirs. Jones escaped a financial penalty but had to join the others to be ‘admonished and confesse their faults upon their knees on Friday next in ye Hall’.62

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Farquhar would be there with them, but watching, and not on his knees. He had been, the Vice-Provost determined, a bystander to the incident who was nevertheless ‘prepared to further their designs’. His maintenance allowance was suspended, so he would have to keep his head down and work hard to earn it back again. Although he was spared the public humiliation of being admonished on bended knee in College Hall, a longerlasting humiliation awaited the young man who liked to fantasize about military heroism and whose widow would claim he had fought as a thirteenyear-old at the Boyne. Never mind the Catholic forces of Europe: he could not face a farmhand at Donnybrook. He had not joined the fight. He had not, like Jones, come dashing to the rescue of his friends. He did not have to kneel with them and withstand the gaze of a disapproving community. In the minor skirmish, he had not even been a recruiting officer. It is hard to imagine that Bayly, Fenton, Fitzgerald and Smyth were greatly taken with his conduct at any stage of the episode, and equally hard to think that Farquhar would have welcomed the harder servitude of impoverished sizarship that would come of having an already meagre financial allowance withdrawn. The Donnybrook episode tends to be represented as a sign that Farquhar had difficulty keeping out of trouble, but it shows the reverse. He was adept at it, pushing boundaries only so far as he could without placing himself in real danger. As he put it in the autobiographical ‘Picture’ included in Love and Business, he hated ‘pleasure that’s purchas’d by excess of Pain’.63 The sight of violence, whether at Donnybrook Fair or in a stage accident, sent him running for cover. Where Alexander Masters’s Stuart discovered his power to inflict violence, a discovery which destroyed him, Farquhar’s life hinged on the capacity to observe or escape it. His punishment might have been the cue to run away completely and follow some other course in life, if only in the hope of a better living. Instead, he chose to keep his head down and find his way back into the College’s favour. Whatever he got up to at Smock Alley in the winter of 1695–96 must have been well within Trinity’s expectations of good conduct because on 1 February 1696, his £4 stipend was restored.64 But he was, perhaps, simply fortunate that prevailing standards of discipline were lax. During one incident in 1695 that sounds like a small riot, students threw bricks within the College premises. One of them scored a clean hit to the head of the Provost, Dr George Browne.65 After the restoration of his stipend, Farquhar’s name disappears from the College record, and it was in 1696 that a firm association begins between him and the Smock Alley Theatre. It is fair to assume that he simply quit, less than two years into studies characterized by poverty, trouble and general frustration with an atmosphere of veneration for classics and divinity. In Sir Harry Wildair the character Beau Banter paints a portrait of himself as someone who had hung around at university for seven years, ‘sucking my dear Alma Mater … in defiance to Legs of Mutton, small Beer, crabbed Books, and four-fac’d Doctors’.66 Though he may have agreed with Banter’s

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mordant view of higher education, such a future was intolerable to Farquhar once he had become immersed in the world of Smock Alley. What did his family make of his decision to give up university and take up acting? The idea still sounds a little reckless. According to Margaret’s petition to Queen Anne, his father was already dead, traumatized by the loss of his living after the siege of Londonderry; in Wilkes’s account, Farquhar Senior was alive in 1694 but unable to provide properly for all seven children. Sending George to Trinity was a way of ensuring he could build a living for himself and even help the family a little, if only by taking him off their hands. Throwing in the towel to join a troupe of actors does not indicate a pressing desire to help them in return. He was a runaway, pursuing this latest project purely for himself. The Register of Trinity College gives the name of Farquhar’s father without a secure indication of whether he was alive or dead; moreover, it records that name incorrectly. Slips were made. There were plenty of instances where, as Connely observes, ‘some time elapsed between the actual entry and the registering of the name’, and it is entirely possible that the tutor simply made a mistake when he gave a name that appears nowhere else in the Irish clerical records.67 So if George was not the son of ‘Gulielmi Farquhare, Clerici’, a churchman William Farquhar whose name does not feature in any clerical record, whose son was he?68

(iv) One of Margaret’s stronger cards in pleading to Queen Anne was the story she told about George’s background. To recap, the son of an ‘eminent divine of the Church of England in Ireland’, Farquhar had seen his family ‘plundered and burned’ out of house and fortune by a Catholic mob; in the aftermath, he had seen his father die of grief. How far should the pleading widow be believed? Variant names, combined with the damage to parish certificates in a 1922 fire at the Dublin Record Office, have made it hard to tell how far her account of her second husband’s upbringing was accurate. Still, the volume Clogher Clergy was researched before the fire and in the search for Farquhar’s father it yields surprising results.69 Scots-Gaelic, Fearchar or Fearachar means a man variously described as brave, beloved, dear, or deer-like, and the name attached to royalty. Faerarchar Fada, the Long King of Dal Riada, died in 697, and in 1283 a Ferchware named his son Macbeth, more than 200 years on from the former king. By the mid-fifteenth century the variant Farquhar had appeared, and with Scots settlement in Ireland it became particularly common in County Down, where Farker, Forcker and Fercher became in turn familiar variants. Willard Connely spins a tale that would have appealed to Margaret and would belong in any seventeenth-century account of dispossessed royalism pining for ancestral glory:

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The word Farquhar is Gaelic, from fearachar, meaning manly, brave; Fearachar is the name of an early Scottish king, and the Farquhars of Gilminscroft are traceable from the day of King Robert III at the end of the fourteenth century. In the Ayrshire family the names Robert, Alexander and George recur again and again through the centuries, and for three generations in the period under scrutiny, down to 1681, the eldest son of the Farquhars of Over Katrine was given the name of George.70 To be a settler Farquhar in Ireland certainly carried occupational hazards. In January 1641 a George Fercher, Parson of Cleenish in County Fermanagh and a self-identifying ‘British Protestant’, formally deposed that the previous October he had been robbed of ‘all [his] estate, goods and chattels’ by a group of marauders he identified as Phellime O Cassidie Redmond McHugh Patrick og McJames McManus & diverse of the Maguyres as I understood all of the Countie of ffermanagh and baronie of Clanaully being under the Comannde of Bryan McCoucanaght Mcguyre.71 The men were said to be acting on the orders of King Charles I, who was recruiting Catholic troops in the hope of subduing his Parliamentary enemies. Fercher deposed that he had lost his living plus a total of £980.00’s worth of land, livestock and goods. Connely begins his biography with an account of George Fercher’s steady progress as a career clergyman from Cleenish to Kilbarron, in Donegal, and thence to Raphoe, where he died in 1657, to be succeeded ten years later by his nephew John.72 To Connely, George’s story illustrates how well ‘Farquhars were getting on in the Church’. He does not make the connection between the story of George Fercher and the one Margaret told about Farquhar Senior. There was sufficient violence in Ireland for it not to be implausible that lightning could strike twice in the same family with the same profession. However, the similarity with what is supposed to have happened to the dramatist’s father is suspicious, and it is easy to see how Great Uncle George’s misfortunes could have passed into family lore and metamorphosed accordingly. Those suspicions are aggravated by a search for evidence about Farquhar’s father. In multiple sources, a John Farquhar is identified as Prebendary of Killymard in the diocese of Raphoe, a position to which he was appointed on 8 March 1667 by Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Dromore.73 This is the Farquhar Connely identifies as the dramatist’s father. Two John Farquhars are associated with Raphoe. Parish records show a John Farquhar born in Norhame, Scotland on 2 October 1630 who married Sarah Forbes on 13 February 1666 and died in Raphoe – so far so good. The problem is the date of his death: 11 September 1679, much earlier than should be the case if Margaret’s history is correct, and it leaves Farquhar fatherless at the age

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of two. A still greater problem is the lack of any evidence that this John Farquhar was a clergyman. By far the stronger candidate is John Forcker, Prebendary of Killymard between 1667 and 1678, when he moved to Gleneolmkille and Inniskeel, in County Donegal. In 1689 the same clergyman, named as ‘John Forcker, clerk’, was subject to the exiled James II’s Great Act of Attainder, published from Dublin in order to highlight his enemies in Ireland and put pressure on absentee landlords.74 An Account of the Transactions of the Late King James in Ireland (1690), admittedly a piece of anti-Catholic propaganda, cites the seizure of more than 30,000 barrels of wheat in the Dublin area, and 6,000 more in County Meath. The common talk was that ‘it would never be well with the good Catholick Subjects, till the one half of the Protestants were hanged and the other half Starved’.75 Many of those Protestants harboured memories of the seizures of 1641, fearing attack from the ‘Offspring of those Vulturs’ who half a century before had committed ‘open and uncontroll’d Outrages’, and kept secret stores of food and goods as a result.76 John’s inclusion in the exiled King’s list signifies that he was understood to be an absentee landlord ‘resident … in England’ and therefore required to show loyalty to James in the event of his invading in October.77 Not just an absentee landlord, but presumably an absentee father. The idea that this John Forcker learned of his lost estate in exile and died of grief is not implausible unless we ignore the startling fact that he was still alive and in Ireland in 1707, when his son George was dying in a garret up St Martin’s Lane. On 19 February that year, the same John Forcker solicited Joshua Dawson, under-secretary in the Lord Lieutenant’s office, for the Bishopric of Kildress in County Tyrone.78 Things did not go his way, and we find him eeking out his salary as a tutor to the Staples family in Castleshane, County Monaghan.79 He died in 1713, six years after George. Separate strands of Farquhar family history converged conveniently in the story Margaret told Queen Anne. Farquhar’s father did have trouble at the hands of Catholics but survived whatever consequences there were from the (ex)royal attainder; it was Great Uncle George who in the dark days of the 1640s had really lost out. The fantasy Margaret entertained about her father-in-law replicated his own. He was a man who sought eminence as a clergyman but never found it. Farquhar’s education was compromised by death, but not that of his father, who in any case had never been able to provide for him or been there during most of his childhood: it was Bishop Wiseman who died, causing the funds to dry up. This adds to the web of strategic fibs that had brought George and Margaret together. He thought she was a rich widow; she thought he was a prosperous writer. If he forgave her, it was because he understood what trickery was. We cannot know whether the hard-luck story Margaret presented to the Queen was her doing or George’s, but on balance it seems more likely to have been his, given the risk she would have incurred from Farquhar Senior somehow coming to the attention of the court.

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The life of John Forcker casts his son’s translation from Ireland to London in a different light. George Farquhar is no longer the pitifully fatherless refugee from enemy violence but, like the Wilks of Alexander Knapton’s narrative, a runaway who has invented an orphan identity for himself, consciously severing ties in pursuit of a new life; possibly, indeed, fictionally murdering his father in his self-narrative while actually mimicking his own runaway habit, not to mention that of his former teacher Ellis Walker, who had abandoned beleaguered Londonderry to translate Epictetus in Yorkshire. Farquhar had never really known the father who, the Attainder indicates, preferred to live in England. Father figures are common in other Restoration comedies, but not in Farquhar’s, where they have been erased – literally in the case of The Twin-Rivals, where the death of Wou’dbe Senior is a matter of brief report. Farquhar’s wandering heroes are remarkably self-sufficient. There are no traces of filial loyalty or dependence. In life, correspondingly, there is no indication whatever that Farquhar went to England to find his father. When the clerk of Trinity entered Farquhar Senior’s name as William rather than John, it may not have been a scribal error. George did not, perhaps, know him well enough to recall. Against a background of family alienation – the start of his lifetime’s journey of unbelonging – there was forgiveness of a kind that was typical of him. Other Restoration dramatists slipped easily into the stereotyping of the older generation as meddling or tyrannical, none more so than Congreve, whose Sir Samson Legend in Love for Love is a comic nightmare of a father bent on depriving his son Valentine of his birthright. Farquhar’s senior roles are benign even when a little foolish or eccentric: on the two older characters in The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux’ Stratagem he conferred the delightful names of Balance and Bountiful, almost as though they had stepped straight in from The Pilgrim’s Progress.80 No comparable trail leads to Farquhar’s mother. Connely associates her with the Wiseman family without lighting on a name.81 No record has been found to identify the woman who, Lady Macduff-like, appears to have been left to look after her large brood and face the dangers of the Irish countryside in the late 1680s while her husband was away in England. Although Wilkes mentions seven children, parish records make it possible to trace only six: John, the eldest, born on 19 August 1669; Moses, born on 11 December 1673; George, who arrived on 3 March 1677; Peyton, the bookseller, born in 1679; and two girls called Sarah and Martha. The naming of the elder girl as Sarah may mean that was her mother’s name too. George, the third son by a distance and the only Farquhar to make it to Trinity, was the clever boy in the family. It was an attribute that left him restless. Spinning juvenile verse and then fast-spoken comedy came easily; polishing anything to completion, less so. In a theatrical career that began with stage fright, he ran even from what he had created. Incapable of sticking to the patient business of proofreading, a task his brother Peyton embraced in his own career, or of standing his ground

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in the face of adversity, George Farquhar lived life in the manner of his work: as a series of attempts to find something less stifling, more answerable to his inclinations, intermittently emerging from previous models to yield something fresh and generous. Both life and work amounted to something neither Irish nor English, but somewhere in between. He could neither shed his birth identity nor assume a new one. Acting and writing, study and paid work, marriage and fatherhood, and ultimately migration itself: it is as though everything in his life was doomed to be unfinished business. With the anxiety of the fugitive, his plays present impossible solutions to tragic hardship; with the hope of the migrant, they continue to connect audiences from London to Florida to Botany Bay with the imperishable desire for a better life, somewhere.

NOTES

Introduction 1

The 1922 DNB entry, authored by Leslie Stephen, gives 1678 (reconcilable with 1677 by the rules of the old calendar) while the 2004 New Oxford edition has 1676. The brief biography which introduces Thomas Wilkes’s 1775 edition of Farquhar’s works gives 1678. William Rufus Chetwood’s ‘Some Memoirs of Mr George Farquhar’ in the 1728 edition of the plays offers no date.

2

Wilkes states that it ran for nine days ‘with applause’ (p. v). Chetwood wrote that the success of the play ‘far exceeded [Farquhar’s] expectations’ (p. vi), adding that the same was true for his other plays.

3

Shirley Strum Kenny, ed., The Works of George Farquhar, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), I.14, notes an advertisement for the play on 22 July 1712 describing it as ‘Not Acted these Twelve Years’. Hereafter Kenny.

4

See Shirley Strum Kenny, ‘Theatrical Warfare, 1695–1710’, Theatre Notebook vol. 27 (Summer 1973), pp. 130–45.

5

Post Boy, 11–13 July 1700, reprinted in William Van Lennep, ed., The London Stage Part One, 1660–1700 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), p. 532. Hereafter LS1.

6

The Constant Couple was first published by Ralph Smith and Bennet Banbury on 11 December 1699; under the same imprint a second edition appeared, with the addition of a new scene, on 1 February 1700. A third edition, with extra material, was published by Smith on 20 August 1700.

7

Lintott’s advocacy is taken from the prefatory dedication to John Eyre.

Chapter 1 1

Fitzroy Pyle, ‘George Farquhar (1677–1707)’. The Trinity Monday Memorial Discourse, 1957, published in Hermathena no. 92 (November 1958), pp. 3–20.

2

Ibid., p. 9.

3

James J. Lynch, Box, Pit and Gallery: Stage and Society in Johnson’s London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), p. 41, notes that while Vanbrugh’s plays were more often revived in the eighteenth century, performances of Farquhar’s outnumbered them. He adds that between them, Vanbrugh and Farquhar accounted for 15 per cent of comic performances in the period. For the frequency of eighteenth-century editions of The

162

NOTES

Recruiting Officer and The Beaux’ Stratagem, see Shirley Strum Kenny, ‘Perennial Favorites: Congreve, Vanbrugh, Cibber, Farquhar, and Steele’, Modern Philology vol. 73 (May 1976), pp. 4–11. The Beaux’ Stratagem appeared in forty editions before 1800. The play’s popularity on the London stage continued for another fifty years, albeit in edited versions. See Barry J. Olshen, ‘The Beaux’ Stratagem on the Nineteenth-Century London Stage’, Theatre Notebook vol. 28 no. 2 (1974), pp. 70–80. The article summarizes Olshen’s unpublished doctoral thesis, ‘The Reception of Restoration Comedy of Manners in Nineteenth-Century England’ (University of Toronto, 1972). An extensive early stage history of The Recruiting Officer is to be found in John Burke’s unpublished doctoral thesis, ‘The Stage History of the London Productions of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, 1706–1964’ (Ohio State University, 1972). 4

Pyle, ‘George Farquhar (1677–1707)’, p. 30.

