The Recruiting Officer - a historical note

In 1706 - the year this play premiered - Great Britain did not yet exist. Scotland and England had shared the same monarch for just over a century, but with that Scottish Stuart dynasty spluttering to a close they had still not formally been united into one nation. All that was to change with 22 July that year with the Treaty of Union, passed the following year by the two countries’ parliaments to create something called Great Britain. At the same time, with the February 1706 Regency Act, that Stuart dynasty was facing up to its own extinction by rewriting the normal rules of succession.

Those rules of succession had already been suspended once before less than thirty years ago in 1680 to eject the Catholic James II and call in his daughter Mary and her husband William. William and Mary had been succeeded by Mary’s sister Anne but now all Anne’s children were dead. Thus the Regency Act leap-frogged her closer but Catholic heirs to give the British crown to a suitably Protestant German princess, Anne’s first cousin Sophia, Electress of Hanover. William was the Prince of Orange, effective head of state of the Dutch Republic and sworn enemy of Louis XIV’s France. Thus William and his supporters the Whigs were keen to pull Britain and its armed forces into the continental wars she had previously kept at arm’s length.

The Act and Treaty of Union were not entirely popular moves in Scotland, still smarting from the Glencoe Massacres, and among Catholics in Farquhar’s Ireland, where William’s victory at the Boyne was still a recent memory. In both places there was still strong support for a Stuart to succeed Anne, even if that was James II’s Catholic son James. This James, the ‘Old Pretender’, would in 1708 make an abortive attempt to invade Scotland with support from Britain’s most powerful enemy, France, and six years later would ignite Scotland’s first full-scale Jacobite rebellion against Britain’s first Hanoverian monarch, George I. In such a context, Brazen accusing Balance of being a Jacobite sounds less like a joke and more a modern-day neo-conservative asking ‘are you with us or with the terrorists?’.

So Farquhar was writing in a time of foment, both for Britain and for Ireland, where Farquhar’s fellow Protestants were jumpy about a Franco-Jacobite invasion. Back in London, however, there was still high support of the government and the ongoing foreign war, the War of the Spanish Succession. William III and the Whigs were doing their best to capitalise on fears of French ‘universal monarchy’ (world domination, in modern parlance) and to metamorphose Britain’s century-old reliance on its navy to a foreign policy based firmly on its army. However, British suspicion of a standing army from the Civil War years was still deep-rooted and had been one of the factors in James II’s fall. This meant recruiting officers were not popular figures, as Farquhar well knew, having been one himself – Plume may be a flattering self-portait and the author’s recruiting drives might even have taken him through Shrewsbury, then a major market town and a staging post on the London-to-Ireland coach-and-sea route via Holyhead. What is certain is that it was his failure as an officer and a recruiter which had driven him back to writing for the stage – had he been a success as a recruiter, we might never have had ‘The Recruiting Officer’. Recruiting Acts attempted to mop up the urban and rural poor but protect those in what we would call reserved occupations such as mining, but there were more than enough loopholes for figures like Kite to exploit.

However, while those armies stayed safely abroad and saw success, they proved more popular, especially with an increasingly literate and media-hungry populace of armchair generals like Balance. Even a yokel like Bullock might be taken in by ‘a tale of a great fight between the Hungarians and the Irish’, an accurate reflection of the cosmopolitan nature of Marlborough’s force and recruiting in British-ruled Ireland. Their officers, however, were still aristocrats – even without marrying Melinda, the duel-phobic Brazen must have been well off already to afford both his commission and the £20,000 he has “spent … in the service”. Officers might rise higher by experience or merit, but the vast majority got their post by purchasing it from the government, a system only introduced 40 years earlier. This meant that rising from a volunteer among the other ranks to that of officer by merit alone as Plume claims to have done was at best highly unlikely and in most cases pie in the sky, especially for his artisan-class Shropshire recruits without the requisite money or influence. The recruiter’s promises of travel were more justified, from the lands of the ‘infidels’ in East Europe, Turkey and the Mediterranean, to Britain’s growing West Indian colonies, via the battlefields of Germany and the Netherlands – if one did not die of fever on a troop ship, tropical disease or French cannon shot first.

Though the majority of his army consisted of his German allies’ troops rather than British ones, Marlborough’s campaigns had advanced British troops further into continental Europe than they had for 400 years. His spectacular victory at Blenheim two years before the play’s premiere was still news and patriotism at fever pitch, even though the setbacks of the war’s final years and the government’s resulting fall were both just over the horizon. The war had even given the public the cause celebre of Kit Cavanaugh or Mother Ross, a woman soldier in a real-life breeches role that foreshadowed Sylvia’s cross-dressing. Ross was a Protestant Jacobite who had followed her husband into the army, fought in the infantry and dragoons, duelled over a woman, seen action at Blenheim and only been found out when treated for a fractured skull at the battle of Ramillies, less than two months after the play premiered. She was later presented to Queen Anne and became the first ever female resident of the Royal Hospital at Chelsea.

