University of Virginia Library

II. The Texts

The unusual publication history of The Stage-Coach presents as many "mysteries" as its dating. The first quarto (Q1) was published in Dublin in 1704 with the imprint "Printed, and are to be Sold by the Booksellers," an imprint often used for unauthorized editions. The second quarto (Q2) was published in London by Benjamin Bragg on 3 or 4 May 1705.[12] Both stated the play was first acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Two editions appeared with the imprint "London, Printed in the Year 1709" (1709a, copy at the Folger Shakespeare Library, shelfmarked PR2823 1710b Sh. Col.; 1709b, copy at Harvard, shelfmarked EC75. Sh668. 750eb), in the year of a successful revival at Drury Lane, the theater noted on both title-pages. From 1709 Drury Lane was the theater noted on title-pages in London editions. Of these four early editions, only Q1 lists Farquhar as the author.

Curll published the farce in 1718 (1718) with the Phillips prologue and epilogue. Two Dublin editions appeared in 1719 (Du 1719) and 1728 (Du 1728), S. Powell for George Risk. In 1735 the farce was twice published in nearly identical printings for W. Feales (1735a, 1735b); at least one of these, perhaps copies of both, were included in the Dramatick Works of 1736. Unquestionably 1735b (copy in the British Library, shelfmarked 1507/424) was a second printing with 1735a as copy text.[13] Four more London editions were published within the century, in 1766, Lowndes (1766); 1772, Lowndes (1772), included in the tenth edition of the Works; 1775, Oxlade (1775); and 1778, Wenman (1778). In Dublin it appeared in the "operatic" version, that is, with

songs, issued by Wilson, Exshaw, and Bradley in 1761 (Du 1761), included in the "eighth" Dublin edition of the Works; and by Ewing in 1775 (Du 1775).

The most surprising single fact about the publication is that three distinct manuscripts underlay the printed editions, one used as printer's copy for Q1, one for Q2, and one for 1735a. None of these three texts derives from either of the others. Although Stonehill, the only modern editor to reprint the farce, collated only Q1 and Q2 and used Q2 as copy text without even discussing the reasons for his choice, each of these three editions must be studied to decide which should be considered authoritative or if, perhaps, all have some separate kind of authority. All other editions of intervening and later years were derived from these three important texts; none of the other editions is textually significant.

The relationship of the three underlying manuscripts to each other and to Farquhar and Motteux can be determined through a combination of biographical and bibliographical evidence. The biographical evidence indicates that Farquhar was in Dublin when Q1 appeared there as well as when Q2 was issued in London. Traditionally biographers have assumed that Farquhar took the manuscript of The Stage-Coach to his brother, a Dublin bookseller, on a visit in 1704 (Lawrence, p. 394; Connely, pp. 226-228). The story originates with Wilkes's biography in the Dublin Works of 1775:

In his recent study of "George Farquhar's Military Career," Robert John Jordan shows that Farquhar was indeed in Dublin, not "to see his friends" but on military duty, some time after 20 October 1704 when his regiment began arriving in Ireland and certainly after 23 March 1705 by which time the last seven companies of the regiment had come to Dublin.[14] Jordan estimates that the benefit performance of The Constant Couple, attended by the Duke of Ormonde, occurred between 15 November and 25 March; this period would have been the only time in 1704 in which the benefit could have taken place. It seems likely that Q1 was published during the same period late in 1704, that is, only a few months before Q2 was published in London on 3 or 4 May 1705. Farquhar's established presence in Dublin in 1704 and 1705, the fact that his brother was a bookseller in Dublin at the time, and his anonymity as author in the London edition render strikingly credible the possibility that he may have been the source of the Dublin edition rather than the London one; the usual skepticism about Dublin editions, particularly those issued "by the Booksellers" rather than under a specific imprint, seems inappropriate in this instance.

The biographical evidence which argues for authenticity of the Dublin manuscript also argues against Farquhar's involvement in the London publication, for he must have continued in Dublin at least until the end of July 1705. Although as Jordan points out "absenteeism among officers was a notorious feature of Queen Anne's army," there is no reason to believe Farquhar returned to London before 3-4 May, when Q2 appeared. His regiment stayed in Ireland throughout 1705 and took part in the annual encampment in late June and early July, the camp being a duty which officers did not risk missing. After that, Farquhar sat in judgment on a trooper on 27 July 1705 in Dublin Castle (Jordan, pp. 259-260). Since there is no evidence of his having come to London between the two verifiable stints in Dublin, one must conclude he was away during the time Q2 was in press. Furthermore, Farquhar was by this time consistently publishing with Lintot, probably the biggest dramatext entrepreneur of his day in London. Love and Business (28 February 1702), The Inconstant (Knapton, Strahan, and Lintot, 12 March 1702), The Twin Rivals (29 December 1702), The Recruiting Officer (25 April 1706), and The Beaux Stratagem (27 March 1707) were all issued under Lintot's imprint; Farquhar contracted with no other bookseller to publish plays during these years.[15] Again biography suggests skepticism about any connection between Farquhar and Q2.