5

William Gaskill, A Sense of Direction: Life at the Royal Court (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 56. Gaskill developed parts of the book from his article, ‘Finding a Style for Farquhar’, Theatre Quarterly vol. 1 (January–March 1971), pp. 15–20.

6

Pyle, ‘George Farquhar (1677–1707)’, p. 8.

7

Ibid.

8

Willard Connely, George Farquhar: The Restoration Drama at Twilight (London: Cassell and Co., 1949).

9

Anon., Memoirs Relating to the Late Famous Mr. Tho. Brown (London, 1704), p. 6.

10 Edmund Curll, Preface (entitled ‘The Life and Character of Mr George Farquhar’) to his edition of Farquhar’s The Stage-Coach (London, 1718), p. iii; Giles Jacob, The Poetical Register: Or, the Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets with an Account of Their Writings, 2 vols (London, 1719), I.98. 11 Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the English Poets, 3 vols (London, 1753), III.136. 12 David Erskine Baker, The Companion to the Playhouse: Or an Historical Account of All the Dramatic Writers (and All Their Works) That Have Appeared in Great Britain and Ireland from the Commencement of Our Theatrical Exhibitions, down the Present Year 1764, 2 vols (London, 1764), II. sig M3r. 13 Eugene Nelson James, The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1972), p. 25. Nelson’s bibliographical findings are listed in his George Farquhar. A Reference Guide (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co, 1986). He draws on Marshall Ray Craig’s equally sceptical unpublished doctoral thesis, ‘George Farquhar, Playwright’ (Columbia University, 1968). 14 A recent exception is J. Douglas Canfield, ‘Thomas Otway’, in Paula Backscheider, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 80: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Dramatists, First Series (Detroit: Gale, 1989), pp. 146–71.

NOTES

163

The most comprehensive biography of a Restoration dramatist is James Anderson Winn’s John Dryden and His World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), which situates Dryden’s plays in their professional and political contexts. 15 Charles Dibdin, A Complete History of the English Stage, 5 vols (London, 1800), IV.281. 16 Leigh Hunt, ed., The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar (London, 1840). 17 Ibid., p. lxxiv. 18 Richard Garnett, The Age of Dryden (London, 1897), p. 130. See also H.A. Huntington, ‘Captain Farquhar’, Atlantic Monthly, XLIX (1882), pp. 399– 400, and H. Macaulay Fitzgibbon, ed., The Beaux’ Stratagem (London: Temple, 1914), p. lx. 19 Hunt, The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar, p. lxxiv. 20 Bonamy Dobree, Restoration Comedy, 1660–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), pp. 162–3. 21 James, The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist, p. 27. The work in question is Otto Hallbauer, The Life and Works of George Farquhar (Holzminden, 1880), p. 16. 22 A.J. Farmer, George Farquhar (London: Longman Green & Co, 1966). 23 For surveys of recent approaches, see Linda Anderson, Autobiography, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2010); Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Laura Marcus, Auto/ biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). 24 Eric Rothstein, George Farquhar (New York: Twayne, 1967). 25 Rothstein, George Farquhar, pp. 13–29. Rothstein’s approach was anticipated by Virgil R. Hutton’s unpublished doctoral thesis, ‘The Aesthetic Development of George Farquhar in His Early Plays’ (University of Michigan, 1964), which attributes a profound moral purpose to The Constant Couple and Sir Harry Wildair. 26 James, The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist, pp. 29–30. 27 Connely asserts that into at least one character in each of his plays he put the character of himself, ‘the warm-hearted, rattle-brained, thoughtless, highspirited young fellow’ (Connely, George Farquhar, pp. 9–10); that is, Roebuck in Love and a Bottle, Sir Harry in The Constant Couple and Sir Harry Wildair, Mirabel in The Inconstant, Trueman in The Twin-Rivals, Captain Basil in The Stage-Coach, Captain Plume in The Recruiting Officer and both Aimwell and Archer in The Beaux’ Stratagem. 28 The following works provide an overview of key debates: Angelika Bammer, Displacement: Cultural Identities in Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Ian Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity

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(London: Routledge, 1994); Gerard Delanty, Ruth Wodak and Paul Jones, eds., Identity, Belonging and Migration (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008); Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, ‘“Beyond Culture”: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference’, Cultural Anthropology vol. 71 (1992), pp. 6–23; Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, eds., Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005); Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity, Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990). Studies of Irish migration often focus on the Great Famine of the Nineteenth Century but the following works include useful theoretical reflections: Brian Fanning, ed., Immigration and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Breda Gray, Women and the Irish Diaspora (London: Routledge, 1994); Liviu Popoviciu, ‘Migrating Masculinities: The Irish Diaspora in Britain’, Irish Studies Review vol. 14 no. 2 (2006), pp. 169–87. For an overview of Irish migration, from the planter settlements onwards, see Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 29 Pyle, ‘George Farquhar (1677–1707)’, p. 17. 30 See above, pp. 111–14. 31 Tim Keenan, Restoration Staging, 1660–74, Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 1. See also David Wiles, ‘Seeing Is Believing: The Historian’s Use of Images’, in Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait, eds., Representing the Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance (Iowa: Iowa University Press, 2010), esp. p. 216; Robert. D. Hume, ‘Theatre History, 1660–1800: Aims, Materials, Methodology’, in Michael Cordner and Peter Holland, eds., Players, Playwrights, Playhouses: Investigating Performance, 1660–1800 (London: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 9–44. 32 Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007, p. 74. 33 Ibid., p. 100. 34 Roy Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1672 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 70. 35 L.M. Cullen, ‘The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in N. Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 113–49. 36 Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007, p. 109. 37 See Jennifer L. Airey, The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars and the Restoration Stage (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014). 38 For example, Congreve’s Sailor Ben in Love for Love (London, 1695) and the country cousin Sir Wilful Witwoud in The Way of the World (London, 1700). In ‘Dialect in Irish Literature: The Hermetic Core’, Richard Wall charts the nuances of Hiberno-English and their resistance to English glosses, noting Farquhar’s alertness to the dialect in Teague, the Irish servant from The TwinRivals. See Irish University Review vol. 20 no. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 8–18. 39 The Post Man, 29–31 December 1698 and 28–31 January 1699.

NOTES

165

40 Brady wrote The Rape: Or, The Innocent Impostor (performed in 1691 and published the following year). Two of Wilson’s plays were performed: The Cheats (1663) and Belphegor: Or the Marriage of the Devil (1690). A further two were probably only published: Andronicus Comnenius (1664) and The Projectors (1665). 41 The standard biography of Orrery remains Kathleen Lynch’s Roger Boyle, First Earl of Orrery (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1965). See also Robert F. Bode, ‘Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery’, Backscheider, Dictionary of Literary Biography, pp. 29–35. 42 Orrery’s plays included The General (1662), Henry the Fifth (1664), Mustapha (1665) and The Black Prince (1667). Dates are those of the first performances. Henry Herringman published a folio collection of Orrery’s plays in 1668. For a study of Orrery’s work amid the reversals of recent history, see Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration. English Tragicomedy 1660–1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 43 See Brian Corman’s entry on Tate in Backscheider, Dictionary of Literary Biography, pp. 210–28; also David Hopkins’s entry in H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., The New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 53, pp. 811–13. 44 Tate translated Satires 2 and 5 in The Satires of Junius Juvenalis. Translated into English Verse. By Mr Dryden, and Several Other Eminent Hands (London, 1693). He also translated most of Book 7 in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Fifteen Books (London, 1717), and Books 6–10 of The Ethiopian History of Heliodorus. In Ten Books (London, 1686). 45 The History of King Richard II was banned during the Popish Plot crisis in 1681 because it was judged subversive; the company tried unsuccessfully to reintroduce it as The Sicilian Usurper. The History of King Lear (1681) foregrounded Edmund as a critique of the Duke of Monmouth and ended with Cordelia’s survival and Lear’s restoration. The Ingratitude of a Common-wealth (1682) aligned Coriolanus with the unpopular Duke of York, Catholic heir to the throne. 46 Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), p. 500. 47 Cibber, The Lives of the English Poets, III.258. 48 Charles Gildon, The Lives and Characters of the English Poets (London, 1699), p. 139. 49 For biographical information, see Robert Jordan and Harold Love, eds., The Works of Thomas Southerne, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), I.xi–xliv; also Anthony Kaufman, ‘Thomas Southerne’, in Backscheider, Dictionary of Literary Biography, pp. 196–210. 50 It was a mixed group. Aphra Behn had consorted with Republicans; Thomas Otway displayed nostalgia for the Golden Age of the 1630s; John Crowne exhibited crypto-Catholic tendencies. See the entries in Backscheider, Dictionary of Literary Biography, by Katharine M. Rogers (Behn, pp. 14–28), J. Douglas Canfield (Otway, ‘Love Letters Written by the Late Most Ingenious Mr Thomas Otway’, pp. 146–71), and Beth S. Neman (Crowne, pp. 36–51).

166

NOTES

51 See, for example, Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 381–96; and my study, The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama 1660–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 127–65. 52 Southerne, ‘To the Right Honourable Tho. Wharton, Esq’, dedicatory epistle for The Wives Excuse, in Jordan and Love, The Works of Thomas Southerne, I.268. 53 In his Preface, Congreve wrote that ‘since all Traditions must indisputably give place to the Drama … I resolved in another beauty to imitate Dramatick Writing, namely, in the Design, Contexture and Result of the Plot’. Preface to the Reader, Incognita: Or Love and Duty Reconcil’d (London, 1692). 54 In his ‘Discourse upon Comedy’ (1701). For discussion, see above, pp. 96–101. 55 The anecdote first appears in Letters concerning the English Nation by M. de Voltaire (London, 1733). Voltaire later regretted his reply, as discussed by D.F. McKenzie, ‘Mea Culpa: Voltaire’s Retraction of His Comments Critical of Congreve’, Review of English Studies vol. 49 (1998), p. 462. 56 For Congreve’s social circle, see John C. Hodges, ed., William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London: Macmillan, 1964), and the same author’s William Congreve The Man (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1941). D.F. McKenzie’s three-volume edition of Congreve’s Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011) is a mine of information about the playwright and his network. 57 See David M. Bergeron, Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570–1640 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Deborah C. Payne, ‘The Restoration Dramatic Dedication as Symbolic Capital’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture no. 20 (1990), pp. 27–42. 58 The other plays concerned are The Rival Ladies (1664), to Orrery; The Indian Emperour (1667), to the Duchess of Monmouth; Tyrannick Love (1670), to the Duke of Monmouth; An Evening’s Love (1671), to the Duke of Newcastle; The Conquest of Granada (two parts, 1672), to the Duke of York, heir to the throne; Marriage a la Mode (1673), to the Earl of Rochester; The Assignation (1673), to Sir Charles Sedley; All for Love (1678), to the Earl of Danby; Troilus and Cressida (1679), to the Earl of Sunderland; Don Sebastian (1692), to the Earl of Leicester. 59 Cibber, The Lives of the English Poets, III.136–7. 60 ‘Advertisement’ for The Beaux’ Stratagem, in Kenny, II.159. 61 For further discussion, see above, pp. 68–9. 62 For details, see Shirley Strum, Kenny, The Works of George Farquhar, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), I.581. 63 Farquhar, ‘To the Right Honourable, Peregrine, Lord Marquiss of Carmarthen, &c’, Kenny, I.25. 64 For details, see Andrew Browning, Thomas Osborn Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds, 1632–1712, 3 vols (Glasgow: Jackson, 1951), I.542–4. Carmarthen was as much of a businessman as a sailor. As a reward, Peter gave him a licence to import tobacco to Russia. Carmarthen promptly sold it to a consortium of merchants.

NOTES

167

65 Kenny, II.255. 66 William Walker, Preface to Marry, or Do Worse (London, 1704). Walker’s play enjoyed a single recorded performance at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in November 1703. See LS2, p. 47. For Dryden and Will’s coffee house, see Winn, John Dryden and His World, p. 130 passim. 67 Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols (London, Bell & Hyman, 1971), V.37, 3 February 1664. 68 William Myers, note in his edition, The Recruiting Officer and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 324. 69 Kenny, I.149. 70 Ibid. 71 Myers, The Recruiting Officer and Other Plays, p. 324. 72 John Oldmixon, Prologue to Charles Gildon’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (London, 1700). Oldmixon (1673–1742) shared Farquhar’s status as a relative outsider (he was from Somerset) but pilloried his former friend as the heir of ‘Flecknoes Irish Pen’, maintaining a ‘Dreadful War, with Wit and Sense’ (see Kenny, I.131). 73 See J.P.W. Rogers, ‘The Dramatist vs. the Dunce: George Farquhar and John Oldmixon’, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research vol. 10 (November 1971), pp. 53–8. 74 George Farquhar, Love and Business: In a Collection of Occasionary Verse, and Epistolary Prose, not Hitherto Published (London, 1701), refers to transcribing a letter for ‘My Lord A___le’. See Kenny, II.361. 75 Anon., ‘A Dialogue between the Illustrious Ladies, the Countesses of Albemarle and Orkney, Soon after the King’s Death’ (1702), in F.H. Ellis, ed., Poems on Affairs of State 1704–14, Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714, vol. 7 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). 76 ‘To the Right Honourable the Earl of Albemarle, &c. Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter’, Kenny, I.251. 77 James Sutherland queries the authenticity of Farquhar’s letters to Susanna Centlivre on the basis that they embody the conventions of the epistolary tradition. See ‘The Progress of Error: Mrs Centlivre and the Biographers’, The Review of English Studies vol. 18 (April 1942), p. 176. 78 Edmund Chaloner, Letters to Robert Harley, BL Loan 29/129 and 29/34, cited in Kenny, II.574. William A. Shaw and F.H. Slingsby, eds., `Warrant Books: December 1713, 16 -31’, in Calendar of Treasury Books 1713, vol. 27 (London: HMSO, 1955). William A. Shaw and F.H. Slingsby, eds., `Warrant Books: August 1715, 11 -20’, in Calendar of Treasury Books 1714 -1715, vol. 29 (London, 1957). William A. Shaw and F.H. Slingsby, eds.,`Declared Accounts: Civil List’, in Calendar of Treasury Books 1716, vol. 30 (London: HMSO, 1958). William A. Shaw and F.H. Slingsby, eds.,`Treasury Warrants: May 1718, 21 -25’, in Calendar of Treasury Books 1718, vol. 32 (London: HMSO, 1962). show a series of £20 payments to him for the benefit of the Farquhar children. 79 In the dedication of Love and Business Farquhar writes, ‘These Advantages I had design’d myself before, in a Piece of another Nature, had not your Modesty caution’d me the contrary ’. See Kenny, II.301 and her note on the line, II.574–5.

