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Abstract
This article examines the representation of the justices of the peace in George Farquhar’s 1706 play The Recruiting Officer. I place this play in the context of Farquhar’s work of literary criticism, “A Discourse Upon Comedy” (1701), in which he claims “Liberty and Toleration” as guiding principles for his home-grown, anti-Aristotelian aesthetic. The political, legal, and theatrical history surrounding the 1688 English revolution and its aftermath frames my examination of the justices’ position at the intersection of local and national legal procedures. The Recruiting Officer interrogates the justice of the peace’s role in recruiting and conscription during the War of Spanish Succession. Justices of the peace in The Recruiting Officer, I argue, enable inquiry into liberty and toleration’s limits and costs in their use of discretionary power and informal mediation. The situational and empirical legal judgments of Farquhar’s justices render a pattern for moral judgments allowing for a temporary and tame personal license—“grains of allowance”—relative to cynical Restoration rakishness. Legal and quasi-legal relationships drive the plotlines of The Recruiting Officer—whether in representing recruiters empowered to enlist men, local justices’ roles in military conscription, contractual aspects of the marriage bond, or extramarital encounters, real and imagined. Farquhar uses the justices’ characters to suggest that the balances of power at home, in the community, in the government, and in the global theaters of war are all interlinked, mutually sustaining, and prone to destabilization. I maintain that the play invites critique of the law, the military, and marriage, but avoids, in its fundamental optimism and good humor, a trenchant satire on any of these institutions.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 George Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, The Works of George Farquhar, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 364–86. See Eric Rothstein’s excellent discussion of the “Discourse” in George Farquhar (New York: Twayne, 1967), 116–27. Rothstein identifies a “radical empiricism” in Farquhar’s critical stance, though he cautions us to read the “Discourse” as “oratory or rhetoric rather than naïve credo” (122).
2 Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Prophaneness of the English Stage, ed. Benjamin Hellinger (New York: Garland, 1987), 9.
3 Drawing from Steve Pincus’s persuasive account of the Revolution, I also note how the personality of the monarch could set a tone for the culture. See Pincus for the Revolution as a “politically, morally, and socially transformative event” in 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 28. Joseph Wood Krutch compares King William to both Charles and James: “William brought a new age. No adjective could be less applicable to him than ‘merry.’ Saturnine and able, he cared nothing for literature for the stage, which had occupied so much of Charles’ thought.” Krutch adds that “Mary was fond of plays” but that “wanton indecency could no longer look for support and example at court” (Comedy and Conscience after the Restoration, [New York: Columbia University Press, 1949], 153).
4 In Antitheatricality and the Body Politic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), Lisa A. Freeman devotes a chapter to the Collier controversy. My comment that both Collier and Farquhar inhabited the same cultural milieu is informed by Freeman’s view of post-Revolutionary factions that challenge the assumption of a coherent “public sphere” as well as “a simplistic set of binary oppositions” (103, 104). See also Matthew Kinservik’s “Theatrical Regulation during the Restoration Period” in A Companion to Restoration Drama, ed. Susan Owen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 36–52.
5 Farquhar, “Discourse Upon Comedy,” ed. Kenny, 377.
6 Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?: England 1689–1727 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6. See also Liberty Secured?: Britain Before and After 1688, ed. J.R. Jones (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
7 See Ralph Stevens, Protestant Pluralism: The Reception of the Toleration Act, 1689–1720 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2018).
8 Robert D. Hume reminds us to be careful how we identify such libertinism in “The Myth of the Rake in ‘Restoration Comedy’” in The Rakish Stage: Studies in English Drama, 1660–1800 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 138–75. Two essays in A Companion to Restoration Drama, ed. Susan Owen, are helpful for understanding libertinism and its opponents: Maximillian Novak, “Libertinism and Sexuality” (53–68) and Kirk Combe, “Rakes, Wives, and Merchants: Shifts from the Satirical to the Sentimental” (291–308). See also Pat Gill, “Gender, Sexuality, and Marriage” in The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, ed. Deborah Payne Fisk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 191–208. Attuned as he was to his audience, Farquhar knew that court culture no longer defined it. In “The Theater in the Age of Queen Anne: The Case of George Farquhar,” Brian Corman observes that “the eighteenth-century audience had become far more middle class” (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015, 151–66), 159.
9 Farquhar, “Discourse Upon Comedy,” ed. Kenny, 378–79.
10 See Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, “The Humour of Humours: Comedy Theory and Eighteenth-Century Histories of Emotions” in The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology, ed. Daniel Derrin and Hannah Burrows (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 93–108.
11 Farquhar, “Discourse Upon Comedy,” ed. Kenny, 379.
12 Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 465.
13 Alexander Pope, “The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated,” line 288 in The Poems of Alexander Pope: A Reduced Version of the Twickenham Text, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 645. Michael Shugrue, ed. George Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, “Introduction,” (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), xv.
14 George Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Peter Dixon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 11.
15 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, 16.
16 Brian Corman claims that The Recruiting Officer is “the comedy envisaged in Farquhar’s ‘Discourse’” (“The Theater in the Age of Queen Anne,” 161).
