Farquhar The Beaux Stratagem

Full Text and Introduction (NHB Drama Classics)
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78001-607-8
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 0, 128 Seiten

Reihe: NHB Drama Classi

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price George Farquhar's immortal comedy about two young gentlemen with a misguided plan to get enrich themselves at the expense of a series of young heiresses. A pair of London gentlemen, Archer and Aimwell, pose as a Lord and his servant in order to procure one handsome dowry to split between them. While Aimwell, the 'lord', works on the affections of Lady Bountiful's daughter Dorinda, his 'servant' Archer makes his bid for her son's wife. George Farquhar's play The Beaux Stratagem was first produced at the Theatre Royal, London, in 1707. This edition, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is edited and introduced by Simon Trussler.

George Farquhar (1677-1707) was an Irish  dramatist  noted for his contributions to late Restoration comedy, particularly for his plays The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux Stratagem.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Farquhar, George

Leseproben

Introduction

George Farquhar (c. 1677-1707)

George Farquhar was born in Londonderry in northern Ireland, probably in 1677, and would have been verging on adolescence when the recently deposed James II besieged that city in 1689. His father, as an Anglican clergyman, was a prime target for plunder, and died soon afterwards, while the barely teenage George is said to have fought (on King William’s victorious side) in the subsequent Battle of the Boyne in 1690 – which imposed the protestant succession (and a great deal of continuing grief) upon the Catholic majority in Ireland.

Prematurely experienced in both the sorrows and the heroisms of war, Farquhar proceeded from the local grammar school to Trinity College, Dublin, in 1694, then in quick succession fell in love with the theatre, performed at the Smock Alley playhouse in Dublin, gave up acting after accidentally killing a fellow-performer in a stage duel, and, like his lifelong friend and compatriot Robert Wilks, determined on a future in London. Here, Farquhar’s first comedy, Love and a Bottle, was performed in 1698: but his precocious success as a playwright (discussed in more detail in the section ‘The Comic Worlds of George Farquhar’, on p. vii) was interrupted by the renewal of war with France in 1702. In 1704 he was granted a commission as a Lieutenant of Grenadiers and sent off on a recruiting campaign to the Midlands.

Meanwhile, in 1703, Farquhar had married, less from love than in expectations of an income from his wife’s fortune, which proved to be non-existent. Indeed, he very soon found himself needing to provide for their two daughters as well – at a time when he was beginning to feel the effects of the wasting illness which we now suppose to have been tuberculosis. He drew on his provincial experiences in both of his last two plays, The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux Stratagem (as also on his unhappy marriage in the last), but his rapidly declining health prevented him from building on their success, and he died in poverty in late May 1707. His friend Wilks paid for his funeral.

The Beaux Stratagem: What Happens in the Play

A pair of presentable but impoverished London gentlemen arrive at a Lichfield inn, plotting to repair their broken fortunes. One, Aimwell, pretends to be a lord (like his brother) to improve his chances of marrying a rich woman, while the other, Archer, has agreed to act as his servant – on condition that any dowry they secure is equally shared. After some dalliance with the bucolic landlord and his pretty daughter, Cherry, Aimwell sets his sights on Dorinda, the well-endowed daughter of Lady Bountiful – whose son, Squire Sullen, finds himself ill-matched with a spouse of great beauty but no inclination to share his hunting-and-drinking life-style. And so, while his ‘master’ woos the beauteous but innocent Dorinda, Archer makes illicit advances to the more knowing but cautiously receptive Mrs Sullen.

With Sullen safely out of the way, in quest of drinking companions at the inn, Archer inveigles himself into the household to pursue his amorous quest – on the very night chosen by a local band of highwaymen to rob the supposedly unprotected women. Aimwell, summoned by an anxious Cherry, helps to vanquish the intruders. He is renewing his suit to Dorinda when Sullen returns, in the company of his wife’s brother, Sir Charles Freeman, who is determined to rescue her from her unhappy marriage. Freeman also brings news that Aimwell’s brother has died – so Aimwell, now a lord indeed, can legitimise his love for Dorinda, which has by now grown to be real rather than self-serving. Sir Charles persuades the Squire into a divorce by consent – assisted by Archer’s acquisition from the thieves of all the papers which give Sullen title to his wife’s fortune.

