74-461: George Farquhar (1677 – 29 April 1707) was an Irish dramatist. He is noted for his contributions to late Restoration comedy , particularly for his plays The Constant Couple (1699), The Recruiting Officer (1706) and The Beaux' Stratagem (1707). Born in Derry , Farquhar was one of seven children born to William Farquhar, a clergyman of modest means. The author of Memoirs of Mr. George Farquhar ,
148-604: A comedy written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher , and first published in 1616 , the year of Beaumont's death. It was one of the pair's most popular, often revived, and frequently reprinted works. The title page of the 1616 first edition states that the play was premiered by the Children of the Queen's Revels ; it later passed into the possession of the King's Men , who revived the play in 1624 . (The company's clown, John Shank , played
222-462: A College-life," but another story of uncertain veracity has him being expelled from Trinity College due to a "profane jest." The two accounts are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Farquhar joined a company performing on the Dublin stage, probably through his acquaintance with the well-known actor Robert Wilks . However, Farquhar was reportedly not that impressive as an actor. We are told that "his Voice
296-521: A Tub (1664), which has one heroic verse "conflict between love and friendship" plot, one urbane wit comedy plot, and one burlesque pantsing plot. ( See illustration, top right .) Such incongruities contributed to the low esteem held by Restoration comedy in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, whereas today such total theatre experience is again valued on the stage and by postmodern academic critics. The unsentimental or "hard" comedies of John Dryden , William Wycherley , and George Etherege reflected
370-461: A biographical sketch prefixed to certain 18th-century editions of his works, claims that Farquhar discovered a Genius early devoted to the Muses. When he was very young, he gave Specimens of his Poetry; and discovered a Force of Thinking, and Turn of Expression, much beyond his years. He was educated at Foyle College and later entered Trinity College Dublin at age 17 as a sizar under the patronage of
444-465: A commission in the regiment of the Earl of Orrery, so his time for the next few years was divided between the vocations of soldier and dramatist. It was also at about this time that Farquhar discovered Anne Oldfield , who was reading aloud a scene from The Scornful Lady at her aunt's tavern. Impressed, he brought her to the notice of Sir John Vanbrugh , and this led to her theatrical career, during which she
518-579: A dimension of melancholy and frustration. After a forged-letter complication, the play ends with marriage between Heartfree and Bellinda and stalemate between the Brutes. Constant continues to pay court to Lady Brute, and she continues to shilly-shally. The tolerance for Restoration comedy even in its modified form was running out by the end of the 17th century, as public opinion turned to respectability and seriousness faster than playwrights did. Interconnected causes for this shift in taste were demographic change,
592-404: A draft of his first play in his portmanteau." Some writers tie his move to that of his friend Wilks, who had received an offer from the manager of Drury Lane to come to London and join that theatre, and Wilks is also credited with encouraging Farquhar's efforts at writing plays. Farquhar's first comedy, Love and a Bottle , was premiered in 1698; "for its sprightly Dialogue and busy Scenes," it
666-515: A fatal slope to the lowest common denominator of public taste. Rich's company notoriously offered Bartholomew Fair -type attractions – high kickers, jugglers, rope dancers, performing animals – while the co-operating actors, while appealing to snobbery by setting themselves up as the one legitimate theatre company in London, were not above retaliating with "prologues recited by boys of five and epilogues declaimed by ladies on horseback". Restoration comedy
740-495: A gallant and a separate maintenance too." Bellinda is meanwhile grumpily courted by Constant's friend Heartfree, who is surprised and dismayed to find himself in love with her. The bad example of the Brutes is a constant warning to Heartfree not to marry. The Provoked Wife is a talk play, with the focus less on love scenes and more on discussions between friends, female (Lady Brute and Bellinda) and male (Constant and Heartfree). These are full of jokes, but are also thoughtful, with
814-674: A great fortune. His 18th century biographer records that "though he found himself deceived, his Circumstances embarrassed, and his Family increasing, he never upbraided her for the Cheat, but behaved to her with all the Delicacy and Tenderness of an indulgent Husband." He was engaged in recruiting for the army, due to the War of the Spanish Succession , for the next three years, writing little except The Stage Coach in collaboration with Peter Motteux ; this