168

NOTES

80 George Dames Burtchaell and Thomas Wick Saleir, eds., Alumni Dublinenses (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2001). 81 ‘To Richard Tighe, Esq.’, in Kenny, I.403. 82 Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, ed. B.R.S. Fone (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1968), p. 201. 83 Details from Kenny, I.636. 84 See David Francis Taylor, Theatres of Opposition. Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 85 In Kenny, I.499–501. 86 Dryden wrote a prologue for the text of The Wives Excuse (Jordan and Love, The Works of Thomas Southerne, I.270–1). For Southerne’s contribution to Cleomenes, Jordan and Love, The Works of Thomas Southerne, I.351. 87 Southerne, ‘To His Grace the Duke of Richmond’, The Loyal Brother, in Jordan and Love, The Works of Thomas Southerne, I.9. 88 ‘To the Right Honourable James, Earl of Ossory’, in Jordan and Love, The Works of Thomas Southerne, I.83. Subsequent dedications were Sir Anthony Love (1690) to Thomas Skipwith, a major shareholder in the United Company; The Wives Excuse (1692) to Thomas Wharton, Comptroller in the King’s Household; The Maid’s Last Prayer (1693) to Charles Boyle, heir to the Earldom of Orrery and author of the prologue to Southerne’s later The Fate of Capua (1700); Oroonoko (1695) to the Duke of Devonshire; The Spartan Dame (1719) to the Duke of Argyle and Greenwich; and Money the Mistress to John, Lord Boyle, later fifth Earl of Orrery. The exception to this impressive list of connections is the dedication of The Fatal Marriage (1694) to Southerne’s friend Anthony Hammond, an MP the following year and reputed to be fond of ‘men of letters and genius, and was fond of being taken notice of them in their writings’. See Jordan and Love, The Works of Thomas Southerne, II.451. 89 See, for example, Pope’s poem, ‘Tom Southerne’s Birth-day Dinner at Ld Orrery’s’, reprinted in Jordan and Love, The Works of Thomas Southerne, I.xl. 90 Pope, in Jordan and Love, The Works of Thomas Southerne, l.7. 91 The Loyal General (1680) to Edward Tayler; The Sicilian Usurper (Richard II, 1681) to George Raynsford; The History of King Lear (1681) to Thomas Boteler; The Ingratitude of a Common-wealth (1682) to Charles, Lord Herbert; A Duke and No Duke (1685) to Sir George Hewyt; The Island Princess (1687) to Henry, Lord Walgrave, Comptroller of the King’s Household. 92 A Present for the Ladies (1693) is dedicated to the Countess of Radnor and A Poem on the Late Promotion of Several Eminent Persons (1694) to the Earl of Dorset. 93 As advanced, for example, by Charles Stonehill in his introduction to The Complete Works of George Farquhar, 2 vols (London: Nonesuch Press, 1930), pp. xi–xxxiii. 94 James, The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist, pp. 30–68. 95 Oliver Goldsmith in The Literary Magazine (January 1758), reproduced in J.M.W. Gibbs, ed., The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 5 vols (London: Bell, 1901), IV.418–9.

NOTES

169

96

John Palmer, The Comedy of Manners (London: Bell, 1913), p. 242. Louis Kronenberger, The Thread of Laughter: Chapters on English Stage Comedy from Jonson to Maugham (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), p. 174. Palmer and Kronenberger cited in James, The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist, pp. 58 and 62, respectively.

97

See Peter Lewis, ‘The Beaux’ Stratagem and The Beggar’s Opera’, Notes and Queries (June 1981), pp. 221–2.

98

An approach typified by, among others, F.S. Boas, An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Drama 1700–1780 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. 32–64, and Jean E. Gagen, The New Woman: Her Emergence in English Drama 1600–1730 (New York: Twayne, 1954), pp. 156–8. The most extensive discussion of Farquhar’s sentimentalism is Erich Germeer’s thesis, ‘Sentimentale Zuge in den Lustspielgestalten Ethereges, Wycherleys, Congreves, Vanbrughs und Farquhars’ (University of Munster, 1963), pp. 122–51. For the philosophy of sentimentalism, see John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

99

A.N. Kaul, ‘The Inverted Abstractions of Restoration Comedy’, in The Action of English Comedy: Studies in the Encounter of Abstraction and Experience from Shakespeare to Shaw (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 90–130; Shirley Strum Kenny, ‘Humane Comedy’, Modern Philology vol. 75 no. 1 (August 1977), pp. 29–43.

100 Explored in James H. Fox’s unpublished doctoral thesis, ‘The Actor-Audience Relationship in Restoration Comedy with Particular Reference to the Aside’ (University of Michigan, 1972). 101 In particular Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Early Eighteenth Century Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), pp. 147–50; Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1927), pp. 75–6; George Sherburn and Donald F. Bond, ‘The Restoration and Eighteenth Century’, in Albert C. Baugh, ed., A Literary History of England, 2nd edn (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1967), pp. 766–79; Kenneth Muir, The Comedy of Manners (London: Hutchinson, 1970), pp. 142–53; John Barnard, ‘Drama from the Restoration till 1710’, in Christopher Ricks, ed., The Sphere History of Literature in the English Language. Volume 3 (London: Sphere, 1971), pp. 375–407. 102 James, The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist, p. 67. 103 Simon Trussler, Introduction to The Constant Couple (London: Methuen, 1988), p. xviii. 104 Trussler, The Constant Couple, p. xviii; Palmer, The Comedy of Manners; Jocelyn Powell, Restoration Theatre Production (London: Routledge, 1984). 105 John Loftis, ed., Restoration Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); John Loftis, Comedy and Society from Congreve to Fielding (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959); Derek Hughes, English Drama 1660–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 106 Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 37.

170

NOTES

107 See David Clare, ‘Why Did George Farquhar’s Work Turn Sectarian after The Constant Couple?’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review of Letters, Philosophy, and Science vol. 103 (2014), pp. 159–68. Clare lists Irish literary histories that ignore Farquhar as Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), Norman Vance’s Irish Literature: A Social History (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), and Daniel Corkery’s Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Cork: Cork University Press, 1931). The writer receives only passing mention in Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) – but note that Grene’s survey begins with the nineteenth-century playwright Dion Boucicault. For a favourable Irish view of Farquhar’s first two plays, see Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 119–21. 108 Clare, ‘Why Did George Farquhar’s Work Turn Sectarian after The Constant Couple?’, p. 166. 109 An exception is Arthur H. Scouten’s very brief ‘George Farquhar’ in The Revels History of Drama in English, ed. T.W. Craik, vol. 5 1660–1750, ed. John Loftis, Richard Southern, Marion Jones and A.H. Scouten (London: Methuen, 1976), pp. 224–6. Even here the concern is less with Farquhar’s history than with the qualities that link him to a broader and better connected tradition of Irish playwrights, including Sheridan, Shaw and Wilde. G. Wilson Knight cites Farquhar’s Irish wit as the crucible of his reconciliation of geniality and morality; see his The Golden Labyrinth: A Study of British Drama (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), pp. 171–3. 110 Kenny, I.134. 111 For studies relating to more recent literary figures, see Julian Moynihan, Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination of a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Vera Kreilkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998); and Ellen M. Wolff, ‘An Anarchy in the Mind and in the Heart’: Narrating Anglo-Irish Fiction (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006). 112 Hunt, The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar, p. lxxii. 113 William Archer, Introduction to The Best Plays of George Farquhar (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), p. 17. For further contrasts between Congreve and Farquhar, see Anon., ‘Caxtoniana: A Series of Essays on Life, Literature and Manners’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine vol. 134 (September 1863), pp. 267–92. 114 Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, p. 465. 115 Roger Michell, Director’s Note, in The Constant Couple (London: Methuen, 1988), p. xx. 116 Edmund Gosse, ed., Restoration Plays from Dryden to Farquhar (London: Dent, 1936), p. x. 117 See, among many studies, S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 25–9.

NOTES

171

118 Dobree, Restoration Comedy, 1660–1720, p. 95. 119 Ashley H. Thorndike, English Comedy (New York: Cooper Square, 1929), p. 340. Similar views are expressed by Harold Frederick Rubenstein, introduction to The Recruiting Officer in Great English Plays (New York: Harper, 1928), p. 882. John Wilcox in The Relation of Molière to Restoration Comedy (New York: Ayer & Co, 1938), p. 177. 120 On Restoration theatre and the idea of novelty, see Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 1660–71 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1984) and J.S. Peters, ‘The Novelty; or, Print, Money, Fashion, Getting, Spending, and Glut’, in J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne, eds., Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995), pp. 169–94. 121 The Constant Couple, dir. Roger Michell, with Pip Donaghy, Simon Russell Beale and Amanda Root, for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, 1988. 122 For example, George Heinrich Michaels, trans., Der Werbofficier (Frankfurt, 1769); Agolstino Lombardo, trans., Lo Strattagemma dei Bellimbusti (Florence: Sansoni, 1955); Jean Hamard, trans., La Ruse des Galants (Paris: Aubier, 1965); 123 Gaskill, A Sense of Direction, p. 13. 124 Bertolt Brecht, Trumpets and Drums, in The Collected Plays of Bertolt Brecht, 9 vols, translated and edited by Ralph Manheim and John Willett (New York: Random House, 1972), IX.249. Brecht’s title was Pauken und Trompeten and is studied by Albert Wertheim, ‘Bertolt Brecht and George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer’, Comparative Drama vol. 7 (Autumn 1973), pp. 179–90. 125 Brecht, The Collected Plays of Bertolt Brecht, IX.258. 126 Ibid., IX.251. 127 Ibid., IX.250. 128 Ibid. 129 See David D. Mays, ‘Theatre Can’t Get Here from There: A Brief Introductory History of Florida’s First Plays’, in Samuel Proctor, ed., Eighteenth-Century Florida: Life on the Frontier (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1976), pp. 91–100. 130 See Eric Irvin, ‘Shakespeare in the Early Sydney Theatre’, in Kenneth Muir, ed., Shakespeare Survey vol. 22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 125–32. 131 For the Out of Joint Theatre Company, dir. Max Stafford-Clark, 1994. 132 Thomas Keneally, The Playmaker (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1987), pp. 302–3. 133 Keneally, The Playmaker, p. 329. For Farquhar and Collier, see above, p.101. 134 Keneally, The Playmaker, p. 329. 135 David Nokes, Jane Austen: A Life (Oakland: University of California Press, 1998), p. 4.

172

NOTES

136 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’, in M.B. Smith and B. Harshav, trans., Entre-Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 5. For discussion, see Nicholas Ridout, Theatre and Ethics (London and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). 137 Michelle Pauli citing Claire Armitstead, ‘Biography of Homeless Man wins Guardian First Book Award’, Guardian, 8 December 2005, available at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/dec/08/ guardianfirstbookaward2005.guardianfirstbookaward (last accessed 23 May 2017). The book is Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (London: HarperCollins, 2005).

Chapter 2 1

James Sutherland discusses the petition in ‘New Light on George Farquhar’, The Times Literary Supplement (6 March 1937), p. 171.

2

Charles Dalton, English Army Lists and Commission Registers, 1661–1714, 6 vols (London, 1892–1904).

3

Curll, Preface to The Stage-Coach, sig.A3; however, the Preface does contain inaccuracies and skips over whole periods in Farquhar’s life, propelling him from university to army in a single bound (p. ii).

4

Chetwood, ‘Memoirs’, sig.A2.

5

For Anne’s cultural life, see James Anderson Winn, Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

6

Emmett Langdon Avery, ed., The London Stage Part Two, 1700–1729 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960), p. 172. Hereafter LS2.

7

Kenny, II.470. Performances listed in LS2, pp. 147 (Author Benefit of 29 April 1707), 149 (Benefit for Henry Norris, 5 June 1707), 169 (Benefit for William Pinkethman, 8 April 1708), 171 (Second Benefit for Norris, 20 May 1708), 187 (Benefit for Anne Oldfield, 3 March 1709). For Farquhar’s presumed relationship with Oldfield, see Connely, George Farquhar, pp. 86–8.

8

Kenny, II.469.

9

On 17 March 1707 the Queen’s Theatre staged The Beaux’ Stratagem; on the same day Rich’s company revived The Recruiting Officer for the benefit of Mrs Moore. See LS2, p. 143.

10 Margaret Farquhar, letter to Robert Harley, BL Loan 29/32, cited in Kenny, II.469–70. 11 For an account of military epic poetry in the period, see Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture: 1680–1714 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). 12 Colin Ballard, The Great Earl of Peterborough (London: Skeffington and Son, 1929), p. 149. 13 Letter from Mordaunt to Baron Sidney Godolphin, Lord High Treasurer and Secretary of State, dated 9 September 1705, BL Add MSS 39 757 ff.117v and 116r.

NOTES

173

14 Kenny, II.468. 15 Ibid., II.470. 16 The entry is recorded in James, Reference Guide, p. 5. 17 George Farquhar, Barcellona (London, 1710), I.1–10, in Kenny, II.479. 18 Dryden’s translation of Book 1 of The Iliad was published in 1700 as part of Fables Ancient and Modern; Congreve published ‘Homer’s Hymn to Venus’ in his Poems upon Several Occasions (London, 1710), with a Homeric imitation, ‘The Birth of the Muse’. 19 Farquhar, Barcellona, VI.27–31, in Kenny, II.514. 20 Kenny, II.463; Rothstein, George Farquhar, pp. 105, 100. 21 Curll, Preface to The Stage-Coach, p. vii. 22 LS2, p. 128. 23 Epilogue to John Oldmixon, The Grove, or, Love’s Paradise (1700); Prologue to David Crauford, Courtship A-la-Mode (1700); Prologue to Francis Manning, All for the Better (1702), spoken by Wilks; Epilogue to Charles Gildon, The Patriot: Or, the Italian Conspiracy (1702); Prologue for the new Theatre in the Haymarket (1706); Prologue to Susanna Centlivre, The Platonick Lady (1706), spoken by Betterton. All reprinted in Kenny, II.402– 7. Farquhar’s 1702 miscellany, Love and Business, contains two further prologues: An Epilogue, Spoken by Mr Wilks at His First Appearance upon the English Stage, and A Prologue on the Propos’d Union of the Two Houses (Kenny, II.328–30). The first probably dates from 1699, although the title conceals the fact that this was his second stint in London. The second is believed to have been written in 1701, when Betterton’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields company was struggling and there were rumours of a merger with Rich’s company, from which Betterton had broken away in 1695. 24 Farquhar, ‘The Prologue Spoken by Mr. Wilks, at the Opening of the Theatre in the Hay-market, October the 15th, 1706’, in Kenny, II.406, ll.1–7. 25 Letter from Owen Swiney to Colley Cibber in the Osborn Collection, Yale University, reproduced in LS2 317. 26 Farquhar, ‘Prologue Spoken by Mr Wilks’, ll.8–26, in Kenny, II.406. 27 See in particular the passage where Motteux ingeniously incorporates French and Spanish into the rhyming couplet form: ‘So Don and Monsieur, bluff before the siege, / Were quickly tamed – at Venlo, and at Liege. / ’Twas Viva Spagnia! Vive France! Before; / Now Quartier! Monsieur! Quartier! Ah! Senor!’ 28 A translation of Jean de la Chappelle’s Les Carrosses d’Orleans (1681) published in 1705 but perhaps performed as early as 1701. For Motteux, see Robert Newton Cunningham, Peter Anthony Motteux, 1663–1718: A Biographical and Critical Study (Oxford: Blackwell, 1933), and Carolyn Kephart’s entry on the dramatist in Backscheider, Dictionary of Literary Biography, pp. 137–46. 29 Pound, ‘The Renaissance’, in T.S. Eliot, ed., Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), p. 217. See also T.S. Eliot’s, ‘Andrew Marvell’, in Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 169.

174

NOTES

30 Farquhar, Barcellona, I.212–13, in Kenny, II.484. 31 Ibid., I.223–4, in Kenny, II.484. 32 Ibid., II.23–6, in Kenny, II.486. 33 Ibid., II.32–4, in Kenny, II.486–7. Scholarly introductions to the 1688 revolution and its aftermath are J.P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and W.A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 34 Farquhar, Barcellona, II.37–40, in Kenny, II.487. 35 Ibid., II.41–62, in Kenny, II.487. 36 See Derek Hughes, ‘Body and Ritual in Farquhar’, Comparative Drama vol. 31 no. 3 (1997), pp. 414–35. For Hunt, The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar, pp. 18–19. 37 Farquhar, Barcellona, II.63–6, in Kenny, II.487. 38 Ibid., II.90–3, in Kenny, II.488. 39 Compare the arguments of Paulina Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) and Dustin Griffin, Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014). 40 Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1668 to 1725 (Oxford: The Bibliographical Society, 1922), p. 190. 41 Standfast also published Farquhar’s The Adventures of Covent-Garden in December 1698. For dates, see Kenny, II.251. 42 On the economics of play publishing in the period, see Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, The Publication of Plays in London 1660–1800. Playwrights, Publishers and the Market (London: The British Library, 2015). 43 Bernard Lintott, ‘To John Eyre, Esq’, in The Comedies of Mr George Farquhar (London, 1708), n.p. 44 Alexander Pope, ‘The Dunciad’, in John Butt, ed., The Poems of Alexander Pope (London: Methuen, 1963), II. 47–58 (pp. 374–6). 45 Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1668 to 1725, pp. 275, 280. 46 Richard Steele, ‘White’s Chocolate House’, The Tatler (11 May 1710). 47 Cited in Kenny, II.471. 48 Writing to Harley, Margaret made some striking spelling mistakes: ‘I have bin Sr a celisitriss to her most gracious majesty. ’ BL Loan 29/194, f.108r, cited in Kenny, II.470. It is no disrespect to her to suggest that either Smith or Standfast ensured her dedication to Mordaunt was cast to conventional standards. 49 Margaret Farquhar, ‘To the Right Honourable Charles Earl of Peterborough and Monmouth’, in Kenny, II.475, ll.5–9. 50 Ibid., in Kenny, II.475–6, ll.24–7.