The edition itself is sufficiently odd to cast doubts on its authenticity. First of all, although Q1 attributed the farce to Farquhar on the title-page, there is no byline in Q2, and yet Farquhar's name would certainly have drawn business. The edition appeared without any link to recent performances; the most recent one noted in The London Stage had occurred on 16 October 1704. It lists a cast that could only have appeared during the ten performances[16] in 1703-1704, that is, the previous season, because the actors were not all in the company in 1704-1705 or indeed in any other season. The piece is labelled a "Comedy" rather than a "Farce." It is elaborately divided into three acts. The sixteen pages of text in Q1 swell to thirty-nine pages in Q2, with large type and huge margins inflating the small four-penny farce into an acceptably long shilling comedy.[17]

Farquhar was in Dublin serving his Queen. The outdated cast list, neither the first nor the most recent performers of the farce, suggests the lack of a playhouse source for the manuscript. One is led, then, to suspect either coauthor Motteux or an interloper as the person who brought the manuscript, distinctly different from that followed in Q1, to Bragg for publication. Although the possibility of an unknown purveyor cannot be rejected entirely, circumstantial evidence, if not enough to convict Motteux, certainly makes

that "thrifty Cit" (Prologue, The Different Widows), a likely suspect. Three months earlier, in the Diverting Post for 20-27 January 1705, Bragg printed the "Mountebank Song" from Motteux's play Farewel Folly; or, the Younger the Wiser. On 6 February, he published The Amorous Miser: or, the Younger the Wiser anonymously. The play is considered an early draft or piracy of Farewel Folly, which played at Drury Lane 18 January 1705 but did not appear in print until 1707.[18] The similarity of circumstances, the song plus two "anonymous" plays, all connected with Motteux, printed within about three months for Bragg, leads one to strong suspicions that Motteux had a hand in bringing them into print.

Another reason to suspect the Frenchman is that although the two editions vary in ways that preclude any form of derivation from the same manuscript, some of the variants are either foolish compositorial misreadings of the manuscript or bad stabs at English colloquialisms. Although I have no information on the state of Motteux's familiarity with colloquialisms and perhaps give him less than his due, some Q2 expressions have a foreign flavor. For example, the phrase "Club this Matter" in Q1, meaning divide the bill of expenses, becomes "Curry this Club" in Q2, a reading that makes no sense. "But this is a rare time to quit Scores with him," that is, get even with him, in Q1 becomes in Q2 "but this is a rare time to kill Horses with him," an inexplicable line in the context. Such errors could derive from a misreading of a manuscript—"quit Scores" might well look like "kill Horses" in some hands. They could not, of course, derive from a printed version.

The dedication and epilogue further argue against Farquhar's hand in the publication, but they argue neither for nor against Motteux as Bragg's source. No prologue, epilogue, or dedication appears in Q1; all three items appear in Q2. The prologue borrows in part from Farquhar's epilogue to John Oldmixon's The Grove (1700), a plagiarism of which Farquhar as well as Motteux would have been capable. Farquhar did on occasion borrow from himself, although most of the borrowings are less conspicuous than this. Since he was not, I believe, given to plagiarizing other writers' works, someone else was probably responsible for borrowing the epilogue, almost verbatim, from the prologue to Thomas Goffe's The Careless Shepherdess, published in 1656. The lines of the epilogue at first reading seem deliciously rich in clues:

But the clues melt when one learns that the epilogue was a plagiarism and that these lines refer to a theatrical incident more than forty-five years earlier. Accidentals of the epilogue mirror the prologue in the 1656 edition of Goffe's play so closely that it is evident someone carefully copied the earlier text when the material was "stolen bodily," as Lawrence says (p. 392). Considering the frequency with which both Farquhar and Motteux scribbled prologues and epilogues for their own plays and others', one would expect neither to resort to plagiarism in this case.

The unsigned dedication to Samuel Bagshaw in Q2 is completely uncharacteristic of Farquhar, who never inclines toward the fulsome. Robert Newton Cunningham, however, finds it lacks "the extravagant flattery" characteristic of Motteux (p. 143). Lawrence points out that Farquhar signs his dedications and suggests it might be a publisher's dedication (pp. 394-395). Motteux also signs his, but no one signed this one. Statements in the Epistle Dedicatory are meaningless in terms of Farquhar:

Stonehill (II, 431) believes the passage fits The Twin Rivals, but it does not, for the author obviously refers to a specific attack not a play. And although Farquhar was indeed constantly "assaulted with the Ignorance of partial and prejudicial Readers" and critics, he was never one to complain about it. Furthermore, no one, myself included, has ever found evidence of the existence of a Samuel Bagshaw; he was surely no figure of importance. Finally, the dedication never reappears in any edition. The internal evidence then, like the biographical evidence, suggests that either Motteux provided Bragg with the manuscripts for The Stage-Coach and The Amorous Miser or Bragg managed to acquire them in some underhanded way. In any event, a manuscript, probably a rather messy one, was printer's copy, and Farquhar was not its source.