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#1732858862499888-525: A heavy hand, rather than actually performed it. Today Restoration comedy is again appreciated on stage. The classics – Wycherley's The Country Wife and The Plain-Dealer , Etherege's The Man of Mode , and Congreve's Love For Love and The Way of the World – have competition not only from Vanbrugh's The Relapse and The Provoked Wife , but from such dark, unfunny comedies as Thomas Southerne 's The Wives Excuse . Aphra Behn, once considered unstageable, has had
962-456: A major middle-class segment. They were attracted to the comedies by up-to-the-minute topical writing, crowded and bustling plots, introduction of the first professional actresses, and the rise of the first celebrity actors. The period saw the first professional female playwright, Aphra Behn . Charles II was an active and interested patron of drama. Soon after his restoration in 1660 he granted exclusive staging rights, so-called Royal patents , to
1036-426: A renaissance, with The Rover now a repertory favourite. Distaste for sexual impropriety long kept Restoration comedy off the stage, locked in a critical poison cupboard. Victorian critics like William Hazlitt , though valuing the linguistic energy and "strength" of the canonical writers Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve, found it necessary to temper aesthetic praise with heavy moral condemnation. Aphra Behn received
1110-469: A sequel, Sir Harry Wildair , the following year, and in 1702 wrote the comedies The Inconstant and The Twin Rivals . Also in 1702, Farquhar published Love and Business, a collection that included letters, verse, and A Discourse Upon Comedy. The next year, he married Margaret Pemell, "a widow with three children, ten years his senior," who reportedly tricked him into the marriage by pretending to have
1184-455: A set of actors whom the public were inclined to support." Performers like the legendary Thomas Betterton , the tragedienne Elizabeth Barry and the rising young comedian Anne Bracegirdle had the audience on their side, and confident of this walked out. The actors gained a Royal "licence to perform", so bypassing Rich's ownership of the original Duke's and King's Company patents from 1660 and forming their own cooperative company. This venture
1258-475: A single play were appreciated rather than frowned on: audiences prized "variety" within as well as between plays. Early Restoration audiences had little enthusiasm for structurally simple, well-shaped comedies such as those of Molière . They demanded bustling, crowded multi-plot action and fast pace. Even a splash of high heroic drama might be thrown in to enrich the comedy mix, as in George Etherege 's Love in
1332-405: A skirt, outlined by the male outfit." Successful Restoration actresses included Charles II's mistress Nell Gwyn , the tragedienne Elizabeth Barry , famous for an ability to "move the passions" and make whole audiences cry, the 1690s comedian Anne Bracegirdle , and Susanna Mountfort ( Susanna Verbruggen ), who had many roles written specially for her in the 1680s and 1690s. Letters and memoirs of
1406-510: A strong middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of marriage. The focus in comedy is less on young lovers outwitting the older generation, more on marital relations after the wedding bells. Thomas Southerne 's dark The Wives' Excuse (1691) is not yet "soft": it shows a woman miserably married to the fop Friendall, everybody's friend, whose follies and indiscretions undermine her social worth, as her honour
1480-449: A success. This closed system forced playwrights to respond strongly to popular taste. Fashions in drama would change almost week by week rather than season by season, as each company responded to the offerings of the other, and new plays were urgently sought. In this hectic climate the new genres of heroic drama , pathetic drama and Restoration comedy were born and flourished. Both the quantity and quality of drama suffered in 1682 when
1554-532: A very common character in Restoration comedy). Wycherley's The Plain Dealer (1676), a variation on the theme of Molière 's Le Misanthrope , was highly regarded for uncompromising satire and earned Wycherley the appellation "Plain Dealer" Wycherley or "Manly" Wycherley, after the play's main character Manly. The single play that does most to support the charge of obscenity levelled then and now at Restoration comedy