NOTES

175

51 Kenny, II.467, states that the preface was ‘presumably written by Margaret Farquhar’. 52 See my study, The Ladies, pp. 126–65. 53 For December 1709, Calendar of Treasury Books, Volume 23, 1709, ed. William A. Shaw (London, 1959), p. 462; for January and July 1712, Calendar of Treasury Books, Volume 28, 1714, ed. William A. Shaw and F.H. Slingsby (London, 1955), pp. 488–93; for May and October 1712, Shaw, ed., Calendar of Treasury Books, Volume 26, 1712 (London, 1954), pp. 287, 482. 54 William A. Shaw and F.H. Slingsby, Calendar of Treasury Books, Volume 28, 1714 (London: HMSO, 1955), p. 793; and Volume 27, 1713 (London, 1955), p. 464. 55 William A. Shaw and F.H. Slingsby, Calendar of Treasury Books, Volume 29, 1714–1715 (London, 1957), p. 671; Volume 30, 1716 (London, 1958), p. 222. 56 Connely, George Farquhar, pp. 310–11, citing an advertisement in The London Gazette, 29 November–3 December 1715. 57 See Claire Louise Neilsen’s unpublished doctoral thesis, ‘The Chelsea OutPensioners: Image and Reality in Eighteenth-Century and Early NineteenthCentury Social Care’ (University of Newcastle, 2014), pp. 98–118. 58 The London Gazette. The date of the hearing is given as 9 December 1715. 59 Kenny, II.10, gives a date of 29 May 1717; Chetwood’s `Memoirs’ places it a year earlier.

Chapter 3 1

The most commonly cited source for this story is the Preface to Thomas Wilkes’s The Works of George Farquhar (Dublin, 1775). Wilkes claimed to have heard it from Colley Cibber, yet it reproduces verbatim passages from Daniel O’Bryan, Authentic Memoirs… of That Most Celebrated Comedian, Mr Robert Wilks (London, 1732), pp. 24–6.

2

http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/1700_1749.htm. Last accessed 15 October 2016.

3

Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, eds., The London Encyclopaedia (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 1003.

4

Anonymous source cited in Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Random House, 2001), p. 134.

5

O’Bryan, Authentic Memoirs, p. 25.

6

The first (1736) version of the engraving is in David Bindman, Hogarth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), p. 15.

7

‘Studious he sat, with all his books around, / Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound! / Plung’d for his sense, but found no bottom there; / Then writ, and flounder’d on, in mere despair’. Pope, ‘The Dunciad’, I.111–14, in Butt, The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 360.

8

O’Bryan, Authentic Memoirs, p. 25.

176

9

NOTES

Curll, ‘Life and Character’, p. ii: ‘As he liv’d freely, and was a great Lover of his Friend and Bottle, his Circumstances were not only at his Death, but in his Life-Time, very much perplex’d.’ Curll adds that this is ‘the common Fate of a generous Soldier and a Poetical Genius’.

10 ‘Advertisement’ for The Beaux’ Stratagem, cited in Robert D. Hume and Judith Milhous, eds., revised version of LS2, ed., The London Stage Part 2, 1700–1729, published online at http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/h/b/ hb1/London%20Stage%202001/lond1706.pdf, p. 348. Last accessed 20 May 2016. 11 The Daily Courant, 7 February 1707, 5 March 1707 and 24 March 1707. See Verlyn Flieger, ‘Notes on the Titling of George Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem’, Notes and Queries n.s. vol. 26 (February 1979), pp. 21–3. 12 Rothstein, George Farquhar, p. 27. 13 The first recorded benefit night was on 13 March 1707; see LS2, p. 142. 14 Performances of The Recruiting Officer in early 1707 were divided between Rich’s Company (Drury Lane and Dorset Garden) and the new Queen’s Theatre, where Wilks was based. LS2 identifies performances on 2 January (DL), 16 January (DL), 10 February (Q), 20 February (DL), 24 February (Q), 3 March (DL), 6 March (DL), 17 March (DL, benefit for Mrs Moore), 17 April (DL), 29 May (DL). The Constant Couple was revived by the Queen’s Theatre on 27 March (benefit for the actor Mills) and 19 April (‘At the Desire of Several Persons of Quality’). See LS2, pp. 136–48. 15 O’Bryan, Authentic Memoirs, p. 25. 16 Ibid. 17 The Beaux’ Stratagem, II.i.29–36 in Kenny, II.173. 18 Hughes, English Drama, p. 408. 19 Derek Hughes, ‘Who Counts in Farquhar?’, Comparative Drama vol. 31 no. 1 (1997), pp. 7–27. 20 Farquhar, ‘Epistle Dedicatory to All Friends Round the Wrekin’, The Recruiting Officer in Kenny, II.35. 21 James, The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist , p. 265. 22 The Beaux’ Stratagem, I.i.298–302 in Kenny, II.170. 23 Ibid., V.ii.81, Kenny, II.227. 24 It is possible that the Baptismal Register of All Hallows, Staining, contains a reference to one of the girls: Mary, daughter of ‘George and Margaret Feiker’, baptized on 8 April 1705. 25 Farquhar, Works (London, 1728), sig.A3v, in Kenny, II.539. 26 George Farquhar, Love and a Bottle (London, 1699), I.i.231–2, in Kenny, I.35. 27 Rothstein, George Farquhar, p. 23. 28 Farquhar, Works, sig.A3v. 29 Kenny, II.136. Ronald Berman represents the ending as a shift from monetary to emotional value with no attempt to reconcile the tension between the

NOTES

177

two. See his essay, ‘The Comedy of Reason’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language vol. 7 no. 2 (Summer 1965), pp. 162–8. 30 Hughes, English Drama, p. 410. 31 John Milton, ‘The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce’, in C.A. Patrides, ed., John Milton. Selected Prose (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 124–5. In his introduction to The Beaux’ Stratagem Michael Cordner points out that it should be no surprise to find a Restoration playwright drawing on ‘The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce’ since Milton was widely thought of as a ‘libertine’ for writing it. See also Milton A. Larson, ‘The Influence of Milton’s Divorce Tracts on Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem,’ Publications of the Modern Language Association vol. 39 (1924), pp. 174–8. A counter-argument says that Milton’s influence has been exaggerated and that Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife is more significant. See Paul Muesche and Jeanette Fleischer, ‘A Re-evaluation of Vanbrugh’, Publications of the Modern Language Association vol. 49 no. 3 (September 1934), pp. 848–89; and Vincent F. Hopper and Gerald B. Lahey, Introduction to their edition of The Beaux’ Stratagem (New York: Barron, 1963), pp. 16–44. 32 Alan Roper, ‘The Beaux’ Stratagem: Image and Action’, in Earl Miner, ed., Seventeenth-Century Imagery: Essays on the Use of Figurative Language from Donne to Farquhar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp.  169–86. 33 George Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem (London, 1707), III.iii.419–51 in Kenny, II.203–4. 34 Ibid., IV.i.1–7 in Kenny, II.204. 35 For Hobbes and Restoration Drama, see numerous references in Catie Gill, ed., Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England, 1650–1737. From Leviathan to the Licensing Act (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013). 36 Hughes, English Drama, p. 409. 37 John Keats, Letter to his brothers George and Thomas dated 21 December 1817, in Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Letters of John Keats, 1814– 1821, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), I.193. 38 Natalie Cargill, ‘The Language of Disease in Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem’, published online at http://www.academia.edu/9074182/The_ Language_of_Disease_in_George_Farquhars_The_Beaux_Stratagem. Last accessed 12 November 2016. 39 Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem, IV.i.20–5 in Kenny, II.205. 40 W.R. Chetwood, A General History of the Stage (London 1749), p. 151. 41 John Vanbrugh, ‘The Provok’d Wife’, in Michael Cordner, ed., Sir John Vanbrugh. Four Comedies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), I.i.44, p. 160. 42 The Muses Mercury, May 1707, pp. 123–4. 43 For discussion, see above, pp. 96–101. 44 For Shakespeare and Jonson, see Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation, pp. 180–224.

178

NOTES

45 The Muses Mercury, September 1707, p. 218. 46 Richard Steele, ‘White’s Chocolate House’, The Tatler no. 20 (24–26 May 1709). 47 Pope, ‘The First Epistle’, in Butt, The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 645 (ll.287–8). 48 Anon., A Companion to the Theatre, 2 vols (London, 1740), II.206. 49 Sir Thomas Burnet, Pasquin no. 75 (22 October 1723). For Johnson, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, revised by L.F. Powell, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), IV.7. 50 Dominic Cavendish, ‘The Beaux’ Stratagem, National Theatre, Review: A Decent Romp That Needs to Be Rompier’, The Daily Telegraph, 26 May 2015, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatrereviews/11629723/The-Beaux-Stratagem-National-Theatre-review-.html. Last accessed 29 May 2015. 51 John Goodwin, ed., Peter Hall’s Diaries (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983), pp. 302, 315. 52 Hall, Peter Hall’s Diaries, p. 308. 53 Guys and Dolls, dir. Richard Eyre, des. John Gunter (Olivier Theatre, 1982); Antony and Cleopatra, dir. Peter Hall, des. Alison Chitty (Olivier Theatre, 1987). 54 James, The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist, p. 277. 55 New writers were often profuse in their use of different settings. Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1696) requires sixteen different settings. Etherege’s first play, The Comical Revenge (1664), needs ten; his last, The Man of Mode (1676), only four or five. Congreve’s The Old Bachelour (1693) uses six and The Way of the World (1700) only three; even this was luxury compared to The Double Dealer (1694) and Love for Love (1695), in which he had used only two locales each. Wycherley followed a similar trajectory: Love in the Wood (1671) needs ten settings and The Plain Dealer (1676) five; between the two however, he restricted The Gentleman Dancing Master (1672) to only two settings, albeit with unusual day/night switching. These writers were proponents of the more austere, early Restoration style expounded by Keenan’s Restoration Staging 1660–1674. On playhouse design from the 1670s onwards, see David Thomas, ed., Restoration and Georgian England 1660–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 68–77. 56 On Sir Michael, see above, p. 102. 57 Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem, I.i.14 in Kenny, II.162. 58 Treasure Island, adapted by Bryony Lavery, dir. Polly Findlay (Olivier Theatre, 2014). Lizzie Clachan also designed this production. 59 Sybil Rosenfeld, Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces 1660–1765 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), pp. 225–47. 60 Recorded in Michael Cordiner’s edition of The Beaux’ Stratagem (London: Ernest Benn, 1976), p. xiii. 61 The Beaux’ Strategem, I.i.40 in Kenny, II.163. 62 Ibid., I.i.29–31 in Kenny, II.163. 63 For Farquhar as farceur, see Leo Hughes, A Century of English Farce (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956).

NOTES

179

64 Peter Conrad, The Everyman History of English Literature (London: Dent, 1985), p. 309. For further discussion, see my Restoration Plays and Players (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 3–5. 65 Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem, III.iii.117–19 in Kenny, II.195. 66 Simon Callow, Acting in Restoration Comedy (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1996), pp. 98, 15. 67 Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem, I.i.53–60 in Kenny, I.163–4. 68 Ibid., I.i.111 in Kenny, I.165. 69 Ibid., I.i.128–31 in Kenny, II.165. 70 Ibid., I.i.132 in Kenny, II.165. 71 Ibid., I.i.138–66 in Kenny, II.166. 72 Ibid., I.i.172–89 in Kenny, II.166–7. 73 Ibid., I.i.194 in Kenny, II.167. 74 Ibid., I.i.230–1 in Kenny, II.168. 75 Ibid., I.i.238–9 in Kenny, II.168. 76 Ibid., I.i.254–69 in Kenny, II.168–9. 77 Ibid., I.i.299–321 in Kenny, II.170. 78 Ibid., I.i.315–21 in Kenny, II.170. 79 Cordner, ed., The Beaux’ Stratagem, note to p. 24. 80 Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem, I.i.374–8 in Kenny, II.172. 81 For discussion of the workings of playhouses at this time, see Keenan, Restoration Staging, Powell, Restoration Theatre Production, and Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 82 Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem, II.i.15–23 in Kenny, II.173. 83 Ibid., II.i.42 in Kenny, II.174. 84 Ibid., II.i.53–76 in Kenny, II.174. 85 Ibid., II.i.107 in Kenny, II.175. The production was directed by Ramin Gray at the Newman Rooms. Sullen was played by Tim Hudson and Scrub by Patrick Marber, dramaturg for the 2015 National Theatre production. Sir Charles was played by the present author. 86 Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem, III.i.50–6 in Kenny, II.185. 87 Ibid., II.i.59–61 in Kenny, II.185. 88 Philip Roberts, ‘Vanbrugh’s Lost Play: The Prologue’, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research vol. 12 (1973), p. 57. 89 The London Chronicle, 4 January 1759. 90 Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem, III.iii.79–80 in Kenny, II.194. 91 Ibid., III.iii.194–247 in Kenny, II.197–8. 92 Ibid., III.iii.262–7 in Kenny, II.199. 93 Ibid., III.iii.411–13, in Kenny, II.203. 94 Ibid., IV.i.1–5 in Kenny, II.204. 95 Ibid., IV.i.318 in Kenny, II.213.

180

NOTES

96 Ibid., IV.i.441–2 in Kenny, II.216. 97 Tiffany Stern, ‘The Beaux’ Stratagem and 18th-Century Life’, programme note for the 2015 National Theatre production at the Olivier Theatre, dir. Simon Godwin. See also Gellert Spencer Alleman, Matrimonial Law and the Materials of Restoration Comedy (Wallingford, Pennsylvania: Alleman, 1942).

Chapter 4 1

See Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 187–9.

2

Kenny, II.9, based on a count of performances recorded in The London Stage, and including those of a French translation which ran at the Haymarket Theatre in the 1740s.

3

Kenny. II. 10.

4

Ibid.

5

Ibid. For performances, LS2, p. 453. For Margaret’s death, see above, p. 41.

6

Noted in Kenny, II.7.

7

Farquhar, Epistle Dedicatory ‘To All Friends Round the Wrekin’, The Recruiting Officer, in Kenny, II.35–7.

8

Letter from Bishop Thomas Percy to E. Blakeway, 4 July 1765; cited in John Ross, ed., The Recruiting Officer (London: Ernest Benn, 1973), p. xvi. Bertram H. Davis considers the context for Percy’s searches in ‘Thomas Percy and The Recruiting Officer’, Notes and Queries n.s. vol. 30 (December 1983), pp. 490–1.

9

Hunt, The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar, cited in Ross, The Recruiting Officer, p. xviii.

10 For a summary of critical doubters, see James, The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist, p. 218 n. 1. It is perhaps no coincidence that the period’s other conspicuously plotless play, Etherege’s The Man of Mode, is often regarded as a pièce-a-clef about the real-life Earl of Rochester. Equally, the pattern of Plume’s amatory entanglements resembles Dorimant’s to a degree that suggests conscious or unconscious imitation of Etherege. 11 As explored in two articles by Robert L. Hough, ‘An Error in The Recruiting Officer’, Notes and Queries old series vol. 198 (August 1953), pp. 340–1; and Robert L. Hough, ‘Farquhar: “The Recruiting Officer”’, Notes and Queries old series vol. 199 (November 1954), p. 474. 12 See Judith M. Milhous, Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1695–1708 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979). LS2 p. 122 carries a report that Durfey’s piece was ‘made to the famous Sebel of Signior Baptist Lully’, in other words to the Act One ‘Descente de Cybelle’ in his 1676 opera Atys. See Michael Tilmouth, ‘Cibell’, in Stanley Sadie, ed., The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, 29 vols (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), V.833.