Of the two reprints in London in 1709, the first, 1709a, is a reprint of Q2, but the title-page says "As it was Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane," and the cast list matches that of the playbill for 17 May 1709, the first recorded performance at Drury Lane. The second, 1709b, is a reprint of 1709a. Curll's London 1718 edition lists the same cast and theater, but it is a reprint of Q1, as are the Dublin editions of 1719 and 1728. It is, then, a surprise to discover in 1735a a third distinct text, the copy for which was neither Q1 nor Q2. This edition and 1735b, which derives from it and introduces a few variants, list no actors although the title-page notes "As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane." They contain "Some Memoirs of Mr. George Farquhar," which had been published in the sixth edition of the works in 1728; however, no London edition of the Works or the Comedies before 1735 had included The Stage-Coach. One would expect in 1735a a reprint of an earlier edition of the farce, but such is not the case; 1735a agrees with Q1 in some readings, Q2 in others; but in still other variants it agrees with neither. For

instance, a stage direction in Q1 reads "Peeps in the Empty Purse and throws it down." Q2 substitutes "the Pot," for "the Empty Purse and"; 1735a reads "the empty Pot, and". Again, Q1 reads "see what your Uncle will say to you"; Q2, "odd you'll make a rare Wife, if you"; and 1735a "See what your Uncle will say to you! You'll make a rare Wife, faith, if you. . . ." Q1 reads "Whimbled", Q2 "dwindled", 1735a, probably accurately, "whindled". Q1 reads "I Charge you in the Kings Name?", Q2 "I charge you to come out, I am an Officer, What—won't you come out, in the Queens name,"; and 1735a "I charge ye come out: I'm an Officer, won't you come out in the King's Name?" The list could be extended at great length.

The notion of authorial or editorial revisions so long after Farquhar and Motteux died lacks credibility. Another manuscript was printer's copy. The most logical explanation is a playhouse copy, that of Drury Lane. The farce had played there fifty-five times by 1735, and it had first played there with some of the original cast. Between 1704 and 1735 it played only eight times at Lincoln's Inn Fields, according to available records, and the last of those performances was in 1720.

There is, of course, no absolute proof that the playhouse copy was the source for 1735a, but no other explanation makes any sense. Furthermore, the copy must have been a manuscript used at Drury Lane, for it was neither Q1 nor Q2. The possibility of a playhouse copy seems extremely probable also because editions of plays in the early 1730's under Feales's imprint seem to have had a close relationship to the theater. Others of Farquhar's plays were revised for the Dramatick Works of 1736 or other editions of the same period (1728-1735) according to the promptbook—the best example, perhaps, is the exclusion of a scene in The Beaux Stratagem, probably cut during or immediately after the first season. Professor Leo Hughes has told me that he has found Feales's editions of this period anticipating Bell's later editions. It is extremely likely, then, that 1735a reflects what played at Drury Lane, probably from the earliest performances there in 1709 (although the text reads "King's Name" again, not "Queens name"). The text must be considered of far more importance than one would usually give a text published twenty-eight years after the author's death. Farquhar had died in 1707, but his relationship with Drury Lane and particularly with actor Robert Wilks was so close that one suspects the manuscript probably came from him or his widow.

Why did the farce not appear in the earlier editions of the Comedies and Works? Doubtless for the simple reason that neither Lintot nor his associates in the collected editions owned the copyright. The first edition of the Comedies appeared 27 March 1708,[19] after Farquhar's death. Lintot made appropriate arrangements for all seven full-length comedies (he owned the rights on four of them). Whether it was possible to buy rights to The Stage-Coach or whether Lintot even knew it was part of the canon we cannot know. Its copyright, however, expired 10 April 1731 according to the Copyright Act

of 1710. When the Dramatick Works of 1736 appeared, The Stage-Coach was included for the first time, its copyright now expired.

No later editions are textually significant. Curll's edition of 1718 and all the Dublin editions derive from Q1; the two editions of 1709 derive from Q2; and the other London editions (1735b, 1766, 1772, 1775, 1778) from 1735a. The play was called a farce in Q1 and the London editions of 1735, 1766, 1772, and 1775; a comedy in Q2 and 1709a, 1709b, 1718, Du 1719, and Du 1728; and an opera in Du 1761 and Du 1775. Three sets of memoirs appear with the farce: (1) one which begins "Mr. George Farquhar was a Gentleman by Birth. . . ." and does not discuss The Stage-Coach, in 1718, Du 1719, and Du 1728; (2) one which begins "'Tis observ'd that the World. . . ." and says Farquhar assisted Motteux in The Stage-Coach, in 1735 as well as the sixth edition of the Works in 1728 and several subsequent editions of the Works; (3) one that begins "Mr. Farquhar, an ingenious Writer and Poet, . . ." and says he was "jointly concerned with another" in composition of The Stage-Coach, in 1766 and 1775.