The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Beaux-Stratagem, by George Farquhar

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Title: The Beaux-Stratagem

Author: George Farquhar

Release Date: May 5, 2007 [EBook #21334]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David Widger

THE BEAUX-STRATAGEM

By George Farquhar

'He was a delightful writer, and one to whom
I should sooner recur for relaxation and
entertainment and without after-cloying and disgust,
than any of the school of which he may be said
to have been the last The Beaux-Stratagem
reads quite as well as it acts: it has life,
movement, wit, humour, sweet nature and sweet
temper from beginning to end.'
CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE

PREFACE

_The Author_. 'It is surprising,' says Mr. Percy Fitzgerald,
'how much English Comedy owes to Irishmen.' Nearly fifty
years ago Calcraft enumerated eighty-seven Irish dramatists in
a by no means exhaustive list, including Congreve, Southerne,
Steele, Kelly, Macklin, and Farquhar--the really Irish
representative amongst the dramatists of the Restoration, the true
prototype of Goldsmith and Sheridan. Thoroughly Irish by
birth and education, Captain George Farquhar (1677-1707)
had delighted the town with a succession of bright, rattling
comedies--Love and a Bottle (1698), The Constant Couple
(1699), Sir Harry Wildair (1701), The Inconstant (1702),
The Twin Rivals (1702), The Recruiting Officer (1706). In
an unlucky moment, when hard pressed by his debts, he sold
out of the army on the strength of a promise by the Duke of
Ormond to gain him some preferment, which never came. In
his misery and poverty, with a wife and two helpless girls to
support, Farquhar was not forsaken by his one true friend,
Robert Wilks. Seeking out the dramatist in his wretched
garret in St Martin's Lane, the actor advised him no longer to
trust to great men's promises, but to look only to his pen for
support, and urged him to write another play. 'Write!' said
Farquhar, starting from his chair; 'is it possible that a man
can write with common-sense who is heartless and has not a
shilling in his p