NOTES

181

13 Farquhar, ‘To All Friends Round the Wrekin’, in Kenny, II.36. 14 Kenny, II.36. 15 Hughes, English Drama, p. 408. 16 Kenny, II.36. 17 Kenny, II.10. 18 Arthur H. Scouten, ed., The London Stage Part 3 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), p. 959, records a letter to Garrick from the Reverend T. Newton: ‘You who are equal to the greatest parts, strangely demean yourself in acting anything that is low and little’. 19 Rae Blanchard, ed., The Occasional Verse of Richard Steele (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 93. 20 See above, p. 3. 21 Max Stafford-Clark, Letters to George (London: Nick Hern Books, 1989), p. 67. Callow, Acting in Restoration Comedy, pp. 29–30. 22 Wilkes, The Works of George Farquhar, p. ix. 23 George Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer (London, 1706), II.iii.10–22 in Kenny, II.59–60. 24 Ibid., II.iii.190–4 in Kenny, II.64–5. 25 Ibid., III.i.135–64 in Kenny, II.68–9. 26 Gaskill, A Sense of Direction, p. 58. His 1963 production of The Recruiting Officer for the National Theatre at the Old Vic also featured Robert Stephens, Maggie Smith and Laurence Olivier. A documentary record of the production, including press reviews, was made by Kenneth Tynan, The Recruiting Officer: The National Theatre Production (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1965). 27 The Recruiting Officer, dir. Adrian Noble, with Miles Anderson, Meg Davies and Pete Postlethwaite, at the Bristol Old Vic and Edinburgh Festival, 1980. 28 The Recruiting Officer, dir. Max Stafford-Clark, with David Haig, Jim Broadbent and Lesley Sharp, at the Royal Court Theatre, 1988. 29 The Recruiting Officer, dir. Josie Rourke, with Mark Gatiss and Mackenzie Crook, at the Donmar Warehouse, 2012. 30 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, IV.iii.sd and 19 in Kenny, II.91. 31 See above, pp. 49–51. 32 James, The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist, p. 240. James quotes at length from Arthur Bedford’s Evil and Danger of Stage Plays, Shewing Their Natural Tendency to Destroy Religion & Introduce a General Corruption of Manners (Bristol, 1706). Bedford was appalled by Farquhar’s depiction of soldiers as drunkards and philanderers. 33 James, The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist , p. 241. 34 James, The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist, pp. 236, 234. The Twin-Rivals, V.i.81–3 in Kenny, I.566. 35 II.i.14–18, Kenny, II.52. James, The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist, p. 251.

182

NOTES

36 Kevin J. Gardner, ‘Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer: Warfare, Conscription and the Disarming of Anxiety’, Eighteenth-Century Life vol. 25 no. 3 (2001), pp. 43–61. 37 James, The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist, p. 257. 38 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, I.i.224–7 in Kenny, II.46. 39 See J.C. Ross, ‘Some Notes on The Recruiting Officer’, Notes and Queries n.s. vol. 28 (June 1981), pp. 216–21. Ross also provides further information about the ‘originals’ listed by Blakeway and Owen.

Chapter 5 1

Robert John Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, The Huntington Library Quarterly (1974), pp. 251–64 (264). This chapter is indebted to Jordan’s article.

2

Ibid., p. 264.

3

Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 602.

4

Ibid., pp. 154–5.

5

Dalton, English Army Lists, V.263.

6

Bodley MS. Eng. Hist. b. 124, fol. 43 cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 253.

7

PRP, WO 25/3149, fol. 29, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 253.

8

See Lawrence Berkley Smith, ‘Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery, 1674–1731’ (University of Edinburgh, Scotland, PhD Thesis, 1994).

9

Wilkes, The Works of George Farquhar, vii.

10 Mary De La Rivière Manley, The Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality (London 1709), p. 166. 11 Margaret Farquhar’s petition, cited in Sutherland, ‘New Light on George Farquhar’, p. 371. 12 For Ormonde’s budget, National Library of Ireland MS. 992, fol. 58; for his deputies’ resistance, British Museum Add MSS. 9176, fol. 181, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 254. 13 Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 254. 14 National Library of Ireland, MS 992, fols. 122, 140, 144, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 254. 15 PRO, WO 26/13, fol. 11 and HMC 7th Report [App], p. 774, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 254. 16 Connely, George Farquhar, p. 235. 17 Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 254. 18 PRO, WO 26/13, fol. 11, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 255.

NOTES

183

19 National Library of Ireland, MS 992, fols. 43, 53 & 58; BM Add MSS 9716, fols. 177 & 181. Cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 255. 20 BM Add MSS 9765, fol. 153r, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 261. 21 Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 261. 22 Farquhar, Love and Business, in Kenny, II.352. 23 BM Add MSS 9765, fol. 153v, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 261. 24 Letter from Lord Cutts to the Duke of Ormonde dated August 1706. National Library of Ireland, MS 2469, fols. 472–3, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 256. 25 Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 256, notes that when Orrery left the army in 1716 he was ‘held personally responsible for a similar state of decay in the regiment he commanded at that time’. 26 See Herbert Davis, ed., The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, 14 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939–68), V.264; and ‘The Legion Club’ in Harold Williams, ed., The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), III.831. 27 Dalton, English Army Lists, V.264. 28 BM Add MSS 9765, fols. 115–16 and 120, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’ p. 256. 29 BM Add MSS 9766, fol. 62, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, pp. 256–7. 30 BM Add MSS 9766, fol. 25v; PRO, WO 4/5, fols. 108r and 130r, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 257. 31 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, III.i.127–9, in Kenny, II.69. 32 Anon., Impartial Occurrences, Foreign and Domestic, no. 92 (26 June 1705), p. 478, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 259. 33 Anon., Dawks’s News Letter, 28 June 1705 (Dublin, 1705); PRO, SP 63/365 (ii), letters 120 and 121, cited by Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 260. 34 National Library of Ireland, MS 2464, fols. 137–42; Impartial Occurrences, Foreign and Domestic, no. 96 (10 July 1705), p. 497, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 261. 35 See an order of 25 November 1704, PRO, WO 25/3149, fols. 34–5, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’ pp. 257–8. 36 Impartial Occurrences, Foreign and Domestic, no. 78 (27 March 1705), p. 406. 37 Wilkes, The Works of George Farquhar, p. ix. Mary Pollard, A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade 1550–1800 (London: Bibliographical Society, 2000), pp. 197–8.

184

NOTES

38 For a commentary on Swift’s intervention via The Drapier’s Letters, see David Nokes, Jonathan Swift. A Hypocrite Reversed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 280–91. 39 Pollard, A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade 1550–1800, p. 198. 40 Wilkes, The Works of George Farquhar, p. x. 41 Ibid., p. x. 42 Anon., A Comparison between the Two Stages (London, 1702), p. 32. 43 Ibid., p. 32; Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, p. 446; Jackson I. Cope, ‘The Constant Couple: Farquhar’s Four-Plays-in-One’, ELH vol. 41 no. 4 (1974), pp. 477–93. 44 The argument is Jackson Cope’s, who further sees a subtle dig at Thomas Betterton of the kind Farquhar would repeat in ‘A Discourse Upon Comedy’. See above, p.100. 45 George Farquhar, The Constant Couple (London 1699), original ending reprinted as Appendix A in Kenny’s edition, I.228; Kenny, ‘Humane Comedy’, pp. 29–43 (p. 30). In The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), John Harold Smith sees Sir Harry and Angelica as part of a longer tradition of sparring couples. 46 Kenny, ‘Humane Comedy’, p. 30. 47 Farquhar, The Constant Couple, I.i.124 in Kenny, I.157. 48 Ibid., I.i.129–53 in Kenny, I.157. 49 Ibid., I.i.130–8 in Kenny, I.157. 50 John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (London, 1708), ed. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1987), p. 106. 51 Anon., ‘Robert Wilks’, in Philip H. Highfill Jr, Kalvin A. Burnham and Edward A. Langhans, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), vol 16, pp.108–23. 52 Cited in LS1, p. 518. 53 Highfill et al., Biographical Dictionary, p. 116. 54 Farquhar, The Constant Couple, I.i.184–7 in Kenny, I.159. 55 PRO, WO 25/3149, fol. 45, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 261. 56 BM Add MSS 9765, fols. 194 and 210–12, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 261. 57 HMC Ormonde VIII, p. 190, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 262. 58 ‘Richard Moor to be Lieut of Grenadiers in ye room of George Farquhar in John Fermors company of L. Orrerys Regt’. BM Egerton MSS 1631, fol. 13v, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 262.

NOTES

185

59 Submission of 7 September 1711 in PRO, WO 26/284, cited in Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 262. Also Anon., An Essay on the Most Effectual Way to Recruit the Army and Render It More Serviceable by Preventing Desertion, by a Lover of His Country and the Army (London, 1707), p. 16. 60 O’Bryan, Authentic Memoirs, p. 23. 61 Sutherland, ‘New Light on George Farquhar’, p. 171; Jordan, ‘George Farquhar’s Military Career’, p. 263. Jordan refers to BM Add MSS 9762, fol. 188, which lists a ‘Farqhuar’ among captains ‘recommended to [Ormonde] for employment in the army’.

Chapter 6 1

Kenny, II.340.

2

Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem, III.i.18 in Kenny, II.184.

3

Farquhar, Love and Business, in Kenny, II.350.

4

Kenny, II.351.

5

See Rochester’s lyric, ‘All my past life’, in Paddy Lyons, ed., Rochester. Complete Poems and Plays (London: Dent, 1993), p.32.

6

Kenny, II.351.

7

Ibid., II.352.

8

Ibid.

9

Ibid.

10 See Connely, George Farquhar, p. 209. 11 Kenny, II.353. 12 William Matthews, ed., The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715–1716 (London: Methuen, 1939), p. 44. 13 Kenny, II.337. 14 Ibid., II.355. 15 Ibid., II.356. 16 Ibid., II.350. 17 Ibid., II.337. 18 Thomas Otway , ‘Love Letters Written by the Late Most Ingenious Mr Thomas Otway’, in J.C. Ghosh, ed., The Works of Thomas Otway, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), II.475–81. 19 Kenny, II.341 and 337. 20 Connely, George Farquhar, p. 205. 21 Middlesex Sessions: Sessions Papers – Justices’ Working Documents SM/PS, 1 June 1701, London Lives, 1690–1800, LMSMPS500790004 (available at www.londonlives.org, version 1.1, 17 June 2010. Last accessed 1 May 2017), London Metropolitan Archives.

186

NOTES

22 Middlesex Sessions: Sessions Papers – Justices’ Working Documents, 1701, LL, LMSMPS500790004. 23 Marriage Allegations, July 1683 – July 1686, FM I/10, Faculty Office, Lambeth Palace Library. 24 Benjamin’s grandfather, John Pemell, was one of nine parishioners appointed to take possession of the parsonage occupied by the previous royalist vicar, Benjamin Stone. See House of Lords Journal, vol. 9: 11 March 1646 (London: HMSO, 1767–1830), pp. 71–4, available at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ lords-jrnl/vol9/pp71-74. Last accessed 4 November 2016. 25 All Hallows London Wall, Composite Register: baptisms and marriages 1559– 1653, burials 1559–1651, P69/ALH5/A/001/MS05083, London Metropolitan Archives. 26 J.R. Woodhead, ed., The Rulers of London 1660–1689: A Biographical Record of Aldermen and Common Councilmen of the City of London (London: London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, 1966), and accessed online 19 October 2016 at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/londonrulers/1660-89 27 St Mary Abchurch, Composite Register, 1558–1736, P69/MRY1/A/001/ MS07666, London Metropolitan Archives. The children were Richard (christened 3 April 1632), Ester (13 December 1633), Edward (17 June 1636; an uncle of that name died on 22 October 1686 and was buried at the same church), Jane (12 March 1638), Joseph (29 July 1640 but died the following day), Thomas (christening unknown but he died on 12 August 1680; his will expresses a wish to be buried at St Mary Abchurch). 28 Will of John Pemell, Prerogative Court of Canterbury and Related Probate Jurisdictions: Will Registers, Class: PROB 11/370, The National Archives, Kew. For St Mary Abchurch, London Metropolitan Archives, St Mary Abchurch, Composite Register, 1558–1736, P69/MRY1/A/001/MS07666. 29 Will of John Pemell, Prerogative Court of Canterbury and Related Probate Jurisdictions: Will Registers, p. 270 (b). 30 National Archives, Probate lawsuit Pemell vs Pemell, concerning the deceased Thomas Pemell, PRO 18/12/44. Other lawsuits of the same period carry the name Benjamin Pemell; it has not been determined whether Pemell vs Battersby (C 10/150/88) and Pemell vs Antrobus (C 6/271/64), both relatively trivial property disputes, were a matter for Margaret’s father-in-law or husband. 31 As proved by the will of Peter Moulson of Wharton, Cheshire, in the National Archive at Kew. See Prerogative Court of Canterbury and Related Probate Jurisdictions: Will Registers, Class PROB 11; Piece: 345. 32 Weinreb and Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia, p. 760. 33 Composite Register for St Mary Abchurch. I am grateful to Signe Hoffos for this information (private communication dated 26 October 2016). Strangely, it appears that one burial took place on 4 September 1666, the day after the Great Fire is believed to have reached Abchurch Lane. The vault is now sealed and inaccessible but it is possible that burials will be revealed during excavation for the new Crossrail line linking East and West London.

NOTES

187

34 Report on the Charities of the Drapers’ Company: Part III, in City of London Livery Companies Commission Report, vol. 4 (London, 1884), pp. 160–77, available at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/livery-companies-commission/ vol4/pp160-177#h3-0005. Last accessed 4 November 2016. 35 Middlesex Sessions: Sessions Papers – Justices’ Working Documents SM/PS 1 February 1692, London Lives, 1690–1800, LMSMPS500180030. Available at www.londonlives.org, version 1.1), London Metropolitan Archives. Last accessed 9 June 2017. 36 See above, p. 29. 37 For example Leo Hughes, The Drama’s Patrons: A Study of EighteenthCentury Audiences (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971). 38 George Farquhar, ‘A Discourse upon Comedy’, in Love and Business (London, 1701) in Kenny, II.368. 39 Ibid., II.368 40 Ibid., II.368–9. 41 Ibid., II.369–70. 42 Ibid., II.370–1. 43 Ibid., II.376. 44 Dryden, Preface to All for Love, np. 45 Ibid., np. 46 Charles Edward Guardia argues that while he attacked the concept of the unities, Farquhar wrote remarkably unified plays. See his ‘Studies in the Dramatic Technique of George Farquhar’, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Harvard University, 1951). 47 Kenny, II, 376–7. Robert D. Hume points out similarities with a point previously made by Edward Howard. See his article, ‘The Theory of Comedy in the Restoration’, Modern Philology vol. 70 no. 4 (May 1973), pp. 302–18. 48 Farquhar, ‘A Discourse upon Comedy’, in Kenny, II.377. 49 Ibid., II.378–9. 50 Ibid., II.379. 51 Ibid., II.380. 52 See Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation, pp. 180–224. 53 Farquhar, ‘A Discourse upon Comedy’, in Kenny, II.381. 54 Ibid., II.382–3. 55 Ibid., II.384. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., II.386. 58 Ibid. 59 Anon., Comparison, pp. 173–4. 60 Cibber, Apology, p.145. 61 Kenny, I.504. 62 Kenny, I.150.