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#17328588624991628-399: Is a great success and Horner has sex with many married ladies of virtuous reputation, whose husbands are happy to leave them alone with him. In the famously outrageous "China scene", sexual intercourse is assumed to take place repeatedly just off stage, where Horner and his mistresses carry on a sustained double entendre dialogue purportedly about Horner's china collection. The Country Wife
1702-475: Is also acknowledged. Restoration comedy peaked twice. The genre came to marked maturity in the mid-1670s with an extravaganza of aristocratic comedies. Twenty lean years followed this short golden age, though the achievement of Aphra Behn in the 1680s can be noted. In the mid-1690s a brief second Restoration comedy renaissance arose, aimed at a wider audience. The comedies of the golden 1670s and 1690s peak times are extremely different from each other. An attempt
1776-418: Is bound up in his. Mrs Friendall is pursued by a would-be lover, a matter-of-fact rake devoid of all the qualities that made Etherege's Dorimant charming. She is kept from action and choice by the unattractiveness of all her options. The humour of this "comedy" is in the subsidiary love-chase and fornication plots, none in the main plot. In Congreve's Love for Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700),
1850-516: Is driven by a succession of near-discoveries of the truth about Horner's sexual prowess (and so the truth about the respectable ladies), from which he extricates himself by quick thinking and luck. Horner never reforms, but keeps his secret to the end and is seen to go on merrily reaping the fruits of his planted misinformation past the last act and beyond. 2. The married life of Pinchwife and Margery draws on Molière's School for Wives . Middle-aged Pinchwife has married an ignorant young country girl in
1924-489: Is made below to illustrate the generational taste shift by describing The Country Wife (1675) and The Provoked Wife (1697) in some detail. The two plays differ in some typical ways, just as a Hollywood movie of the 1950s differs from one of the 1970s. The plays are not, however, offered as "typical" of their decades. Indeed, there exist no typical comedies of the 1670s or the 1690s; even within these two short peak-times, comedy types kept mutating and multiplying. The drama of
1998-407: Is meanwhile tempted to embark on an affair with the witty and faithful Constant. Divorce is no option for either of the Brutes at this time, but forms of legal separation have recently arisen and would entail separate maintenance for the wife. Such an arrangement would prevent remarriage. Still, muses Lady Brute, in one of many discussions with her niece Bellinda, "These are good times. A woman may have
2072-481: Is only over the last few decades that the statement has become untrue, with Restoration comedy acknowledged as a rewarding subject for high theory analysis, and Wycherley's The Country Wife , long branded the most obscene play in the English language, becoming something of an academic favourite. "Minor" comic writers are getting a fair share of attention, especially the post-Aphra Behn generation of women playwrights around
2146-455: Is probably Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675). The Country Wife has three interlinked but distinct plots, which each project sharply different moods: 1. Horner's impotence trick provides the main plot and the organising principle. The upper-class rake Horner mounts a campaign to seduce as many respectable ladies as possible, first spreading a false rumour of his own impotence, so as to be allowed where no other men might go. The trick
2220-421: Is said to have "cheered him with a substantial present, and urged him to write another comedy." This comedy, The Beaux' Stratagem , was given its première on 8 March 1707; we know from Farquhar's own statement prefacing the published version of the play that he wrote it during his sickness: The reader may find some faults in this play, which my illness prevented the amending of; but there is great amends made in
2294-463: Is said to have been "well received by the Audience." Called a "licentious piece" by one scholar, and cited as proof that Farquhar had "absorbed the stock topics, character-types, and situations of Restoration comedy" by another, the play deals with Roebuck, "An Irish Gentleman of a wild roving Temper" who is "newly come to London. " The general character of the play can be evaluated by considering that in
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2368-533: Is something of a Restoration problem play in its attention to the subordinate legal position of married women and the complexities of "divorce" and separation, issues that had been highlighted in the mid-1690s by some notorious cases before the House of Lords (see Stone). Sir John Brute in The Provoked Wife is tired of matrimony. He comes home drunk every night and is continually rude and insulting to his wife. She
