University of Virginia Library

I. The Date

Recent scholars have agreed that The Stage-Coach opened shortly before 2 February 1704, the date of the earliest extant advertisement. The Daily Courant on that day advertised it as "the last new Farce"; although this wording would not suggest a premiere, Leo Hughes points out it would indicate "pretty clearly that the performance was recent" (p. 82, n. 20). So one would ordinarily believe. But in this instance, other details give pause. First of all, even the advertisement cautions one against accepting the formulaic phrasing as proof of a recent premiere: "At the New Theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, Wed. Feb. 2—The Country Wit with an Addition of the last new Farce, call'd The Stage Coach. And several Entertainments of Danceing." John Crowne's Country Wit was an old chestnut, first performed in 1675; Lincoln's Inn Fields had tried it in September 1703 for the first time in five years, adding at that time "the last new Epilogue. . ." as well as a dialogue between Heraclitus Ridens and the Observator by way of Prologue. Obviously both performances, in a year of virulent struggle between the two companies, were revivals of an old favorite, embellished with anything that could easily be attached. The fact that The Stage-Coach was not deemed enough to guarantee an audience, that "several Entertainments of Danceing" were also required, would suggest that the farce was not new.

And indeed it was not. Clearly it predates Mary Pix's The Different Widows (premiere date unknown, but probably November 1703; published 4 December 1703). The prologue to that piece laments the lack of current taste for tragedy—even Monimia, the heroine of Otway's The Orphan, has not found an audience. Military men feel they've had enough tragedy in Flanders; at home they want laughter:

The prologue incontrovertibly refers to The Stage-Coach, for Nicodemus can be no one but Squire Nicodemus Somebody, the country booby who was the favorite character of the farce, the role consistently advertised in playbills. "Our Teague," that is, our stage Irishman, probably is Macahone of the same farce since the author seems to speak of a single farce, but it may have referred also to the original Teague in Sir Robert Howard's The Committee.[4] "An Irish farce" links the play to Farquhar in a way his contemporaries would immediately have understood; indeed the most notably Irish element of the play is its author, for Macahone has a relatively small role. The Stage-Coach, then, played at Lincoln's Inn Fields long enough before The Different Widows opened late in 1703 that its lure had "grown stale" and had to be supplemented by epilogues or other cordials, a situation that calls to mind the bill for 2 February 1704.

The prologue demonstrates as accurately as any in the period the desperate competition of the theaters, the increasing sense of siege and strife, and the resultant frantic attempt to win audiences by embellishing the program with dancing, singing, farces, new prologues and epilogues, any gimmick to attract an audience. More important, it demonstrates the Lincoln's Inn Fields company's continuing frustration over George Farquhar's unprecedented success with The Constant Couple at Drury Lane, which broke all performance records in 1699-1700 and held the record until The Beggar's Opera set a new one in 1728—the reference to Sir Harry Wildair would have required

no explanation. The term "Irish farce" became a code word for Farquhar's play, "farce" derogating his comedy, and "Irish" its author. His literary reputation suffered the ire aroused by his success, for jealous playwrights and critics (many of whom were failed playwrights) felt his success unjustified and even insulting to their own stage efforts. With considerable relish, they condemned Farquhar as a new MacFlecknoe, an Irish fool, a writer of farce. The prologuist cannot quite admit to admiration or even mere approval for the piece of Irish farce which tempted audiences to attend Lincoln's Inn Fields. When one's own efforts faced such struggles, one must have relished animosity toward a twenty-five-year-old Irishman who breezily conquered the playhouse.

Willard Connely and Eric Rothstein both cite Pix's prologue as evidence that The Stage-Coach opened in the fall of 1703,[5] but the trail winds further back. Given the conclusive evidence of Pix's reference to Nicodemus, one realizes that in the spate of prologues in 1703 against Irish farce, lines which seem venomous attacks on The Constant Couple several years after its first run also embrace The Stage-Coach, denigrating the former by categorizing it with the latter. One such prologue preceded John Oldmixon's The Governour of Cyprus, which opened at Lincoln's Inn Fields probably in December 1702 or early January 1703 and was published 13 January 1703:

The passage seems, at first glance, general—"Farce and Fustian"—but in the context of the day-to-day events of the theaters, it is specifically a reference to the Lincoln's Inn Fields production of The Stage-Coach. The lines become comprehensible only if one understands that Lincoln's Inn Fields ("we") as well as Drury Lane ("others") could fill the house by importing "a few Loose Characters" (Nicodemus, Macahone, Dolly, etc.) and a "Lucky Name" (Farquhar). The final quoted couplet, like the rest of the passage, shows the contempt, even hatred, that Oldmixon consistently expressed for his successful fellow playwright Farquhar.[6] But Lincoln's Inn Fields had attracted the best-drawing playwright of Drury Lane, and that feat was worthy of note; Oldmixon had grudgingly to admit the success of the ploy, if not the play. The Stage-Coach buoyed Lincoln's Inn Fields at a time when the theater could barely stay afloat. Three points should be noted: (1) Oldmixon, like the author of the prologue for The Different Widows, seems to have considered the famous Farquhar, not Motteux, author of the farce; (2) the date of the first performance must be pushed back at least another year; (3) the play must have been performed at Lincoln's Inn Fields, as the title-pages of the first two editions state, not at Drury Lane as Lawrence and Summers surmised.

In fact, the date must, I believe, be set at least another year earlier, sometime before late February 1702. The final evidence appears in Farquhar's own works, the prologue and preface to The Inconstant, a letter in Love and Business, and internal evidence in The Stage-Coach.