188

NOTES

63 George Farquhar, Preface to The Twin-Rivals (London, 1702) in Kenny, I.499. 64 For detailed discussion of the Collier controversy, Sister Rose Anthony, The Jeremy Collier Stage Controversy, 1698–1728 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1937), esp. pp. 165–71 in relation to Farquhar; and Yuji Kaneko, ed., The Restoration Stage Controversy, 6 vols (London: Thoemmes Press, 1996). 65 See, for example, Collier’s The Desertion Discuss’d in a Letter to a Country Gentleman (1698). 66 Farquhar, Preface to The Twin-Rivals in Kenny, I.499. 67 Ibid., I.499. Dryden’s Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) admits that Collier had ‘taxed [him] justly’ in many respects. 68 Farquhar, Preface to The Twin-Rivals in Kenny, I.499. 69 Ibid., I.499. 70 As explored by Elizabeth Savage, ‘“For Want of Clelia”: Re-placing the Maternal Body in The Twin-Rivals’, Comparative Drama vol. 42 no. 4 (2008), pp. 481–532. 71 Farquhar, Preface to The Twin-Rivals in Kenny, I.500. 72 Ibid., I.499. 73 Ibid., I.501. 74 Wilkes, The Works of George Farquhar, p. viii; Jacob, p. 99. 75 LS2, p. 30. 76 Kenny, I.483. 77 Ibid., I.486. 78 For the ‘Picture’, see above, pp. 90–92. 79 Kenny, I.482–3. 80 Farquhar, The Twin-Rivals, V.iv.68–72 in Kenny, I.576. 81 The Twin-Rivals, dir. John Caird, with Miles Anderson and Mike Gwilym, for the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place, 1981, and The Pit at the Barbican, 1982. 82 Farquhar, The Twin-Rivals, I.i.1–2 in Kenny, I.505. On the evolution and significance of the dressing scene, see Emrys Jones, ‘The First West End Comedy’, Proceedings of the British Academy vol. 68 (1982), 215–58. Dorimant is the hero of Sir George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676). 83 Farquhar, The Twin-Rivals, I.i.15–16 in Kenny, I.505. 84 Ibid., I.i.111–12 in Kenny, I.508. 85 Ibid., I.i.78–83 in Kenny, I.507. 86 Ibid., I.i.90–1 in Kenny, I.507. 87 Ibid., I.i.99 in Kenny, I.507. 88 Ibid., I.i.253–5 in Kenny, I.511. 89 Ibid., I.i.264–5 in Kenny, I.512. 90 Ibid., I.i.276–7 in Kenny, I.512. 91 Ibid., II.v.67–74 in Kenny, I.532.

NOTES

92

See above, p. 125.

93

Farquhar, The Twin-Rivals, II.v.75–6 in Kenny, I.532.

94

See Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, p. 433.

95

Farquhar, The Twin-Rivals, III.i.28–30 in Kenny, I.533.

96

See above, pp. 129–30.

97

Farquhar, The Twin-Rivals, III.i.51–5 in Kenny, I.534.

98

Ibid., V.iv.149–50 in Kenny, I.578.

99

Pyle, ‘George Farquhar (1677–1707)’, p. 17.

189

100 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), p. 281.

Chapter 7 1

Rothstein, George Farquhar, p. 49.

2

Ibid., p. 50.

3

Sir Harry Wildair, V.vi.112–16 in Kenny, I.310–11.

4

Ibid., V.iv.36–9 in Kenny, I.304.

5

Anon., A New Miscellany of Original Poems (London, 1701), cited in Kenny, I.241–2.

6

Oldmixon, Prologue to Charles Gildon, Measure for Measure (London, 1700).

7

Daniel Kenrick, A New Session of the Poets Occasioned by the Death of Mr Dryden (London, 1700), cited in Kenny, I.133.

8

See, for example, Robert Martley, ‘The Canon and Its Critics’, in Deborah Payne Fisk, ed., The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 226–42.

9

Kenrick, A New Session of the Poets, cited in Kenny, I.133.

10 Daniel Kenrick, The Tryal of Skill: Or, A New Session of the Poets (1705), cited in Kenny, I.133. 11 Kenrick, The Tryal of Skill in Kenny, I.133. 12 Pope, ‘The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated’, in Butt, The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 645 (ll.287–8). 13 Farquhar, ‘To the Right Honourable the Earl of Albemarle’, Sir Harry Wildair in Kenny, I.251. 14 Nicholas Rowe, ‘To the Right Honourable William, Lord Marquiss of Hartington’, in Tamerlane (London, 1702), sig.B. In later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century tellings of the story it is Bajazeth who is portrayed as the Jacobite threat: ‘a man of stern invincible ambition, rage, cruelty, atheism, and an insensibility to all impressions of friendship and generosity’. 15 Sir Harry Wildair, I.i.397 in Kenny, I.266.

190

NOTES

16 Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, p. 446. 17 Wilks played Sir Harry again, Jane Rogers came back from the dead as Angelica, while Norris (Dicky), Pinkethman (Clincher Senior) and Susannah Verbruggen (Lurewell) reprised their original roles. 18 The play was not published until 1705 but there is evidence of its premiere no later than February 1702 and possibly as early as April 1701. J.O. Bartley reviews the development of the stage Irishman in ‘The Development of a Stock Character: 1. The Stage Irishman to 1800’, Modern Language Review vol. 37 no. 4 (October 1942), pp. 438–77. 19 Farquhar, The Stage-Coach, I.i.66–9 in Kenny, I.350. 20 ‘To Richard Tighe, Esq’, in Kenny, I.404. 21 Preface to The Inconstant in Kenny, I.405. 22 The Inconstant, IV.ii.4–11 in Kenny, I.444. For discussion of Farquhar’s treatment of Fletcher, see A.C. Sprague, Beaumont and Fletcher on the Restoration Stage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), pp. 98–100 and 248–55. 23 John Milton, ‘Areopagitica’, in Selected Prose (1644), p. 213. 24 Farquhar, The Twin-Rivals, III.ii.17–19 in Kenny, I.538. 25 Ibid., III.ii.22–3 in Kenny, I.538. 26 Ibid., III.ii.25–6 in Kenny, I.538. 27 Ibid., III.ii.92–4 in Kenny, I.540. 28 Ibid., III.ii.114–16 in Kenny, I.540–1. 29 Ibid., IV.i.208–9 in Kenny, I.554. 30 A point made by Michael Cordner in his edition of the play, p. xviii. 31 The Beaux’ Stratagem, IV.ii.100–1 in Kenny, II.220. 32 Briscoe kept premises in Russell Street, next to Will’s coffee house, and published plays by Dryden and Congreve. See Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1668 to 1725, p. 50. 33 Letter to Samuel Briscoe, 10 August 1700 (new style), in Kenny, II.316. The dead nephew, son of Princess Anne, was the Duke of Gloucester. 34 State Papers Domestic (SP 44, 101, p. 137) in Kenny, II.287. 35 Rothstein, George Farquhar, p. 113. 36 Letter to Briscoe in Kenny, II.317. 37 Ibid., II.316. 38 Ibid., II.317. 39 Letter to ‘Madam’, presumed to be Margaret Pemell, 23 October 1700, in Kenny, II.360. The best instance of this line of humour is Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Character of Holland’, in Nigel Smith, ed., The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 2nd edn (Harlow: Pearson, 2007), p. 251: ‘Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid, / And oft at leap-frog o’er their steeples played’. 40 Letter to Briscoe in Kenny, II.317.

NOTES

191

41 Ibid., II.318. 42 Ibid., II.318–9. 43 Ibid., II.319. 44 Letter to Briscoe (from Leiden) in Kenny, II.320. 45 Ibid., II.320–1. 46 Ibid., II.321. 47 Ibid., II.323–7. 48 Letter of 23 October 1700, in Kenny, II.361. The Captain has not been identified. 49 Connely, George Farquhar, pp. 138–57. For the ‘Picture’, see above, pp. 90–92.

Chapter 8 1

The critical verdict is Robert D. Hume’s, in his The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, p. 446. For The Beggar’s Opera, which had 62 performances in the 1728–9 season, see Kenny, I.121.

2

Maurice Ashley, Louis XIV and the Greatness of France, 2nd edn (New York: Free Press, 1965), p. 125.

3

For an account of entertainments derived from the 1700 Jubilee, see Matt Roberson, ‘The Prize Music of 1701: A Reinvestigation of the Staging Issue’, in Kathryn Lowerre, ed., The Lively Arts of the London Stage, 1675–1725 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 47–62. See also Richard Morton and William M. Peterson, ‘The Jubilee of 1700 and Farquhar’s The Constant Couple’, Notes and Queries vol. 200 (1955), pp. 521–5. For the impact on Peg Woffington’s performance of Sir Harry, see Felicity Nussbaum, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater (Philadelphia and Oxford: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 219–20.

4

Trussler, Introduction to The Constant Couple, p. xvii.

5

Poems on Affairs of State, cited in Connely, George Farquhar, p. 171.

6

Anon., Comparison, p. 55.

7

Susanna Centlivre, Preface to Love’s Contrivance (London: James Knapton, 1703).

8

Farquhar, The Constant Couple, Dramatis Personae in Kenny, I.153.

9

Ibid., IV.i.18 in Kenny, I.196.

10 Ibid., I.i.91–2 in Kenny, I.156. 11 Ibid., V.i.222–3 in Kenny, I.215. 12 Hughes, ‘Who Counts in Farquhar?’, pp. 11–12. 13 Rothstein, George Farquhar, pp. 39–40. 14 Ibid., p. 40. 15 Trussler, Introduction to The Constant Couple, p. xvii.

192

NOTES

16 Hughes, English Drama, p. 408. 17 Kenrick, A New Session of the Poets, p. 136; Connely, George Farquhar, pp. 92–3. 18 Kenny, I.150. 19 Both versions are printed in Kenny, I.222–31. 20 Appendix A, l.101 in Kenny, I.230. 21 Kenny, II.251. 22 Cited in Baker, ‘George Farquhar’ in Biographia Dramatica, II.123–4. 23 Leigh Hunt, The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar, pp. lxiv–lvx. 24 Farquhar, Adventures, ll.1–2 in Kenny, II.259. 25 Farquhar, ‘The Dedication’, Adventures, in Kenny, II.255. Connely, George Farquhar, p. 56, speculates that Farquhar was introduced at Will’s by the Dublin-born poet John Hopkins. 26 Farquhar, ‘To the Reader’ Adventures, in Kenny, II.257. 27 See Kenny, II.251. 28 Kenny, I.25. 29 Farquhar, ‘To the Reader’ Adventures, in Kenny, II.257. 30 Ibid. 31 A reference to the new Lord Mayor in the preface must post-date election day, 29 September 1698, and perhaps his inauguration on 29 October. 32 Farquhar, Adventures in Kenny, II.269. 33 Ibid., II.270. 34 A view favoured by Rothstein, George Farquhar, p. 72. 35 Farquhar, ‘To the Reader’ Adventures, in Kenny, II.258. 36 Ibid., II.258. 37 Ibid. 38 For the date of Love and a Bottle, see Post-Man, 27–29 December 1698, cited in LS1, p. 507. 39 Farquhar, Adventures in Kenny, II.261–2. 40 Ibid., II.276–7. 41 Rothstein, George Farquhar, p. 72. 42 Ibid., p. 78. 43 Ibid. 44 Anon., Comparison, p. 15. 45 Anon., Memoirs relating to the late famous Mr. Thomas Browne, np. 46 Kenny, I.28–9. 47 Kenny, I.37; for discussion, I.6–7. The idea that Farquhar left Dublin having already completed Love and a Bottle was first advanced by Daniel O’Bryan’s Authentic Memoirs, pp. 13–14, and perpetuated by subsequent scholars, including Connely, George Farquhar, p. 48; Rothstein, George Farquhar,

NOTES

193

p. 17; Robert Hitchcock, An Historical View of the Irish Stage from the Earliest Period Down to the Close of the Season 1788, 2 vols (Dublin, 1788–94), I.315; and A.C. Ewald, Preface to The Dramatic Works of George Farquhar, 2 vols (London, 1892), I.vii. 48 Love and a Bottle, I.i.19–21 in Kenny, I.29. 49 Ibid., I.i.29–30 in Kenny, I.30. 50 Ibid., I.i.144–67 in Kenny, I.33. 51 Ibid., I.i.179–81 in Kenny, I.34. 52 Ibid., I.i.233–8 in Kenny, I.35. 53 Ibid., II.i.8–22 in Kenny, I.42–3. 54 Ibid., II.i.56–7 in Kenny, I.43. 55 Ibid., III.ii.3–11 in Kenny, I.67. 56 Ibid., III.ii.28–39 in Kenny, I.67. 57 William Wycherley, The Country Wife, in Peter Holland, ed., The Plays of William Wycherley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 280; III.ii.340–61. 58 The Constant Couple, V.i.220–31 in Kenny, I.215; The Beaux’ Stratagem, II.ii.151 in Kenny, II.181. 59 The year 1703 saw the publication of the anonymous The Ladies Catechism, The Beaus Catechism and The Town-Misses Catechism. In 1704 those were followed by the anonymous The Ladies Catechism for Paint and Patches, The High-Flyers Catechism, The Atheist’s Catechism and The Players Catechism. 60 Kenny, II.451, discusses the likely order of Farquhar’s final works. 61 Love and a Bottle, III.ii.74–5 in Kenny, I.68. 62 Ibid., III.i.192–204 in Kenny, I.63–4. 63 Ibid., IV.ii.48–56 Kenny, I.80–1. 64 Ibid., IV.ii.38–9 & 58–62 Kenny, I.80–1. 65 O’Bryan, Authentic Memoirs, pp. 13–14. 66 Wilkes, The Works of George Farquhar, p. v. 67 See Hitchcock, Historical View of the Irish Stage, I.315; Connely, George Farquhar, p. 48; Rothstein, George Farquhar, p. 17. 68 Ewald, Preface to The Dramatic Works of George Farquhar, I.vii. 69 Kenny, I.6.

Chapter 9 1

For actors, LS1, p. ci. Ogilby won his battle with Davenant when the Dublin patent was issued to him on 8 May 1661. SP 63/307, no. 201, recorded in Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, eds., A Register of English Theatrical Documents, 1660–1737, 2 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), no. 71.

194

NOTES

2

St Marylebone, Westminster, Composite Register: Burials Apr 1668–Dec 1711, Baptisms Jan 1679/80–Oct 1711, Marriages Apr 1668–Dec 1711, P89/ MRY1/001, London Metropolitan Archives. Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry Knapton and christened at the Church of St Helen, Bishopsgate, on 13 September 1674. See St Helen Bishopgate, Composite Register: Baptisms 1649–1700, Banns 1653, Marriages 1666–1695, Burials 1651–1686, P69/ HEL/A/002/MS06831, Item 002, London Metropolitan Archives.

3

England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538–1975, FHL Film number 56037, Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2014.

4

James Mills, ed., The Registers of St John the Evangelist, Dublin: 1619 to 1699 (Dublin: A. Thom & Co., 1906), p. 244. The entry for 30 October 1694 reads ‘Two twins, daughters of Mr Robert Wilks’.

5

Ibid., p. 247. The date given is 15 October 1695.

6

See William J. Burling, Summer Theatre in London, 1661–1820 (Madison: Teaneck Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000); John Dunton, The Dublin Scuffle: Being a Challenge Sent by John Dunton, Citizen of London, to Patrick Campbell, Bookseller in Dublin (London, 1699).

7

DNB gives 1698 and Genest 1699; there is no record of a performance by Wilks in the 1698–99 season, or indeed before The Constant Couple on 28 November 1699. See LS1, p. 517.

8

England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538–1975, 560371.

9

Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, p. 31. For commentary see my Thomas Betterton: The Greatest Actor of the Restoration Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 141–2 (Hart) and 13 (Davenant).

10 See Robert Jordan, ‘Richard Norton and the Theatre at Southwick’, Theatre Notebook, vol. 38 (1984), pp. 105–15. 11 See Jacob Hooke, Pinacotheca Bettertonaeana: The Library of a SeventeenthCentury Actor, David Roberts, ed. (London: Society for Theatre Research, 2013). 12 Mark S. Dawson, Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); for Betterton, see Robert Gould, ‘A Satyr against the Play-house’, in Poems, Chiefly Consisting of Satyrs and Satirical Epistles (London, 1689) p.183. 13 Edmund Curll, The Life of That Eminent Comedian Robert Wilks, Esq. (1733). 14 Joseph Knight, ‘Wilks, Robert’, in Sir Lesley Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds., The Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), volume 20.280. 15 There were a number of Wilkses across Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire who were relatively prosperous but did not even serve as Justices of the Peace; none is close to the description in Curll. No Judge Wilks is to be found in the records of the Quarter Sessions for the three counties between 1625 and 1665. There are no plausible candidates in John Venn and J.A. Venn, eds., Alumni Cantabrigienses Part I. Vol. IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927) or Joseph Foster, ed., Alumni Oxonienses 1500– 1714 (Oxford, 1891). The same is true for the Inns of Court: http://www.