2442-431: Is the way Pinchwife's pathological jealousy always leads him into supplying Margery with the very information he wishes her not to have. 3. The courtship of Harcourt and Alithea is a comparatively uplifting love story, in which the witty Harcourt wins the hand of Pinchwife's sister Alithea from the hands of the upper-class town snob Sparkish, to whom she was engaged until discovering he loved her only for her money. When
2516-522: The "wit duels" between lovers typical of 1670s comedy are underplayed. The give-and-take set pieces of couples still testing their attraction for each other have mutated into witty prenuptial debates on the eve of marriage, as in the famous "Proviso" scene in The Way of the World (1700). Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife (1697) follows in the footsteps of Southerne's Wives' Excuse , with a lighter touch and more humanly recognisable characters. The Provoked Wife
2590-516: The Bishop of Dromore , who may have been related to Farquhar's mother. Farquhar may have initially intended to follow his father's profession and become a clergyman, but was "unhappy and rebellious as a student" and left college after two years to become an actor. His 18th-century biographer claims that the departure was because "his gay and volatile Disposition could not long relish the Gravity and Retirement of
2664-676: The Glorious Revolution of 1688, William 's and Mary 's dislike of the theatre, and the lawsuits brought against playwrights by the Society for the Reformation of Manners (founded in 1692). When Jeremy Collier attacked Congreve and Vanbrugh in his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage in 1698, he was confirming a shift in audience taste that had taken place. At
2738-571: The Interregnum (1642–60), material was extracted from The Scornful Lady to form a droll called The False Heir and Formal Curate, published by Kirkman in The Wits . The play was revived early in the Restoration and became a standard in the repertory. In his Diary, Samuel Pepys recorded seeing it on 27 November 1660 and on 4 January 1661 , both times with male actors in the title role, as
2812-833: The King's Company and the Duke's Company , led by two middle-aged Caroline playwrights, Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant . The patentees scrambled for performance rights to the previous generation's Jacobean and Caroline plays, as the first necessity for economic survival before any new plays existed. Their next priority was to build splendid patent theatres in Drury Lane and Dorset Gardens , respectively. Striving to outdo each other, Killigrew and Davenant ended with quite similar theatres, both designed by Christopher Wren , both optimally providing music and dancing, and both fitted with moveable scenery and elaborate machines for thunder, lightning, and waves. The Restoration dramatists renounced
2886-490: The Restoration period of 1660–1710. Comedy of manners is used as a synonym for this. After public stage performances were banned for 18 years by the Puritan regime, reopening of the theatres in 1660 marked a renaissance of English drama . Sexually explicit language was encouraged by King Charles II (1660–1685) personally and by the rakish style of his court. Historian George Norman Clark argues: The best-known fact about
2960-477: The Tories John Dryden and Aphra Behn . Behn's achievement as an early professional woman writer has been the subject of much recent study. During a second wave of Restoration comedy in the 1690s, the "softer" comedies of William Congreve and John Vanbrugh reflected mutating cultural perceptions and great social change. The playwrights of the 1690s set out to appeal to more socially mixed audiences with
3034-469: The 1660s and 1670s was vitalised by the competition between the two patent companies created at the Restoration, and by the personal interest of Charles II, while comic playwrights arose to the demand for new plays. They stole freely from the contemporary French and Spanish stage, from English Jacobean and Caroline plays, and even from Greek and Roman classical comedies, combining the looted plotlines in adventurous ways. Resulting differences of tone in
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3108-697: The Curate in their 1624 production.) The King's Men acted The Scornful Lady on 19 October 1633 , when Sir Henry Herbert , the Master of the Revels , refused to let them perform The Woman's Prize . Prince Charles, the future King Charles II , attended a performance of the play at the Cockpit-in-Court Theatre on Twelfth Night , 6 January 1642 . While the theatres were closed during the English Civil War and