17 Norma Landau, The Justices of the Peace 1679–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 1.
18 G.M. Trevelyan, The English Revolution 1688–1689 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 45.
19 David Lemmings, Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century: From Consent to Command (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 7. David Eastwood’s Government and Community in the English Provinces, 1700–1870 discusses the justices of the peace in the context of local government, although its scope overlaps only slightly with Farquhar’s dramatic career (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
20 Bertolt Brecht, for example, magnifies the dark undercurrents of Farquhar’s play in his adaptation, Trumpets and Drums. See the translation by Rose and Martin Kastner in Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays: Volume 9 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 247–326. John Bull observes that Farquhar’s original audience would have been relatively untroubled by “the possibility of seeing events from more than one class perspective” compared to more recent adapters and directors (Vanbrugh and Farquhar [Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1998]), 122. In 1706, the moralistic critic Arthur Bedford spent several pages taking The Recruiting Officer to task in The Evil & Danger of Stage Plays, a portion of which is anthologized in in Farquhar: The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux’ Stratagem: A Casebook, ed. Raymond A. Anselment (London: Macmillan, 1977), 27–29.
21 Alex Feldman, “‘Law Enough to Set You Free’: Contract, Community, and Consent in the Comedies of George Farquhar” (Eighteenth-Century Life 46, no. 2: 30–60), 32.
22 “All three judges have names relating to the traditional symbol of justice . . . .” (Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Tiffany Stern [London: A & C Black, 2010], note on 6).
23 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, Act 3, Scene 2, Line 165. All subsequent quotations from the play are taken from this edition and cited with act, scene, and line numbers unless otherwise indicated.
24 Hoppit, Land of Liberty?, 50.
25 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, 2.3.13-14.
26 Kevin J. Gardner goes so far as to say that “once enlisted, the soldiers will practically be prisoners” in “George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer: Warfare, Conscription, and the Disarming of Anxiety” (Eighteenth-Century Life 25, no. 3: 43–61), 48.
27 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, 2.3.19-20.
28 Statutes of the Realm, vol. 8 (1828), 2º & 3º Annae, c. 13, on page 275.
29 Gilbert, “Army Impressment During the War of Spanish Succession” (The Historian 48, no. 4, August 1976: 689–708), 689. See also Denver Brunsman, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2013). For a broader view of English involvement in the war, see John B. Hattendorf, England in the War of the Spanish Succession: A Study of the English View and Conduct of Grand Strategy, 1702–1712 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987).
30 Throughout The Justices of the Peace 1679–1760, Landau discusses appointments to the commission of the peace, often in connection with politics.
31 Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 287. See also Sir Thomas Skyrme, The History of the Justices of the Peace (Chichester, UK: Barry Rose Publishers, 1994), 487–91.
32 Comical as he is, Pearmain’s character fits the “appreciative treatment of rusticity” that John Loftis identifies in Farquhar’s final two plays (Comedy and Society from Congreve to Fielding [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959], 44). See also Farquhar’s affectionate preface to the real-life Shrewsbury models for the characters in The Recruiting Officer (Kenny, ed., 35–37).
33 The commission of the peace had long carried with it “multifarious . . . functions,” as J.H. Gleason characterizes the magistracy at the beginning of the seventeenth century by its “combination of matters of national and local concern, of the particular and the general” (The Justices of the Peace in England, 1558–1640: A Later Eirenarcha [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969]), 99.
34 Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 174.
35 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, 38.
36 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, 3.1.141-43. Sir Thomas Skyrme, in The History of the Justices of the Peace, explains, “It became customary for all local problems to be laid before the nearest justice. On these occasions they were able to achieve more successful results than a regular court of law or government officer because they could handle the problem in an informal atmosphere and with a close understanding of the problems arising in their neighbourhood” (415). See also p. 486 for a discussion of justice’s work as a “police officer” as well as in managing social inferiors.
37 Ibid., 3.1.172-74.
38 Ibid., 3.1.179-80.
39 Cox, Cinderellas & Packhorses: A History of the Shropshire Magistracy, ed. David J. Cox and Barry S. Godfrey (Eardisley, UK: Logaston Press, 2005), 23.
40 Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 178. Though covering a different region of England, this data tracks with the general trends of The Recruiting Officer’s setting.
41 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, 1.1.98-109.
42 Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (London, 1661), 214.
43 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, 3.1.283-86.
44 In Experimentation on the English Stage, 1695–1708: The Career of George Farquhar, Elisabeth J. Heard describes Silvia as “the culmination of many of Farquhar’s characters from previous plays—Leanthe, Constance, Angelica and Oriana” (88). Outside of Farquhar’s own plays, Heard identifies another influence: “The character of Silvia is reminiscent of Hypolita in Cibber’s She Wou’d and Wou’d Not. Like Silvia, Hypolita not only dresses like a man, but becomes one” (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), 89.
