Beaux' Stratagem - Couverture souple

The A nthor. It is surprising, says Mr. Perqr Fitzgerald, how much English Comedy owes to I rishmen. Nearly fifty years ago Calcraft enumerated eighty-seven I rish dramatists in a by no means exhaustive list, including Congreve, Southeme, Steele, Kelly, Macklin, and Farquharthe really I rish representative amongst the dramatists of the Restoration, the true prototype of Goldsmith and Sheridan. Thoroughly I rish by birth and education. Captain George Farquhar (1677-1707) had delighted the town with a succession of bright, rattling comedies Lave 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 bis misery and poverty, with a wife and two helpless girls to siporty Farquhar was not forsaken by his one true friend, Robert Wilks. Seeking out the dramatist in his wretched garret in StM artin s Lane, the actor advised him no longer to trust to great mens promises, but to look only to his pen for support, and urged him to write another play.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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One of the last of the Restoration comedies, it is, nonetheless, as frothy as deliciously frothy as anything in the canon. --Time Out