3182-606: The Restoration drama is that it is immoral. The dramatists did not criticize the accepted morality about gambling, drink, love, and pleasure generally, or try, like the dramatists of our own time, to work out their own view of character and conduct. What they did was, according to their respective inclinations, to mock at all restraints. Some were gross, others delicately improper.... The dramatists did not merely say anything they liked: they also intended to glory in it and to shock those who did not like it. The socially diverse audiences included aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on and
3256-477: The atmosphere at Court. They celebrated with frankness an aristocratic macho lifestyle of unremitting sexual intrigue and conquest. The Earl of Rochester , a real-life Restoration rake, courtier and poet, is flatteringly portrayed in Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676) as a riotous, witty, intellectual, sexually irresistible aristocrat, a template for posterity's idea of the glamorous Restoration rake (actually never
3330-412: The canon of Fletcher and his collaborators, produced this breakdown in the two writers' contributions: Hoy's schema is in general agreement with the work of earlier researchers. A few early critics suggested the participation of Philip Massinger , though that possibility has generally been rejected due to lack of evidence. Based on references and allusions to contemporary events, scholars generally date
3404-472: The condemnation without the praise, as outspoken sex comedy was seen as particularly offensive from a woman author. At the turn of the 20th century, an embattled minority of academic Restoration comedy enthusiasts began to appear, such as the editor Montague Summers , whose work ensured that plays of Restoration comedy authors remained in print. "Critics remain astonishingly defensive about the masterpieces of this period," wrote Robert D. Hume as late as 1976. It
3478-456: The freedom society allowed to men. Some feminist critics such as Jacqueline Pearson saw them as subverting conventional gender roles and empowering female members of the audience. Elizabeth Howe has objected that the male disguise, when studied in relation to play texts, prologues, and epilogues, comes out as "little more than yet another means of displaying the actress as a sexual object" to male patrons, by showing off her body, normally hidden by
3552-473: The hope that she will not know to cuckold him. Horner teaches her, and Margery cuts a swathe through the sophistications of London marriage without even noticing them. She is enthusiastic about the virile handsomeness of town gallants, rakes, and especially theatre actors (such self-referential stage jokes were nourished by the new higher status of actors), and keeps Pinchwife in a state of continual horror with her plain-spokenness and interest in sex. A running joke
3626-522: The lawyer Christopher Rich , who tried to finance a tangle of "farmed" shares and sleeping partners by slashing salaries and dangerously by abolishing traditional perks of senior performers, who were stars with the clout to fight back. The company owners, wrote the young United Company employee Colley Cibber , "had made a monopoly of the stage, and consequently presum'd they might impose what conditions they pleased upon their people. [They] did not consider that they were all this while endeavouring to enslave
3700-510: The leading man in the Duke's Company, and played Dorimant, the seminal irresistible Restoration rake , at the première of George Etherege 's Man of Mode (1676). Betterton's position remained unassailed through the 1680s, both as leading man of the United Company and as its stage manager and de facto day-to-day leader. He remained loyal to Rich longer than many of his co-workers, but eventually it
3774-508: The least important draw, no performance being advertised by an author until 1699). Although playhouses were built for large audiences – the second Drury Lane theatre from 1674 held 2000 patrons – they were compact in design and an actor's charisma could be intimately projected from the thrust stage . With two companies competing for their services from 1660 to 1682, star actors could negotiate star deals, comprising company shares and benefit nights as well as salaries. This advantage changed when
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#17328588624993848-470: The more successful Duke's Company absorbed the struggling King's Company to form the United Company . Production of new plays dropped off sharply in the 1680s, affected by the monopoly and the political situation (see Decline of comedy below). The influence and incomes of actors dropped too. In the late 1680s, predatory investors ("adventurers") converged on the United Company. Management was taken over by