NOTES

195

innertemplearchives.org.uk/, last accessed 30 April 2017; W. Paley, ed., The Records of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, Vol. I (London, 1896); Joseph Foster, ed., The Register of Admissions to Gray’s Inn, 1521–1889 (London, 1889); or Sir Henry Macgeagh and H.A.C. Sturgess, eds., Register of Admissions to the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple (London: Butterworth & Co, 1949). 16 England, Select Births and Christenings, 560371. 17 The cast list for The Island Princess does not mention Wilks. 18 O’Bryan, Preface to Authentic Memoirs, sig.A2. 19 Unfortunately the records of the school do not extend back to the 1670s. Information supplied by Mr Tim Gill, Principal of St Patrick’s Cathedral Grammar School, Dublin. 20 See William Cotter Stubbs, ‘The Weavers Guild, the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Dublin, 1446–1840’, The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Series 6, Vol. IX (1919), pp. 60–88. This was a family tradition. Henry F. Berry, ‘The Goldsmiths’ Company of Dublin, Guild of All Saints’, The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Series 5, Vol. XXXI, no. 2 (1901), pp. 119–33, shows that an Edward Wylkes had been admitted as a Freeman of the city in 1591. 21 O’Bryan, Authentic Memoirs, pp. 5–6. 22 Ibid., p. 7. 23 Ibid., p. 8. 24 See Winn, John Dryden and His World, pp. 333–6. 25 O’Bryan, Authentic Memoirs, p. 8. 26 Ibid., p. 9. 27 Berry, ‘The Goldsmiths’, p. 122. 28 Knight, ‘Wilks, Robert’, p. 280. 29 O’Bryan, Authentic Memoirs, p. 10. 30 Knight, ‘Wilks, Robert’, p. 280. 31 Connely, George Farquhar, p. 41. 32 Knight, ‘Wilks, Robert’, p. 280. 33 O’Bryan, Authentic Memoirs, p. 12. 34 See Cheryl Wanko, Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2003). 35 O’Bryan, Authentic Memoirs, p. 13. 36 For the date, Kenny, II.285. 37 Farquhar, ‘An Epilogue, Spoken by Mr Wilks at His First Appearance upon the English Stage’, in Kenny, II.328. The piece is included in Farquhar’s Love and Business. 38 Farquhar, Love and a Bottle, I.i.231 in Kenny, I.35. 39 See Paul Baines, Edmund Curll, Bookseller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

196

NOTES

Chapter 10 1

Connely, George Farquhar, p. 38.

2

State Papers 63/304, no. 171, reprinted in Leslie Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), pp. 209–10 . See also Milhous and Hume, Register, nos. 47 and 71 (I.14 & 19).

3

State Papers 63/307, no. 201, referenced in Milhous and Hume, Register, no. 71 (I.19) and no. 93 (I.24).

4

Order dated 6 August 1662, State Papers 29/58, no. 15. I, referenced in Milhous and Hume, Register, no. 148 (I.36).

5

LS1, p. cclxv.

6

Chetwood, A General History of the Stage, p. 20.

7

Connely, George Farquhar, p. 40; LS1, p. 313.

8

Ibid., p. 38.

9

Wilkes, The Works of George Farquhar, p. iv.

10 Hitchcock, Historical View of the Irish Stage, I.25. A number of sources also cite a ‘tragedian’ called Price, presumably not Joseph Price, formerly of the Duke’s Company, who had died in 1673; see LS1, p. 210. 11 Anon., Poeta Infamis: Or, a Poet Not Worth Hanging (London, 1692), p. 3. 12 Wilkes, The Works of George Farquhar, p. iv. 13 William Shakespeare, Othello, M.R.Ridley, ed. (London: Methuen, 1965), I.ii.263-4. 14 Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, p. 72. 15 See above, p. 38. 16 Wilkes, The Works of George Farquhar, p. iv. 17 The incident is recorded in Chetwood, ‘Memoirs’, iv; Wilkes gives the other actor’s name as Price; Hitchcock, Historical View of the Irish Stage, I.31, gives the year as 1697. 18 Sir Thomas Phillips, Londonderry and London Companies (London: HMSO, 1928). 19 Farquhar, ‘A Discourse upon Comedy’, in Kenny, II.377. See above, pp. 96–101. 20 Ibid., II.377. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London, 1726). 21 ‘Farquhar, ‘A Discourse upon Comedy’, in Kenny, II.377. 22 Chetwood, ‘Memoirs’, p.iii in Kenny, II.523. 23 Chetwood, ‘Memoirs’, p. iv. 24 Kenny, II.525. 25 Foster, Modern Ireland, pp. 140–1. 26 Foster, p. 141. 27 George Walker, A True Account of the Siege of London-Derry (London, 1689), p. 6, lists ‘8 Sakers and 12 demi-culverins’.

NOTES

197

28 Ibid., p. 34. 29 Ibid., p. 36. 30 Connely, George Farquhar, p. 19. The other study is Thomas Witherow’s The Boyne and Aughrim (London, 1879). 31 Walker, A True Account of the Siege of London-Derry, pp. 25–6. 32 David Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 254. 33 Kenny, II.284. 34 Farquhar, ‘On the Death of General Schomberg’, ll.51–5 in Kenny, II.310. 35 Ibid., l.94 in Kenny, II.312. 36 Ellis Walker, Enchiridion in a Poetical Paraphrase (London, 1692). 37 Ibid., p. 6. 38 Connely, George Farquhar, p. 21. 39 Inscription for Ellis Walker in St Peter’s Church, Drogheda, cited in Connely, George Farquhar, p. 25. 40 Nokes, Jonathan Swift, p. 9. 41 Wilkes, The Works of George Farquhar, p. iii. 42 Ibid., p. iv. 43 Chetwood, ‘Memoirs’, p. iv. 44 Cited in William Howett, ‘Oliver Goldsmith’, in Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, 2 vols (London, 1857), I.336. 45 Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 75, shows that 80 per cent of those from poorer backgrounds completed, compared with 30 per cent of gentry and 68 per cent of sons from professional backgrounds. 46 Nokes, Jonathan Swift, p. 12. 47 Farquhar, ‘An Epigram, on the Riding-House in Dublin, Made into a Chappel’, included in Love and Business in Kenny, II.314. 48 For a classic study, see Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Oakland: University of California Press, 1978). 49 Henry Cotton, Fasti Ecclesiae Hibernicae: The Succession of the Prelates in Ireland, 5 vols (Dublin, 1878), III.362. 50 Wilkes, The Works of George Farquhar, p. iv. 51 Ibid., p. iv. 52 Cibber, A Poem on the Death of Our Late Sovereign Lady Queen Mary (London, 1695); Congreve, The Mourning Muse of Alexis: A Pastoral Lamenting the Death of Our Late Gracious Queen Mary of Ever Blessed Memory (London, 1695); Dennis, The Court of Death: A Pindarique Poem Dedicated to the Memory of Her Most Sacred Majesty, Queen Mary (London, 1695); Durfey, Gloriana: Funeral Pindarique Poem Sacred to the Blessed Memory of That Ever-Admir’d and Most Excellent Princess, Our Late Gracious Sovereign Lady Queen Mary (London, 1695); Tate, Mausolaeum: A Funeral

198

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Poem on Our Late Gracious Sovereign Queen Mary of Blessed Memory (London, 1695). 53 Anon., England’s Deliverance from Popery and Slavery and the Piety and Justice of King William and Queen Mary of Eever Blessed Memory, in Ascending the Throne of These Dominions (London, 1695). 54 Farquhar, ‘On the Death of the late Queen’, in Love and Business in Kenny, II.331. 55 Edward Arwaker, A Pindaric Ode upon our Late Sovereign Lady of Blessed Memory, Queen Mary (London, 1695); Samuel Cobb, A Pindarique Ode: Humbly Offer’d to the Ever-Blessed Memory of Our Late Gracious Sovereign Lady, Queen Mary (London, 1695). 56 Chetwood, A General History of the Stage, p. 151. 57 Recorded in Baker, I.225. For Swift and Dean Lloyd, see Nokes, Jonathan Swift, pp. 12–13. Connely, George Farquhar, p. 28, assumes that Lloyd also taught Farquhar. 58 Cited in Peter Kavanagh, ‘George Farquhar’, Times Literary Supplement, 10 February 1945, p. 72. The fair had been founded in 1204 by order of King John. 59 See ‘The Song of Donnybrook Fair’ and ‘The Humours of Donnybrook Fair’, the latter of which exists in two separate versions. Later in the eighteenth century the event was moved to late August. 60 Anon., The Humours of Donnybrook Fair, or The Sprig of Shillelah (Dublin, 1820). 61 In the translation by Kavanagh. 62 Register, cited in Kavanagh, ‘George Farquhar’. 63 Love and Business in Kenny, II.351. 64 Register, cited in Kavanagh, ‘George Farquhar’. 65 John William Stubbs, The History of the University of Dublin, from Its Foundation to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1889), pp. 146–50. 66 Sir Harry Wildair, II.i.202–5 in Kenny I.272. 67 Connely, George Farquhar, p. 25. 68 The entry reads ‘Georgis Farquhare, Sizator, filius Gulielmi Farquhare, Clerici’, giving Farquhar’s hometown as Londonderry and stating that he had been taught there by ‘magistro Walker’. His age on 17 July 1694 is given as ‘Annos 17’. 69 J.B. Leslie, ed., Clogher Clergy and Parishes: Being an Account of the Clergy of the Church of Ireland in the Diocese of Clogher, from the Earliest Period, with Historical Notices of the Several Parishes, Churches etc. (Enniskillen: R.H. Ritchie, 1929); cited in the revised edition by D.W.T. Crooks, Clergy of Clogher: Biographical Succession Lists (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2006), p. 146. 70 Connely, George Farquhar, p. 14. 71 Deposition of George Fercher, 4 Jan 1641, in Trinity College Dublin, The Deposition Books: Fermanaugh, MS 835, fols. 105r–106v.

NOTES

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72 The death is recorded in Clogher Clergy. The entry on George Fercher reads ‘1634. George Farkher (or Farquhar), pres. to the B. by the Crown, Aug. 16 (L.M. v. 110) adm. Aug. 17, ind. Aug. 23, ord. D. 6 Feb., 1630, as M.A., ord. P. 20 April, 1631 (jR.F. 1634) He was C. Clones 1633. There was a deposition made by him as “of Tonehey, Co. Ferm.” on Jan. 4, 1641/2 (Dep. of 1641, T.C.D.) The P. Will of George Fercher, Minister of the Parish of Kilburron, was proved in 1657’. 73 Cotton, Fast ecclesiae hibernicaei, III.369. 74 Anon., A List of Such of the Names of the Nobility, Gentry and Commonalty of England and Ireland (London, 1690), p. 35. This may be the same person as the ‘Johannes Farquhardus’ listed among the MA students of Marischal College, Aberdeen, so making George Farquhar a second-generation immigrant in Ireland. See Peter John Anderson, ed., Fasti Acadamiae Mariscallanae Aberdonensis: Selections from the Records of the Marischal College and University (Aberdeen, 1898). 75 Anon., An Account of the Transactions of the Late King James in Ireland (London, 1690), pp. 52–3. 76 Ibid., pp. 25 and 53. 77 Ibid., p. 37. 78 Ch. MisceU. Mea. P.R.O., in Clogher Clergy p.146. 79 Irish Civil Misc. Cor. P.R.O., No. 2,282, Carton 26, cited in Clogher Clergy p.146. 80 For a study of this topic, see Elisabeth L. Mignon, Crabbed Age and Youth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1947), pp. 160–75. 81 Connely, George Farquhar, p. 15.

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Repositories Hereford and Worcester Record Office: H.W.R.O. Worcestershire Court of Quarter Sessions. Sessions Papers 1651–1699. Summary Sheets and Indexes (Packets 67-69, 85-186). H.W.R.O. Worcester City Freemen Indexes 1564–1935, including Chamber Order Book 1602–50 (A14); Libri Recordum 1564–1739 (A1,2,5,6); Court Books 1632–85 (A9); Order Books 1669–1750 (A14); Freemen Book 1723–1757 (A15). H.W.R.O. Index of Apprentices 1654–1868. Worcester City Collection Reference 4965 BA9360. University of St Andrews Special Collections. Warwickshire County Records Office: Ratcliffe, S.C., and H.C. Johnson, eds., Transcripts of Quarter Sessions Courts 1625–1665, 4 vols (Warwick: L. Edgar Stephens, 1935–1938).

Productions Farquhar, George, The Beaux’ Stratagem, dir. Ramin Grey (Oxford University Dramatic Society, 1985). Farquhar, George, The Beaux’ Stratagem, dir. Simon Godwin, des. Lizzie Clachan (The Olivier Theatre, 2015). Farquhar, George, The Constant Couple, dir. Roger Michell, with Pip Donaghy, Simon Russell Beale and Amanda Root, for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, 1988. Farquhar, George, The Recruiting Officer, dir. Adrian Noble, with Miles Anderson, Meg Davies and Pete Postlethwaite, at the Bristol Old Vic and Edinburgh Festival, 1980. Shakespeare, William, Antony and Cleopatra, dir. Peter Hall, des. Alison Chitty (Olivier Theatre, 1987). Stevenson, Robert Louis, Treasure Island, adapt. Bryony Lavery, dir. Polly Findlay (Olivier Theatre, 2014). Wertenbaker, Timberlake, Our Country’s Good, dir. by Max Stafford-Clark (Out of Joint Theatre Company, 1994).

INDEX

A Comparison between the Two Stages, 100, 120, 127 Addison, Joseph, 10 Aesop, 98, 123, 146, 147 Albemarle, Arnold, Earl of, 13, 111, 118, 167 n.76 An Account of the Transactions of the Late King James in Ireland, 158 Anne, Queen of England, 1, 10, 16, 27, 29, 30, 33, 34, 40, 50, 62, 77, 95, 96, 103, 156, 158 Antrim, Alexander MacDonnell, 3rd Earl of, 147 Aristophanes, 98, 150 Aristotle, 97, 99, 100 The Art of Catechizing, 130 Arwaker, Edward, 153 Ashbury, Joseph, 1, 133, 134, 137, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146 Baker, David Erskine, 4, 162 n.12, 192 n.22, 198 n.57 Banks, John, 145 Barnett, Samuel, 56 Barry, Elizabeth, 93, 135 Bayly, Thomas, 154, 155 Beale, Simon Russell, 19 Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher, 2, 140, 145 Bedford, Arthur, 72 Behn, Aphra, 109, 123 Bennett, Alan, 61 Bennett-Warner, Pippa, 60 Bentley, Richard, bookseller, 37 Bentley, Richard, scholar, 77 Betterton, Thomas, 68, 127, 131, 134, 135, 137, 140, 144, 173 n.23, 180 n.12, 184 n.44, 194 n.9, 194 n.12

Biddulph, Sir Michael, 55, 61 Blakely, Colin, 71 Bohun, William, 37 Bond, Thomas, 61–2 Bonner, Robert, 150 Bowen, William, 144 Boyne, Battle of the, 75, 148, 149, 155 Bracegirdle, Anne, 135 Brady, Nicholas, 9 Bragg, Benjamin, 31, 37, 130 Brecht, Bertolt, 19–21, 73 Brel, Jacques, 62 Bret, Henry, 15 Briscoe, Samuel, 114, 116 Broad, Jacob, 95 Broadbent, Jim, 71 Brooks, Peter, 106 Browne, Dr George, 155 Bullock, William, 33, 55 Burlington, Lady Juliana, 27, 29 Burnet, Gilbert, 153 Bury, John, 54 Butler, Charlotte, 144 Cadogan, William, 148 Caird, John, 104 Callow, Simon, 56, 62, 69 Cargill, Natalie, 50 Carlos II, King of Spain, 30 Carmarthen, Peregrine, Lord Marquiss of, 12, 13, 123, 166 n.63 Centlivre, Susannah, 91, 120, 167 n.77, 173 n.23, 191 n.7 Chaloner, Edmund, 14, 41, 167 n.78 Chaloner, Sir Thomas, 14 Chapelle, Jean de la, 111 Charles, Archduke of Austria, 30 Charles I, King of England, 157 Chekhov, Anton, 49, 61

INDEX

Chetwood, William, 28, 103, 146, 149, 153 Cibber, Colley, 15, 63, 68, 101, 104, 152 Cibber, Theophilus, 4, 10, 12 Clachan, Lizzie, 54, 55, 59, 178 n.58 Clare, David, 17 Cobb, Samuel, 153 Collier, Jeremy, 2, 22, 102–3, 124, 126 Congreve, William, 11, 16, 17, 18, 32, 37, 52, 56, 61, 104, 107, 117, 152–3, 159, 162 n.3, 166 n.53, 166 nn.55–6, 173 n.18, 178 n.55, 190 n.32, 197 n.52 Connely, Willard, 4, 6, 41, 78, 93, 118, 121, 140, 143, 144, 148, 150, 156, 157, 159, 162 n.8, 163 n.27, 172 n.7, 175 n.56, 192 n.25, 192 n.47, 198 n.57 Cope, John, goldsmith, 139 Cordner, Michael, 59 Cotton, Charles, 34, 125 Crofts, William, 103 Crook, Mackenzie, 71 Crowne, John, 37 Curll, Edmund, 4, 44, 136, 142, 162 n.10, 172 n.3, 194 n.13, 194 n.15, 195 n.39 Davenant, Sir William, 37, 127, 134, 143 Dawson, Joshua, 158 Demosthenes, 150 Dennis, John, 153 Dennison, John, 150 Dibdin, Charles, 4–5, 163 n.15 Dobree, Bonamy, 5, 18–19, 53, 163 n.20 Dorset Garden Theatre, 54, 127, 140, 176 n.14 Dowly, Corporal, 79 Downes, John, 84 Drury Lane Theatre, 1, 2, 15, 28, 29, 33, 43, 45, 52, 54, 67, 68, 69, 83, 101, 126, 127, 133, 134, 140, 176 n.14 Dryden, John, 9, 11, 12, 13, 16, 32, 37, 48, 69, 97, 102, 123, 139, 141, 145, 163 n.14, 165 n.44, 167 n.66, 168 n.86, 173 n.18, 187 n.44, 188 n.67, 189 n.7, 190 n.32

221

Dunton, John, 134 Durfey, Thomas, 68, 153 Eliot, T.S., 34 Epictetus, 150, 159 Erasmus, Desiderius, 14 Estcourt, Richard, 68, 71, 144 Etherege, Sir George, 16, 19, 21, 48, 62, 83, 85, 104–5, 121, 133, 145, 178 n.55, 180 n.10, 188 n.82 Ewald, A.C., 132 Eyre, John, 174 n.43 Farmer, A.J., 5 Farquhar, Catherine, sister-in-law, 82 Farquhar, George acting career, 1, 144–5 army career, 2, 28, 77-81, 85-7 Barcellona, 2, 29–36, 40, 45, 66, 72, 97, 98, 100, 122, 128, 130, 147 biographical criticism of, 4–6 childhood, 28, 156–60 ‘Discourse upon Comedy’, 11, 52, 96–101, 117, 124, 127, 131, 150 early poems, 146–9, 152, 153 early reputation, 51–3 epilogue for Wilks, 141–2 image of, 89 in literary history, 18–19 Love and a Bottle, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 14, 39, 55, 72, 106, 123, 126, 127–32, 137, 142, 145 Love and Business, 2, 14, 89–93, 147, 149, 153, 155 Love’s Catechism, 130 as migrant writer, 7–9, 17–18 ‘On the Death of General Schomberg’, 148–9, 150, 153 origins of name, 156–7 ‘A Picture’, 84, 90–2, 124, 155 prologue for the new Theatre in the Haymarket, 33–4 school education, 146–7, 149–50 Sir Harry Wildair, 2, 99, 101, 109–10, 111, 117, 155 The Adventures of Covent-Garden, 1, 11, 12–13, 106, 119, 129 The Beaux’ Stratagem, 2, 3, 10, 12, 15, 21, 24, 25, 29, 34, 45–63,

222

INDEX

67, 89, 98, 112, 114, 117, 121, 130, 137, 159 The Constant Couple, 1, 2, 5–7, 13, 17, 19, 25, 29, 45, 65, 66, 82–5, 101, 109–11, 115, 118, 119–22, 130, 134, 135, 137, 144, 149 The Inconstant, 2, 14, 38, 100, 112–13 The Recruiting Officer, 2, 3, 5, 12, 15, 19, 20–2, 24, 25, 29, 33, 38, 43, 45, 51, 52, 55, 65–74, 114, 128, 137, 144, 153, 159 The Stage-Coach, 2, 31, 34, 37, 38, 82, 111–12 The Twin-Rivals, 2, 15, 34, 55, 72, 87, 113–14, 129, 144, 159 university education, 3, 151–6 visits Holland, 1, 114–18 Farquhar, John, nephew, 82 Farquhar, Margaret Pemell, 2, 14, 25, 27–32, 37, 38, 39, 41, 47–8, 50, 51, 58, 66, 76, 77, 86–7, 89, 91, 93–6, 112, 114, 117, 118, 126, 148, 156, 158 Farquhar, Peyton, brother, 81–2, 85, 144, 159 Fell, Mary (Wilks), 135 Fenton, Peter, 154, 155 Fercher or Farquhar, George, great uncle, 157 Fielding, Henry, 16–17 Fielding, Susannah, 59–60 Fitzgerald, Gamaliel, 154, 155 Fitzgerald, Patrick, and Brian Lambkin, 8, 164 n.28 Fletcher, John, 19, 38, 99, 100, 112, 120 Foster, Roy, 8, 147, 164 n.34 Friend, John, 31 Furetière, Antoine, 125

Gibbons, Captain Jeffrey, 80 Gilborne, Percival, 38 Gildon, Charles, 10, 137, 165 n.48, 167 n.72, 173 n.23, 189 n.6 Godwin, Simon, 53, 55, 63, 180 n.97 Goldsmith, Oliver, 16, 151, 168 n.95, 197 n.44 Gosse, Edmund, 18, 170 n.116 Gower, Sir William Leveson, 11 Granville Barker, Harley, 53 Guiscard, Antoine de, 32, 34–6

Gardner, Kevin J., 73 Garnett, Richard, 163 n.18 Garrick, David, 68, 69, 181 n.18 Gaskill, William, 3, 19, 56, 69, 71, 162 n.5, 181 n.26 Gay, John, 16, 38, 119 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 9 George, Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, 32

Jacob, Giles, 4 James, Eugene Nelson, 4, 5, 16, 17, 46, 54, 72, 73 James II, King of England, 1, 10, 30, 101 Johnson, Samuel, 36, 53 Jones, Richard, 154, 155 Jonson, Ben, 37, 38, 69, 89

Hall, Sir Peter, 53–4 Hallbauer, Otto, 5, 163 n.21 Hantswith, John Andrew, 93, 96 Harding, John, 37 Harris, Henry, Captain, 80 Hart, Charles, 134, 136, 144 Henders, Richard, 60 Herringman, Henry, 37, 165 n.42 The Historical Catechism, 130 Hobbes, Thomas, 50 Hogarth, William, 44, 47, 175 n.6 Homer, 97, 150, 173 n.18 Hook, Mary, 144 Hopkins, Ezekiel, 147, 149 Horace, 150 Howard, Sir Robert, 37, 145 Hughes, Derek, 17, 36, 46, 48, 50, 68, 121, 169 n.105, 174 n.36, 176 n.19 Hughes, Leo, 178 n.63, 187 n.37 Hughes, Robert, 21 Hume, Robert D., 17, 18, 111, 164 n.31, 166 n.51, 174 n.42, 176 n.10, 184 n.50, 187 n.47, 191 n.1, 193 n.1 The Humours of Donnybrook Fair, 154 Husband, Benjamin, 144 Hutchinson, Lloyd, 55–6, 59

INDEX

Jordan, Robert, 75, 78, 79, 80, 82, 85, 86, 165 n.49, 182 n.1, 183 nn.28–30, 185 n.61, 194 n.10 Juvenal, 150 Kaul, A.N., 16 Keats, John, 50, 177 n.37 Keen, Theophilus, 144 Keenan, Tim, 7, 164 n.31, 178 n.55 Kemble, Charles, 68 Keneally, Thomas, 21, 22 Kenny, Shirley Strum, 16, 17, 30, 32, 38, 48, 83, 85, 89, 103, 122, 132, 149 Kenrick, Daniel, 110, 121 Killigrew, Thomas, 127, 143 King, William, 150 Knapton, Alexander, 136–8, 140, 142, 159 Knapton, Elizabeth (Wilks), 133, 135, 137, 141, 194 n.2 Knapton, Ferdinando, 137 Knapton, Henry, 137 Knapton, James, 38 Kneller, Godfrey, 89 Kronenberger, Louis, 16, 169 n.96 Langbaine, Gerard, 10, 165 n.46 Lasdun, Denys, 53 Lee, Nathaniel, 37, 83, 141 Leigh Hunt, James Edward, 5, 18, 19, 36, 67, 122, 163 n.16 Lely, Sir Peter, 38 Levinas, Emmanuel, 23, 172 n.136 Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, 2, 103, 106 Lingard, Thomas, 37 Lintott, Bernard, 2, 31, 37–8, 45, 82, 86, 89, 103 Lintott, Joshua, 37 Lister, Martin, 114 Livy, 150 Lloyd, James, soldier, 79, 81 Lloyd, Owen, 153 Loftis, John, 17 Londonderry, Siege of, 147–8 Louis XIV, King of France, 30, 33, 34, 116 Lucian, 150 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 68, 180 n.12 Luther, Martin, 97

223

Manley, Mary de la Riviere, 77 Manley, Peter, 147, 149 Marber, Patrick, 53, 63, 179 n.85 Marlowe, Christopher, 111 Martial, 150 Mary II, Queen of England, 152 Masters, Alexander Stuart: A Life Backwards, 23, 155, 172 n.137 Menander, 98 Michell, Roger, 18, 19, 121, 145, 152 Middleton, Thomas, 48 Milner or Miller, Jacob, 81, 144, 152 Milton, John, 30, 31, 34, 48–9, 50, 62, 63, 112–13, 149, 151, 177 n.31 Mohun, Michael, 136 Molière, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 71, 103, 121 Molyneux, William, 76 Monmouth, James Scott, Duke of, 11, 165 n.45, 166 n.58 Montjuic, Siege of, 30–1 Moor or Moore, Richard, 86 Mordaunt, Charles, 3rd Earl of Peterborough, 30–2, 37, 39, 40 Mostyn, Sir Roger, 13, 14 Motteux, Pierre, 2, 34, 38, 112, 120, 137, 173 nn.27–8 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 45 The Muses Mercury, 51 Newton, Isaac, 151 Noble, Adrian, 71 Nokes, David, 23, 24, 150, 152, 171 n.135, 184 n.38 Norris, Henry, 33 Norton, Richard, MP, 135 Nourse, Edward, 95 O’Bryan, Daniel, 44, 45, 47, 86, 131, 132, 133, 135–42, 175 n.1 Ogilby, John, 143, 144, 145 Ogleby, James, 95 Oldfield, Anne, 29, 51, 68, 89, 91, 172 n.7 Oldmixon, John, 13, 110, 167 nn.72– 3, 173 n.23, 189 n.6 Ormond, James Butler, 2nd Duke of, 27, 68, 77–82, 86, 137

224

INDEX

Orrery, Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of, 2, 44, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 85, 168 n.88 Orrery, Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of, 9, 11 Orrey, Lionel Boyle, 3rd Earl of, 76 Otway, Thomas, 93, 134, 145, 162 n.14 Overfield, Stephen, 95 Ovid, 150 Palmer, John, 16, 17 Pasquin, 53 Pemell, Benjamin, 27–8, 30, 94–6 Pemell, Benjamin, father of Benjamin, 93–5 Pemell, John, grandfather of Benjamin, 94 Pemell, Susanna, 94 Pemell, Thomas, 94, 95 Pennant, Peter, 80 Philip II, King of Spain, 14 Philippe of Anjou, 30 Pilott, Joshua, 148, 150 Pindar, 150 Pinter, Harold, 119 Plautus, 150 Plutarch, 150 Pope, Alexander, 10, 11, 15, 16, 34, 38, 44, 52, 111 Postlethwaite, Pete, 71 Pound, Ezra, 34 Powell, George, 37, 134 Powell, Jocelyn, 17 Prendergast, Thomas, 76, 80 Puccini, Giacomo, 45 Purcell, Henry, 9 Pyle, Fitzroy, 3–4, 6–7, 18–19, 36, 106, 161 n.1 Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket, 33, 43, 68, 98, 135, 172 n.9, 176 n.14 Quigley, Pearce, 61 Reed, Isaac, 122 Rich, Christopher, 33, 67, 68, 100, 101, 120, 127, 132, 133, 137, 140 Richards, John, 143, 144 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 21, 90 Roper, Alan, 48 Rothstein, Eric, 5–6, 163 n.25

Rourke, Josie, 71 Rowe, Nicholas, 38, 111 Royal Shakespeare Company, 18, 19, 104 Ryder, Dudley, 92, 185 n.12 Sankey, Captain, 80 Scarron, Paul, 106, 125, 126 Shadwell, Thomas, 38, 69, 98 Shakespeare, William, 9, 35, 50, 52, 53, 54, 103, 177 n.44 Skipwith, Thomas, 15, 168 n.88 Smith, John, 31, 39 Smock Alley Theatre, 1, 133, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 152, 155, 156 Smollett, Tobias, 19, 60 Smyth, Edward, 154, 155 Sophocles, 150 Southerne, Thomas, 10–11, 15, 46, 49 Southwell, Sir Robert, 136, 138, 139 Spanish Succession, War of the, 30–1 Stafford-Clark, Max, 21, 22, 69, 71, 171 n.131 Standfast, Richard, 38, 39, 122, 174 n.41, 174 n.48 Stanley, Thomas, 143 Steele, Sir Richard, 14, 44, 52, 69, 101, 103, 161–2 n.3, 178 n.46 Stern, Tiffany, 63 Stockton, Gerrard, 93 Strahan, Robert, 38 Streatfeild, Geoffrey, 56 Sutherland, James, 86, 172 n.1 Swift, Jonathan, 11, 80, 82, 146, 152, 153, 183 n.26, 184 n.38, 198 n.57 Swiney, Owen, 68, 134, 137, 173 n.25 Tate, Nahum, 9–10, 15–16, 153 Taylor, Bishop Jeremy, 157 Terence, 150 Thorndike, Ashley H., 19 Tighe, Richard, 14, 15, 112, 168 n.81 Tonson, Jacob, the Elder, 37 Trinity College Dublin, 1, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 112, 130, 138, 146, 151, 153, 198 n.71 Trussler, Simon, 17, 119, 121, 169 nn.103–4

INDEX

Van Dyck, Anthony, 38, 89 Vanbrugh, Sir John, 16, 18, 37, 44, 46, 49, 51, 61, 105, 109, 161–2 n.3, 177 n.31, 177 n.41, 178 n.55, 179 n.88 Vere, Lady Mary, 77, 78 Virgil, 149, 150 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 11 Walker, Ellis, 148, 150, 159 Wallis, Thomas, 150 Walters, Anne, 93 Wellington, Richard, 37–8 Wertenbaker, Timberlake, 21–2 Wilkes, Thomas, 69, 77, 81, 82, 103, 131, 132, 144, 145, 152, 156, 159

225

Wilks, Edward (Robert’s brother?), 138 Wilks, Edward (Robert’s father?), 136 Wilks, Elizabeth, wife of Robert. See Knapton, Elizabeth Wilks, Robert, 1, 2, 4, 25, 43–4, 45, 47, 67, 68, 80, 83, 84, 85, 91, 104, 106, 107, 131, 132, 144–7, 159 career and private life, 133–42 William III, King of England, 1, 30, 101, 111, 148, 153 Wilson, John, 9 Wiseman, Capel, 151, 152, 158 Withers, Hester, 94 Wycherley, William, 16, 48, 54, 102, 130, 178 n.55