This climax is open to all sorts of literal-minded criticism, not only for the coincidences that make it possible (a frequent enough convenience in this kind of comedy), but for the happy-go-lucky way in which Freeman pronounces a divorce for which the harsh legal constraints of the time gave no grounds. Indeed, The Beaux Stratagem, for all its social and psychological realism, treads a stylistic tightrope between such wish-fulfilment and the harsher realities of marriage – as it does also between the ‘mannered’ characters whose love-lives interweave in its main plot and the ‘humours’ characters whose economic needs and ambitions drive the action at a lower level. Among these latter are to be found the innkeeper Bonniface and his daughter Cherry, the highwaymen with whom Bonniface is complicit (Gibbet, Hounslow and Bagshot), and Sullen’s all-purpose servant Scrub. There is also a pair of comic foreigners – Count Bellair, a captured French officer with whom Mrs Sullen has been platonically flirting, and Foigard, an Irishman who is treacherously serving as chaplain to the French prisoners. Such a presence in the neighbour-hood was, of course, a reminder of the events beyond the play which had earlier made recruiting so topical a theme. But it is no less typical here than of Farquhar’s earlier play-worlds that the tensions between actuality and artifice should generate dramatic energy rather than confusion.

The Comic Worlds of George Farquhar

The work of George Farquhar fits awkwardly into that over-extended category which critics have labelled ‘Restoration comedy’. After all, Charles II had been ‘restored’ (following his father’s execution and the ‘interregnum’ under Cromwell) in 1660, and the honeymoon he had enjoyed with his subjects was well over by 1677, the probable year of Farquhar’s birth. Shortly afterwards, the crisis caused by the increasing probability that the Catholic James would succeed his brother to the throne set in motion the struggle for constitutional monarchy – a struggle which eventually led to King James’s deposition during the ‘bloodless revolution’ of 1688-89, and the enthronement of William and Mary. The bourgeois sensibility of this royal couple proved well-suited to the changing national mood, as pursuit of the pleasure principle (so marked a feature of Charles II’s reign) gave way before the sterner demands of the protestant work ethic.

It’s true that Farquhar’s near contemporaries Congreve and Vanbrugh (who both outlived him by some twenty years) continued to develop a dramatic tradition – of high-style, high-life ‘comedy of manners’, rooted in sexual dalliance – begun during the Restoration proper by Dryden, Etherege, Wycherley and Aphra Behn. But both Congreve and Vanbrugh gave up writing for the theatre soon after Jeremy Collier’s influential anti-theatrical polemic, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, published in 1698, had decisively articulated the changed temper of the times. Of the dramatists who have survived in the modern repertoire, Farquhar alone, it seems, found a spiritual as well as a chronological home in the society and the theatre of the years surrounding the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Even so, he was barely twenty when he wrote his first play, Love and a Bottle, and could not at first afford (or perhaps did not yet know how to manage) so wholly personal a dramatic mode. It was not till his second play, The Constant Couple, of 1699, that he wrote a comedy in which conventional sexual pursuits were driven in part by new imperatives of cash and class – and the play found a responsive audience, proving the success of the season. But Farquhar evidently rested a little too long on the income and the laurels it brought him: and when, after eighteen months, he came up with a sequel, Sir Harry Wildair, the play suffered, as do so many of its kind, from the law of diminishing returns – though it managed a respectable first run, presumably on the strength of public curiosity to see how all the familiar characters would make out after marriage.

Farquhar’s next play, The Inconstant, which took over and simplified the plot of John Fletcher’s late Jacobean comedy The Wild Goose Chase, survived to its sixth night; but the death of King William in March 1702 eclipsed both the play’s and Farquhar’s own fortunes, and he set to work quickly on The Twin-Rivals, which had its first night in December of the same year. Subsequent criticism has been largely shaped by the need to account for the play’s initial failure – which, one suspects, was due not to its relatively high moral tone (now becoming acceptable, indeed expected) but to its formal daring, in portraying unalleviated vice as a proper subject for realistic representation in comedy.

For Farquhar, the play is also very tightly plotted – around a younger brother’s attempt to defraud his marginally older twin out of his inheritance. Sex here not only comes an acknowledged second to money, but is rather more closely connected with childbirth than theatrical convention usually acknowledged. There is more dramatic interest in the fraudulent lordling’s demonstration of his unworthiness than in his eventual exposure, and although the play has not quite caught the tone of voice in which to be ‘seriously funny’, it does strike out in the new direction which Farquhar was shortly to follow through in The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux...