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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Although the years 1701 through 1703 saw the number of Collierite publications markedly diminish, the zeal of the reformers and the consequent distress of the theatres seems hardly to have abated. It was in this perilous atmosphere that Farquhar attempted perhaps the most ambitious and potentially telling attack upon Collier's abolitionist demands: the publications, in February and December 1702 respectively, of the Discourse upon Comedy and The Twin-Rivals. The relativism of the Discourse strikes at Collier's aesthetic position both by denying the validity of his classical authorities and by affirming that of popular consensus. The Twin-Rivals rebuts the force of Collier's moral invective by presenting, concretely, the kind of moral comedy that Collier himself claimed to favor and that the various apologies for comedy had presented, verbally, as a justifying ideal. In demonstrating the value of comedy, Farquhar meant to confound the abolitionists and make the stage flourish. The Twin-Rivals failed and thus accomplished neither. I would suggest, however, that its ethos and its structure make it an extremely interesting document as well as a skillful play. I should like to discuss its purposeful novelty and its relationship both to Farquhar's canon and to the development of the stage at the beginning of the eighteenth century, drawing an eventual moral.
1 Joseph Wood Krutch, Comedy and Conscience After the Restoration (3rd printing: New York, 1957), pp. 170–173, mentions the harassing, from 1700 into 1702, of Betterton, Mrs. Barry, Mrs. Bracegirdle, “and others Your Majties Comedians” for alleged obscenities and profanities on stage. An idea of the vigor of the reformers, and the threat to, if not actual badgering of, the theatre is provided by Krutch and by Garnet V. Portus, Caritas Anglicana (London, 1912). Portus discusses the success of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners in having stage plays banned from Bartholomew Fair in 1702.
A. H. Scouten has proposed as another indication of the discomfort of the theatres the feverish experimentation with kinds of plays and kinds of bills which characterized the early eighteenth-century repertory. See his article with E. L. Avery, “A Tentative Calendar of Daily Theatrical Performances in London, 1700–1701 to 1704–1705,” PULA, lxiii (1948), 114–180; and The London Stage, 1660–1800, Part ii (1700-1729), ed. Emmett L. Avery (Carbondale, Ill., 1960), i, cxii-cxv (“Repertory”), and the dramatic calendar for the years directly preceding and following the performances of The Twin-Rivals. Although the rhetorical function of the Twin-Rivals, the function I shall discuss, was, I believe, unique, Farquhar was experimenting out of the same uneasiness that prompted his fellow playwrights.
2 This view of Farquhar's Discourse is not a usual one, but, I suggest, the most cogent. His radical position becomes both reasonable and coherent if one takes it as a polemic stand rather than as the effusion of irreverence or some sort of liberal rebellion. Presumably Farquhar realized that Collier's aesthetic arguments are not digressions but part of a calculated attack. Although Collier never, so far as I know, explicitly points their moral, they had the effect of making the attacked playwrights seem merely a troop of literary profligates, frivolous panders devoid both of craftsmanship and of morality.
3 A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage, Together with the Sense of Antiquity upon this Argument (London, 1698), p. 2, sig. Bv.
4 Love and a Bottle, iv.iii, in Farquhar's Complete Works, ed. Charles Stonehill, 2 vols. (Bloomsbury, 1930), i, 55. All quotations from Farquhar are from this edition, hereafter referred to as Works. I have used Stonehill's numbering of scenes, which is more precise than that of the original texts.
5 Love and a Bottle, i.i (Works i, 11).
6 Genest's account will do: “Roebuck is a very spirited character—he divides his time between Love and a Bottle—at the opening of the play he arrives in London from Ireland
—-he is followed by Mrs. Trudge, who has a child by him—Leanthe is sister to [Roebuck's friend] Lovewell—in love with Roebuck—and disguised as Lucinda's page—Lovewell and Lucinda are mutually in love—in the last act, she [Lucinda] is offended at him and offers to marry Roebuck—Leanthe contrives to have herself married to Roebuck—Lovewell and Lucinda are reconciled—Mockmode [a fop] is taken in to marry Trudge—the marriage is set aside—and Trudge gets £500. ...“ John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage . . ., 10 vols. (Bath, 1832), ii, 157. Genest leaves out various subsidiary characters, and does not suggest the repartee and small turns of the plots, but the general pattern is clear and familiar: a witty rake, followed by his love disguised as a page (as in The Plain-Dealer); a secondary love plot involving a friend of the rake; a fop upon whom the rake's cast mistress is foisted; a fifth act of particularly dense intrigue ending with marriages.
7 These assumptions have been discussed by a number of scholars, to whose work I am much indebted, e.g., Thomas Fujimura, The Restoration Comedy of Wit (Princeton, 1952), and Dale Underwood, Etherage and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of Manners (New Haven, 1957). Fujimura in particular, although one may not care to subscribe to all his arguments, is extremely helpful in describing the complex of attitudes around that rather factitious term, “wit-comedy.” I should also like to acknowledge my indebtedness here to the advice of Professor Alan S. Downer.
8 Love and a Bottle, i.i (Works, i, 13).
9 Love and a Bottle, v.iii (Works, i, 68).
10 Love and a Bottle, ii.i (Works, i, 22). Collier makes a similar point (Short View, p. 281, sig. T5). Of course, it had always been realized, as Chaucer or Spenser or Milton testified, that “courtly love” was idolatrous, that it involved worshipping something other than God; together with this transfer or division of allegiance comes a transfer of values and vocabulary. (Underwood, pp. 105–106, touches on this matter in terms of the values implicit in the language of witty courtship.) Farquhar and Collier here are merely invigorating a moral platitude, albeit one that proved beyond their contemporaries' and successors' range of recognition.
11 The others are The Constant Couple, or A Trip to the Jubilee (1699; Drury Lane, November, 1699) and its sequel, Sir Harry Wildair (1701; D. L., April 1701). Because of the complications of discussing an adaptation, I shall not discuss Farquhar's The Inconstant (from Beaumont and Fletcher). The quotation from Sir Harry Wildair is from Act i (Works, i, 173).
12 The standard authority on these farceurs, Leo Hughes's A Century of English Farce (Princeton, 1956), nicely clarifies the techniques and potentialities of farcical action in this period, and, in so doing, provides the imagination with some means for bypassing the limitations inherent in printed texts.
13 Thomas Wilkes' Life of Farquhar prefaced to The Works of George Farquhar, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1775), says (i, x) that The Twin-Rivals ran thirteen nights and “met with great success.” Since the latter contradicts Farquhar's own statement, and since Wilkes has the wrong year (1705), this testimony appears unreliable. Furthermore, Shadwell's Lancashire Witches was playing at Drury Lane on 22 December, eight days after The Twin-Rivals' opening on the 14th. (See Avery, i, 30.)
14 Works, i, 286.
15 The plot of The Twin-Rivals is as follows: A penniless debauché, Benjamin Wou'dbe, has been disinherited for villainy toward his elder twin brother, Hermes. Upon hearing of his father's death, he decides to forge evidence that Hermes, who is travelling in Germany, is also dead; and he is so successful in bribing a lawyer, a midwife-bawd, and his father's steward, that Hermes, upon his arrival in London with his Irish servant Teague, finds Benjamin in possession of estate and title. A ruse involving a forged will is scotched when one of the witnesses suborned to testify to its validity turns out to be Teague, but upon the midwife Mandrake's swearing that Benjamin is in fact the elder, Hermes is led off and jailed. The secondary plot deals with the rake Richmore, who traduces Aurelia (cousin of Hermes' beloved Constance), whom he desires, to her suitor (and Hermes' friend) Trueman; Richmore intends to induce Trueman to marry his, Richmore's, cast pregnant mistress, Clelia. Richmore is eventually found out trying to ravish Aurelia, and is shamed by Trueman into marrying Clelia himself; while in the main plot, the discovery of a letter from Benjamin encouraging Mandrake's perjury precipitates a denouement. Benjamin stamps off unrepentant, leaving Hermes with estate, title, and (a third point of contention) Constance. Trueman is reunited with Aurelia. If one compares the scheme of this plot with that of Love and a Bottle (n. 6), the similarities and inversions will be apparent.
16 Avery, i, 28, mentions the performance of The Relapse. Cibber's Richard had not been seen at Drury Lane since 1701—Avery, I, 63, lists a 1704 performance which advertises a revival after three years—but his portrayal of “Crookback Richard” seems to have been memorably notorious. See Richard Hindry Barker, Mr. Cibber of Drury Lane (New York, 1939), especially pp. 38–39.
17 Twin-Rivals, i.i (Works, i, 294).
18 Twin-Rivals, i.ii (Works, i, 299).
19 The most recent and most intelligent statement about the self-aggrandizement of the heroic hero is that by Arthur C. Kirsch, “Dryden, Corneille, and the Heroic Play,” MP, lix (1962), 248–264. While I am aware of the arguments advanced by Scott Osborn, “Heroical Love in Dryden's Heroic Drama,” PMLA, lxxiii (Dec. 1958), 480–490, and by Jean Gagen, “Love and Honor in Dryden's Heroic Plays,” PMLA, lxxvii (June 1962), 208–220, those arguments seem to me misguided.
20 Love and a Bottle, iii.i (Works, i, 35).
21 Constant Couple, iv.i (Works, i, 119).
22 Constant Couple, v.i (Works, i, 141). I take this interpretation of Falstaff from that suggested by Tony Aston, A Brief Supplement to Colley Cibber, Esq. . . ., included in An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, ed. Robert W. Lowe, 2 vols. (London, 1889), ii, 300. It is also the view of Falstaff taken in John Dennis' The Comical Gallant (Drury Lane, 1702).