This meant that there was a ready audience for Farquhar’s rambunctious tale of two wily, lusty and roistering recruiters and their friends, lovers and yokel victims. It premiered on 8 April 1706 and was published less than a month later, seeing 512 performances by the end of the 18th century. Yet, after just one more masterpiece – ‘The Beaux Stratagem’ – and just over one more year of life, Farquhar was dead. Like the British nation of 1706, British drama of 1706 was also in flux, with Restoration comedy dying out in 1717 with ‘Three Hours After Marriage’. For all its hints of the new comic century to come, Farquhar’s work remained all but forgotten for the next two hundred years. But perhaps Farquhar and his alter ego would indeed have the last laugh. For British comedy of the 18th century would reach its apogee in the form of another Irishman, Sheridan, who would write into being another Captain, who might be seen as the heir to Plume and his creator - Captain Jack Absolute.

The Rivals - or, observations on a comedy of manners with military and Shakespearean overtones....

And so to the Southwark Playhouse to see 'The Rivals', for the first time in 10 years. It wasn't a theatre I'd been to before, and the production would have passed me by (and, paradoxically, not sold out as quickly and been an awful lot easier to get tickets for) had not Monsieur Billington of the good ship Guardian reviewed it. Now, after trawling the other reviews a bit (the Times was an awful lot sniffier), and seeing the £18 price tag, I was in two minds as to whether to go. However, it's a play that's not on often - indeed, the RSC revival in 2000 that Billington mentions was the only other time I've seen it, which makes me feel positively ancient - and it sounded a decent cast, so I decided to go along. Ending up on a returns list (of two - the £18 price must be offputting, it nearly was for me), I get a ticket at the last second, dash into the auditorium just after the actors and plonk down in the reserved 'latecomers' spots at extreme left of the single frontal seating tier.

A very good production, for what it was, a professional but shoestring production under cover under a railway arch, with mainline London Bridge services rattling overhead - excellent cast, comic timing and a level of audience interaction that should enliven more productions of 18th century plays. A slightly too simpering Lydia perhaps - that of course needs to be part of the interpretation of that romantic-novel-obsessed character, but it also needs something more (just as, say, an Olivia in Twelfth Night needs both silk and steel). And the sightlines for those on the wings were tricky at times, with both characters blocking each other - but then they always are, and it's no criticism of this production to say that comparing it with a half-remembered RSC one with a proscenium arch at the Barbican or the good old / bad old Royal Shakespeare Theatre is hardly comparing like with like.


Talking of half-remembered, it's strange what strikes you in a play seeing it at two such different times of life and in two such different productions. In the RSC one (pictured), only five years into my theatre-viewing life, and with a cast including Wendy Craig and Benjamin Whitrow (Fowler from Chicken Run if animation or film is more your metier), it was one of my early experiences of professional comic timing, how to ride a laugh, turn on a sixpence from belly laugh to pathos, and so on - and the second time I saw a little-known young Scottish classical actor called David who seems to have gone on to do something big in sci-fi. Not that these things were absent last night - but in addition two other things struck me.

First, now that I work at a military museum, I was struck by the as-standard 'upper class rural yokel' character Bob Acres' repeated references to the Somerset militia, the 18th century's Dad's Army. The play came out in 1775, the year the Americans began their fight for independence, with the Franco-Spanish invasion threats of the Seven Years' War well within Britain's living memory and new ones soon to come. And yet the RSC production was, in its way, much more militarised - not only Jack Absolute was in military uniform (which is in the text) but also his blustering father Anthony (which is not). Which not only proves you always come to a play with a different set of expectations, but also makes you wonder if it could perhaps be played in a militarised 20th century era, perhaps on the British home front during one of the World Wars - though it would take a daring director to break it out of its frock coats and frilly dresses.

Secondly, the Shakespearean overtones. Some of these were down to the production itself - it was a very musical one, with Faulkland wilting like some comedy version of Orsino whilst being sung an 18th-century-aria-like version of 'Come Away Death' from Twelfth Night (admittedly something I wouldn't have noticed had I not been in an amateur Twelfth Night recently). But they're also there in the text - at least four quotes from Hamlet if I counted correctly, again mostly in Acres' mouth.

On past form, return in 2020 for the next time I see the play....