3922-458: The much-anticipated all-star première in 1700 of The Way of the World , Congreve's first comedy for five years, the audience showed only moderate enthusiasm for that subtle and almost melancholy work. The comedy of sex and wit was about to be replaced by the drama of obvious sentiment and exemplary morality. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the sexual frankness of Restoration comedy ensured that theatre producers cannibalised it or adapted it with
3996-498: The opening scene, Roebuck tells his friend Lovewell that he has left Ireland due to getting a woman pregnant with twins (a boy and a girl) and to Roebuck's father trying to force Roebuck to marry the woman; however, Roebuck remarks, "Heav'n was pleas'd to lessen my Affliction, by taking away the She-brat." After the favourable reception of Love and a Bottle, Farquhar decided to devote himself to playwriting. He also at this point received
4070-493: The period show men and women in the audience relishing Mountfort's swaggering, roistering impersonations of young women breeched to enjoy the social and sexual freedom of male Restoration rakes . Male and female actors on the London stage in the Restoration period became for the first time public celebrities . Documents of the period show audiences attracted to performances by the talents of specific actors as much as by specific plays, and more than by authors (who seem to have been
4144-435: The play to the 1613–16 period, though dates as early as 1610 have also been proposed. The Scornful Lady participates in a complex inter-relationship with several other plays of its era, a set of dramas that includes Marston's The Dutch Courtesan , Fletcher and Massinger's The Little French Lawyer , Massinger's The Parliament of Love , and A Cure for a Cuckold by John Webster and William Rowley . All
4218-526: The play; Anne Marshall was noted for her portrayal of the title character in the 1660s, while in the next century Mrs. Macklin, the wife of Charles Macklin , was a popular success as the servant Abigail. The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 19 March 1616; both the Register entry and the first edition assign the play to Beaumont and Fletcher . Cyrus Hoy , in his survey of authorship problems in
4292-458: The playhouse to watch or re-watch performances by particular actresses and to his enjoyment of these. Daringly suggestive comedy scenes involving women became especially common, although of course Restoration actresses were, just like male actors, expected to do justice to all kinds and moods of plays. (Their role in the development of Restoration tragedy is also important, compare She-tragedy .) A speciality introduced almost as early as actresses
4366-412: The plays exploit the idea of a woman who wants her beloved to duel with and kill his closest friend. The play went through multiple editions in the 17th century, leaving it with a complex publication history. Subsequent editions followed in the 18th century. Like other already-published Beaumont/Fletcher plays , The Scornful Lady was omitted from the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647 , but
4440-517: The representation, which cannot be match'd, no more than the friendly and indefatigable care of Mr. Wilks, to whom I chiefly owe the success of the play. Farquhar died on 29 April 1707, not quite two months after the opening of this last play. He was buried in the Church of St. Martin in the Fields , London, on 3 May. Restoration comedy Restoration comedy is English comedy written and performed in
4514-413: The resulting actors' cooperative. Betterton played every great male part there was from 1660 into the 18th century. After watching Hamlet in 1661, Pepys reports in his diary that the young beginner Betterton "did the prince's part beyond imagination." Such expressive performances seem to have attracted playgoers as magnetically, as did the novelty of seeing women on the stage. He was soon established as
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#17328588624994588-436: The tradition of satire recently embodied by Ben Jonson , devoting themselves to a comedy of manners that accepted the social code of the upper class uncritically. The audience of the early Restoration period was not exclusively courtly , as has sometimes been supposed, but it was quite small and could barely support two companies. There was no untapped reserve of occasional playgoers. Ten consecutive performances constituted
4662-458: The turn of the 18th century: Delarivier Manley , Mary Pix , Catharine Trotter , and Susanna Centlivre . A broad study of most never-reprinted Restoration comedies has been made possible by internet access (by subscription only) to the first editions at the British Library . Selected seminal critical studies: The Scornful Lady The Scornful Lady is a Jacobean era stage play,