23 Twin-Rivals, ii (Works, i, 314).
24 The closeness of Benjamin's speech to Edmund's is also mentioned by Willard Connely, Young George Farquhar (London, 1949), p. 193. The quotations come from King Lear, rev. N. Tate (London, 1689), sigs. H2 and D4. One might note that Cibber's reworking of Richard III, like Tate's Lear, also expands on the villain's lust.
25 The phrase, applied to the heroic play, comes from Arthur C. Kirsch, “The Significance of Dryden's ‘Aureng-Zebe’,” ELH, xxix (1962), 166.
26 He attributes the failure of the play to the audience's missing the inveterate butts of wit-comedy: “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. And this I take it to be one Reason that the Galleries were so thin during the Run of this Play” (Works, i, 286).
27 Frederick Wood, “The Beginnings and Significance of Sentimental Comedy,” Anglia, lv (1931), p. 370, remarks that “sentimental comedy” was “an attempt to write comedy by the methods of tragedy.” This, although oversimplified, has a great deal of truth to it. Dennis complained that Steele's comic theories would be more suitable to happily ending tragedy, a disappearing genre; and E. N. Hooker (The Critical Works of John Dennis, 2 vols., Baltimore, 1939–43, ii, 501) quotes Benjamin Victor as having bluntly said that “that part of Comedy . . . [seems] best which is nearest Tragedy.” The critical justifications for pathetic tragedy, involving its fostering benevolence, were equally applicable to comedy, and could lend respectability without damaging popular appeal. Furthermore, as I have indicated, comedy had developed no means for dealing with “romantic” subjects, and, in borrowing from pathetic tragedy, drew closer to it. In some of the earlier comedies, the harder-headed characters seem embarrassed by the sudden irruption of romance into their real world (e.g., Sir Harry Wildair, v.vi [Works, i, 208]; and see David Berkeley, “The Art of ‘Whining’ Love,” SP, lii, 1955, 478–496); but since they were soon in large part ousted, their embarrassment was superseded.
28 Twin-Rivals, iv.i (Works, i, 330). The “sentiment” is an outgrowth of the Latin and Elizabethan (and heroic) sentential but unlike the sententia, a “sentiment” is rarely witty.
29 See my “Unrhymed Tragedy, 1660–1702” (unpubl. diss., Princeton, 1961), Ch. ii, pp. 40–74, for a fuller discussion of this shifting concern.
30 John Harrington Smith, The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), p. 203. Kaspar Spinner, in his George Farquhar als Dramatiker (Swiss Studies in English, XL, Bern, 1956), points out, pp. 37–38, that in The Twin-Rivals Farquhar deviated from his usual pattern, a “kreuzweise schneidendes Beziehungsfeld” in which one member of each couple is temperate and the other “wild.” Thus in Love and a Bottle, Roebuck, characterized in the Dramatis Personae as “of a wild roving temper,” is matched with the sweet Leanthe, while his “sober and modest” friend Lovewell loves the frisky Lucinda. The Constant Couple, Sir Harry Wildair, and even Farquhar's adaptation, The Inconstant, all pair off their lovers that way. The Twin-Rivals does not, since it is more interested in the unity of the lovers than in potential conflicts among them. The one such conflict results from Richmore's slandering Aurelia, from the villain rather than from the lovers, and its resolution comes only when villainy is rendered impotent.
31 Having used Cibber's typical parts to his ironic advantage, Farquhar may have made his palinode complete when Wilks and Jane Rogers, who had played gay leads in his earlier comedies, were cast as the sober couple. It is quite possible that he selected them for these roles himself. John Harold Wilson, All the King's Ladies (Chicago, 1958), says, p. 97, that there is a “mass of evidence” to show that Restoration dramatists “chose or helped choose the casts for their own plays.” The likelihood of Farquhar's having been able to do so is increased because of his close friendships with Wilks and Mrs. Oldfield, and perhaps with the dedicatee of The Twin-Rivals, Henry Bret, who was an intimate of Cibber's (see DNB, ii, 1190).
32 Twin-Rivals, ii.i (Works, i, 303).
33 (London, 1704), sig. a3v. For examples from contemporary tragic criticism of such approvals of vicarious benevolence, see my “English Tragic Theory in the Late Seventeenth Century,” ELB, xixx (1962), 306–323. The distinction made below between moral comedy and comédie larmoyante corresponds to my distinction between fabulist and affective theories of tragedy.
34 Twin-Rivals, ii.v (Works, i, 312–313).
35 See Hughes, p. 38 n.
36 Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–1900, Vol. ii, Early Eighteenth-Century Drama (3rd ed., Cambridge, 1955), 148.
37 Discourse upon Comedy, Works, 11. 336–337.
38 As opposed, for example, to Vanbrugh. In A Defence of the Short View . . . (London, 1699), Collier had differentiated between Providence and Fortune (p. 114, sig. 1v), a distinction that Farquhar is careful to maintain in The Twin-Rivals; and had rejected Vanbrugh's assumption that ridicule of vice without the reflection of Providence in absolute poetic justice was normally sufficient (p. 125, sig. 17). Collier insisted that the fable too be moral.