The Inconstant probably opened in February 1702; it was published 5 March 1702. The printed prologue,[7] written by Motteux, who assisted in The Stage-Coach, compares the theatrical bill to a bill of fare, a not uncommon metaphor in the period:

In the context of the prologue, the "Stage-Coach Fare" must refer to performances of the farce. The poem abounds in specific references to theatrical events, blended into the central metaphor of the feast, often with the help of puns. The Wild Fowl, for example, refers to Mirabel in Fletcher's The Wild Goose, adapted by Farquhar in the current production, The Inconstant. The Squeaker or Italian Capon was Signior Clementine, the famous eunuch, servant to the Elector of Bavaria, who was hired by Drury Lane in spring of 1699 at a reported salary of £500 a year. "Stage-Coach Fare" is another play on words; it can only indicate the farce. It is "slender" in two ways—both slight in size and slight in value, but when no better theatrical nourishment is available, the audience can "dispense with" it, that is, put up with it and make do. The Inconstant of course opened at Drury Lane; there must have been something of the delight of an "in-joke" in the slightly denigrating

reference made by Motteux to the other house's farce, in which he had a hand.

Farquhar includes in the preface to the play an enigmatic reference to Lincoln's Inn Fields ignored by Stonehill in the explanatory notes to his edition. The passage reads:

What does it mean? The sixth night must refer to the author's second benefit for The Inconstant, which ran six days consecutively, according to the preface. But how was Lincoln's Inn Fields civil on that occasion? Did the company, perhaps, run The Stage-Coach against Drury Lane's Inconstant? The passage seems to suggest that Farquhar gave the play to the new house to be presented anonymously, that in the preface he spoke of it jestingly and enigmatically, perhaps playing upon speculations about the authorship, as Motteux did in the prologue added for publication. Surely Farquhar laments the acidity of the theatrical warfare between the two houses—he seems also to regret the need to offer his farce anonymously. Still one cannot incontrovertibly prove the meaning of the intentionally puzzling passage, "for, to be Friends, and reveng'd at the same time, I must give them a Play, that is—when I write another." Does he, in fact, refer to a play already given to the new house? The possibility is certainly strong.

Farquhar also refers to The Stage-Coach in a letter published in his miscellany Love and Business, published 28 February 1702.[8] In a letter to the mysterious woman addressed in the collection, he writes on "Tuesday Morning, one Stocking on, and t'other off," lamenting the pangs of authorship in a punning, metaphorical manner:

The Stage-Coach which encroached upon his liberty was, of course, the farce he struggled to adapt. The jolting and jogging of the stagecoach is cursed in the farce and celebrated in Motteux's comical song, which is full of "Jogging," "Jolting," tumbling and jumbling until "up Tails all." The "Hack," a pun on the coach for hire, also refers of course to hireling writers, like Motteux, like Jean de la Chapelle, whose farce Les Carrosses d'Orléans was adapted, and perhaps like Farquhar seemed to himself in his labors to anglicize the farce. The effort of the adaptation was "killing" him—The Stage-Coach would finish him, hence would serve as his hearse—with puns of this witty, jocular sort, Farquhar filled the correspondence.

The dating of the correspondence reinforces other evidence about the date of the farce. Love and Business was published by Bernard Lintot on 28 February 1702, that is, within days or weeks of the premiere of The Inconstant; but in Lintot's memorandum book of "Copies when published," he entered a payment of £3/4/6 for Farquhar's "Letters and Poems," i.e. Love and Business, on 3 July 1701.[9] The only fully dated letters in the collection came from Holland in August and October 1700. The only dated love letter, one later in the collection than the reference to The Stage-Coach, is marked simply "Hague, October the 23d. New Stile," that is, 23 October 1700, when he was in Holland. The sequence of love letters must have been written over a period of time, probably in 1700. There is some speculation that the "Penelope" of the collection is Anne Oldfield, whom Farquhar had "discovered" in 1699 (Connely, pp. 86-87), another reason to believe 1700 a likely date. He requested the return of the correspondence because he had "promis'd to equip a Friend with a few Letters to help out a Collection for the Press"[10] probably before 3 July 1701 when Lintot paid him. Therefore, it seems likely that the letters were written in 1700 and that the farce, which encroached on his liberty, was written during the same period.

The text of the play offers one final clue to dating. The Dublin edition of 1704 contains the line "Come out here, I Charge you in the Kings Name?" As I shall show, Farquhar was probably the source of copy-text for this edition. In the 1705 London edition, the line reads, "Come out here. I charge you to come out, I am an Officer, What—won't you come out, in the Queens name. . . ." King William died 8 March 1702; the Dublin manuscript obviously predated his death.

The most likely conclusion, then, is that The Stage-Coach first played at Lincoln's Inn Fields either in the 1700-1701 season or by February of the 1701-1702 season; a multitude of data indicate it could not have opened later. Who, then, first performed the piece, and why was it not published soon after it opened as most plays were? We have no incontrovertible answers— speculation becomes a temptation. Clearly the cast listed in the 1705 London edition was not the original cast, for they could only have been assembled in the season of 1703-1704.[11] The Dublin edition does not even list a cast.

The scantiest theatrical information for any season in the eighteenth

century obscures the season of 1701-1702 (Avery I, 15), and 1700-1701 is little better, so lack of information about the opening is not surprising. What is surprising is the seeming anonymity of the play that was probably the first farce used as an afterpiece, an anonymity even more astonishing when one considers the popularity of its author. Would Broadway mount a Neil Simon piece anonymously?