4736-510: The two companies merged in 1682 and the London stage became a monopoly, both the number and the variety of new plays dropped sharply. There was a swing away from comedy to serious political drama, reflecting preoccupations and divisions after the Popish Plot (1678) and Exclusion Crisis (1682). The few comedies produced tended to be political in focus, the Whig dramatist Thomas Shadwell sparring with
4810-507: The two companies were amalgamated in 1682, but the way the actors rebelled and took command of a new company in 1695 is in itself an illustration of how far their status and power had developed since 1660. The greatest fixed stars among Restoration actors were Elizabeth Barry ("Famous Mrs Barry" who "forc 'd Tears from the Eyes of her Auditory") and Thomas Betterton , both active in running the actors' revolt in 1695 and both original patent-holders in
4884-406: Was an adaptation of a French play. He drew on his recruiting experience for his next comedy, The Recruiting Officer (1706). However, Farquhar had to sell his army commission to pay debts, reportedly after the Duke of Ormonde advised him to do so, promising him another but failing to keep his promise. Early in 1707, Farquhar's friend Wilks visited him; Farquhar was ill and in distress, and Wilks
4958-511: Was he who headed an actors' walkout in 1695 and became the acting manager of the new company. Variety and dizzying fashion changes are typical of Restoration comedy. Though the "Restoration drama" unit taught to college students is likely to be telescoped in a way that makes the plays all sound contemporary, scholars now have a strong sense of the rapid evolution of English drama over these 40 years and its social and political causes. The influence of theatre-company competition and playhouse economics
5032-561: Was performing in the Dryden play, an accident on stage put an end to Farquhar's acting career. As Guyomar, Farquhar was supposed to "kill" Vasquez, one of the Spanish generals in the drama. Forgetting to exchange his sword for a foil before enacting this scene, Farquhar severely wounded Price, the actor playing Vasquez. Although Price recovered, Farquhar resolved after this mishap to give up acting for good. Farquhar then left for London, "possibly with
5106-518: Was set up with detailed rules for avoiding arbitrary managerial authority, regulating the ten actors' shares, setting the conditions of salaried employees and the sickness and retirement benefits of both categories. The cooperative had the good luck to open in 1695 with the première of William Congreve 's famous Love For Love and the skill to make it a huge box-office success. London again had two competing companies. Their dash to attract audiences briefly revitalised Restoration drama, but also set it on
5180-675: Was somewhat weak" and that "his movements [were] stiff and ungraceful." But he was well received by audiences and thought to continue in this career "till something better should offer." Some of the roles reportedly played by Farquhar were Lennox in Shakespeare's Macbeth , Young Bellair in The Man of Mode by George Etherege , Lord Dion in Philaster by Beaumont and Fletcher , and Guyomar in The Indian Emperor by John Dryden . But while he
5254-470: Was standard up to that time. Then Thomas Killigrew staged the play with women in the female parts; Pepys saw that production on 12 February 1661. Pepys saw the play again on 27 December 1666 , 16 September 1667 , and 3 June 1668 . Charles Hart and Edward Kynaston were among the actors of the day who played in it. The Scornful Lady remained in the repertory until the middle of the 18th century. Some early actresses acquired reputations for their work in
5328-410: Was strongly influenced by the first professional actresses. Before the closing of the theatres , all female roles had been taken by boy players and the predominantly male audiences of the 1660s and 1670s were curious, censorious and delighted at the novelty of seeing real women engage in risqué repartee and take part in physical seduction scenes. Samuel Pepys refers many times in his diary to visiting
5402-403: Was the breeches role – an actress appearing in male clothes (breeches of tight-fitting knee-length pants, the standard male garment of the time), for instance to play a witty heroine who disguises herself as a boy to hide or to engage in escapades disallowed to girls. A quarter of the plays produced on the London stage between 1660 and 1700 contained breeches roles. Women playing them behaved with
5476-510: Was the first performer of major female roles in Farquhar's last comedies. In 1700, Farquhar's The Constant Couple was acted at Drury Lane and proved a great success, helped considerably by his friend Wilks' portrayal of the character of Sir Henry Wildair (a performance that Farquhar himself praised generously in his "Preface to the Reader" when the play was published). The playwright followed up with
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