Remarks on the Play

Through the years, The Beaux' Stratagem has culled a range of responses from exubrient or more tempered praise, to hesitance regarding its less polished characters, to outright rejection of its seeming immorality. For a taste of some of these responses, peruse the excerpts below.


It is an honour to the morality of the present age, that this most entertaining comedy is but seldom performed; and never, except some new pantomime, or other gaudy spectacle, be added, as an afterpiece, for the attraction of an audience.
The well drawn characters, happy incidents, and excellent dialogue, in “The Beaux Stratagem,” are but poor atonement for that unrestrained contempt of principle which pervades every scene. Plays of this kind are far more mischievous than those, which preserve less appearance of delicacy. […]
Charmed with the spirit of archer and Aimwell, the reader may not, perhaps, immediately perceive, that those two fine gentlemen are but arrant imposters; and that the lively, though pitiable Mrs. Sullen, is no other than a deliberate violator of her marriage vow. Highly delighted with every character, he will not, perhaps, at first observe, that all the wise and witty persons of this comedy are knaves, and all the honest people fools.
    -Mrs. Inchbald, 1808 (from her remarks printed in Volume 8 of The British Theatre)

[A]n excellent play, which [...] is always acted whenever actors can be found. Its plot is new, simple, and interesting; the characters various, without confusing it; the dialogue sprightly and characteristic; the moral bold, healthy, admirable, and doubly needed in those times, when sottishness was a fashion.
    -Leigh Hunt, 1840 (as printed in The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux’ Stratagem: A Casebook, p. 41)

Is the Beaux’ Stratagem a radically improper work or not? Did it, as alleged, require any process of purification before it was presented on the modern stage? Was it, in fact, necessary to Bowdlerize it prior to production? To all these questions I answer emphatically, No. […]
An eminent old critic has observed of this work:--
'[…] Verbal grossness arises in a great measure from a change of terms; words and phrases that were in common acceptation a century ago are superseded by others that convey the very same ideas, yet the ancients are scouted as invidious and the modern heard without a blush. Such is the progress of refinement and the mutability of language.’
The views of the old critic are so far confirmed by the matter of fact that it has been necessary to make very slight verbal alterations in the old text, and when the circumstance is sufficiently appreciated the defence of Farquhar in the prologue will perhaps be understood.
    -Marie Litton, 27 Sept 1879 (from a letter to the editor in The Times, London)

[T]here are traces in The Beaux’ Stratagem of an actual interest in moral problems, wholly different from the downright contempt for the very idea of morality which pervades the Restoration Comedy as a whole.
    -William Archer, 1905 (as printed in The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux’ Stratagem: A Casebook, p. 46)

The characters in The Beaux’ Stratagem, though not more vivid and original, are more finished than those of The Recruiting Officer. The minor persons are invested with a distinction almost Shakespearean. Bonniface is become the accepted type of English innkeeper, and his name is a part of our everyday language. Of Scrub, the factotum, it is sufficient to say that it was a favorite part with Garrick, who frequently exchanged for it the more important role of Archer. Cherry, the pert bar-maid, was voted adorable by eighteenth-century audiences. […] While Mrs. Sullen, albeit somewhat over-sensuous, is probably his best drawn and most highly-colored heroine. Aimwell is an admirable lover: his confession of the cheat in the moment of victory is a capital stroke, and saves him the true gentleman.
But Archer is Farquhar’s most masterly creation. Some one has well said that in Mercutio Shakespeare anticipated all the wit and gaiety of the seventeenth-century cavalier. In Archer Farquhar has perfectly drawn the same cavalier of a later generation, when devotion had given place to pleasure-loving egoism, wit grown hard and brilliant, and poetry vanished to make way for showy prose.
    -Louis A. Strauss, 1914 (from his introduction to A Discourse on Comedy, The Recruiting Officer, and The Beaux’ Stratagem, p. l-li)

Not the least remarkable of Farquhar’s qualities, and one which may serve as a convenient pointer to other virtues of his, is the ease with which his language comes to a modern ear. His dialogue has a more familiar sound than that of any other dramatist of his period. Not that the speech of his characters in the least resembles our own; it has a polish, a shapeliness, and a balance that belong to the 18th century, which was young when he wrote; but it is extraordinarily free of those conceits, those elaborations of verbal wit, which are peculiar to the last decades of the 17th century so lately left behind.
    -review of The Lyric Theatre’s production, 21 Jan 1927 (anonymous article in The Times, London)

Farquhar was one of the first playwrights to move away from London as the focus of the action, and move the play to the country. [...] It's a romantic comedy. It's funny, sexy, and tinged with real ironies.
    -Mark Wing-Davey, 8 Sept 1995 (as quoted in Lynn Carey's Contra Costa Times article, "'Stratagem' with a Few Odd Quirks")

Farquhar’s deployment of comic structures finds its sharpest elaboration in the play’s interrogation of class categories and their meanings. […] The Beaux’ Stratagem exhibits a vested interest in articulating the value of its characters, that is, in producing a measure of their worthiness for marriage. In this case, that end is achieved through a complicated calculus of both rank and wealth, appearance and reality. These calculations appear to provide the basic materials for the identification of gentility throughout the comedy. In the end, however, Farquhar’s metadramatic reflections on these calculations result instead in epistemological uncertainty with respect not only to character value but also to the value of comedy as a form that conveys meaning. We are forced by Farquhar’s maneuvers to recognize that our own consent to comic resolution is grounded more upon the rhetorical persuasiveness of the convention embedded in the comedy than upon any empirical evidence or knowledge that the comedy provides.
    -Lisa A. Freeman, 2002 (from her Character’s Theater, p. 171-2)



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