45 Ibid., 4.1.58.
46 Ibid., 4.1.118-31.
47 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Peter Dixon, 21
48 Most editors of The Recruiting Officer consider Silvia’s two names an inconsistency, the result of Farquhar’s hasty composition that was never corrected (John Ross investigates this claim in his edition [London: A & C Black, 1991], xxix). Tiffany Stern, however, speculates on the character’s intention in choosing two names:
Hence, perhaps, her choice of two names for her male persona: Wilful, because not just purposeful but focused on male sexuality (‘will’); ‘Pinch’ because, as she explains, ‘I cock my hat with a pinch, I take snuff with a pinch, pay my whores with a pinch’ (5.2.62-3), and because the word recalls not just an affectionate nip, but, as a single-syllabled name beginning with ‘p,’ Plume himself. (xvii)
49 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, 5.2.2-5.
50 Ibid., 5.2.6-8.
51 Peter Dixon notes that Farquhar “creates the sense of a whole community, with its range of occupations, its hierarchy of classes, and its network of social, economic, and legal relationships” (George Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Peter Dixon, Manchester University Press, 1986), 10-11.
52 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, 5.2.9-17. Denys Van Renen suggests that this moment “exposes the specious rationale for the War of the Spanish Succession: to protect Shrewsbury from the French . . .” (The Other Exchange: Women, Servants, and the Urban Underclass in Early Modern English Literature [Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2017], 146).
53 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, 2.1.30-35.
54 Ibid., 5.3.77.
55 In the New Mermaids edition of the Recruiting Officer originally published in 1973, John Ross includes an appendix with selected Articles (London: A & C Black, 1991). The harshness of the punishment for any activity related to mutiny or sedition is apparent in the text of Article 14:
No man shall presume so far as to raise or cause the least Mutiny or Sedition in the Army, upon Pain of Death. And if any number of Soldiers shall presume to assemble to take Counsel amongst themselves for the demanding their Pay, or shall at any time demand their Pay in a Mutinous manner, any Inferior Officers accessory thereunto, shall suffer Death for it, as the Heads and Ringleaders of such Mutinous and Seditious Meetings; And the Soldiers shall be punished with Death. And if any Captain, being privy thereunto shall not, suppress the same, or complain of it, he shall likewise be punished with Death. (143)
Article 23 specifies death as the punishment for desertion “either in the Field, upon a March, in Quarters, or in Garrison” (144).
56 See Dalton, Countrey Justice, 39-40.
57 Ibid., 5.2.87.
58 Ibid., 2.1.67-8.
59 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, 5.2.10.
60 Ibid., 5.3.39-41.
61 Speaking of Kentish justices’ petty sessions, for example, Norma Landau explains that “the justices would foregather alternately at the Red Lion and the Black Dog in Wingham” (The Justices of the Peace, 231).
62 Bond, A Compleat Guide for Justices of Peace, revised and corrected by J.W. of the Middle Temple (London, 1707), 28.
63 Ibid., 262-71.
64 In George Farquhar, Eric Rothstein includes a sensitive reading of the courtroom impressment scene that focuses on the morality of the would-be conscripts rather than the legal contexts surrounding the proceedings (New York: Twayne, 1967), 134-35; John Bull, in Vanbrugh and Farquhar, considers the audience’s sympathy with different social groups in the courtroom scene (112-13; 120-21); and Elisabeth J. Heard, in Experimentation on the English Stage, calls the impressment scene one of “the funniest moments in the play” (89).
65 Country gentlemen regarded the state of the game with great personal interest, and a series of complex laws governed its use. According to P.B. Munsche, in Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws 1671-1831 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), the laws regulating game hunting “were measures designed to preserve a stable society, one which was rural-based, hierarchical and paternalist” (7).
66 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, 5.5.79.
67 Ibid., 5.5.93-94.
68 Kevin J. Gardner, “George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer,” 54.
69 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, 5.5.110-12.
70 Ibid., 5.5.107.
71 Gilbert, “Army Impressment,” 691.
72 In his edition of The Recruiting Officer, Peter Dixon observes, “The interplay of roles between Ballance and Plume—the local squire who is eager to furnish recruits, the captain of grenadiers who is metamorphosed into a country gentleman—this interplay projects and advocates a desirable harmony between tax-payer and soldier, Whig officer and Tory squire” (18).
73 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Kenny, 5.7.169-72.
74 Although Van Renen claims that “the totalizing system of Plume inexorably supplants rural life,” I view the play’s ending as the assimilation of Plume to the community, whose structure and endurance is stronger than what Van Renen recognizes (The Other Exchange, 129).
75 Feldman, “Law Enough to Set You Free,” 53.
76 Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, ed. Dixon, 17, 18.
77 To return to Collier’s impact on early eighteenth-century drama, Robert D. Hume concludes that “his reform movement failed” (“Jeremy Collier and the Future of London Theater in 1698,” Studies in Philology 96, no. 4: 480-511), 511.
78 A portion of Hunt’s introduction is anthologized in in Farquhar: The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux’ Stratagem: A Casebook, ed. Raymond A. Anselment, 39-44. The quotation is from p. 43.
79 Farquhar, “Discourse Upon Comedy,” ed. Kenny, 378.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Hilary Teynor Donatini
Hilary Teynor Donatini is Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Languages and Literatures at Ashland University. She has published recently on justices of the peace in eighteenth-century British literature as well as the films of Terry Gilliam.