University of Virginia Library

How Much Did Farquhar's Beaux Spend in London?
by
Alan Roper

Early in The Beaux Stratagem Aimwell and Archer review their finances, having just arrived in Lichfield from London. Archer asks how much money they have left. "But Two hundred Pound," Aimwell replies, and the more sanguine Archer, responding to the glumness of "But," cheerfully enlarges the reckoning: "And our Horses, Cloaths, Rings, &c. why we have very good Fortunes now for moderate People; and let me tell you, besides Thousand, that this Two hundred Pound, with the experience that we are now Masters of, is a better Estate than the Ten we have spent." So the text reads in Bernard Lintott's two quarto editions of the play in 1707, and, plainly enough, it reads as nonsense, garbled by that intrusive "besides Thousand." Plainly too, "besides Thousand" must be authorial, although, as set, it cannot represent Farquhar's intention. No copyist or compositor would make up those two words, putting them impossibly together, and there is nothing in the surrounding text to prompt eye-skip. The few editors who comment on the intrusive phrase agree that "Thousand" has been "misplaced" in the sentence, but they do not explain how the misplacement might have occurred. Those who so comment also agree in moving "Thousand" down to follow "Ten." But no compositor with legible copy before him would be likely to displace a word so far. The intrusive phrase, indeed, not only seems to be authorial but also to represent two separate emendations, which, probably because they were crowded between lines or into a margin, caused a problem in the printing house. But what were they supposed to emend and how?

When Lintott published the first edition of The Beaux Stratagem on 27 March 1707, less than three weeks after the play's premiere, he included a brief, prefatory apology by Farquhar which runs in part: "The Reader may find some Faults in this Play, which my Illness prevented the amending of." Farquhar may have meant that he was too ill to revise his copy fully, or too ill to correct the printed pages, or too ill to do either. Within weeks he was dead, leaving no indication of what was to be done with "besides Thousand." Editorial intervention seems called for, but any intervention must necessarily be unauthoritative.[1] For this reason, we may suppose, the quarto reading of Archer's speech—call it version A—has twice reappeared, each time without comment, in twentieth-century editions prepared by Cecil A. Moore

in 1933 and by Shirley Strum Kenny in 1988.[2] Other modern editors, no doubt thinking to supply readers with a text that makes sense, have been less conservative.

In that endeavor they have been anticipated by eighteenth-century printers, beginning with those for a collected edition in octavo—The Comedies of Mr. George Farquhar—jointly published in 1708 by Lintott, James Knapton, Ralph Smith, and George Strahan. Their version of Archer's speech, version B, deals with the problem by simply deleting "besides Thousand" and supplying a text that runs: "and let me tell you, that this Two hundred Pound, with the Experience that we are now Masters of, is a better Estate than the Ten we have spent." When the four booksellers reissued the Comedies in 1711, Lintott augmented it with Farquhar's miscellaneous prose and verse, calling the whole volume The Works Of the late Ingenious Mr. George Farquhar . . . The Second Edition.[3] Version B of Archer's speech was retained for the Works in 1711 and for the third and fourth editions of the Works in 1714 and 1718.

Two years after the first edition of the Comedies an evidently unauthorized edition in octavo of The Beaux Stratagem appeared at "London. Printed in the Year 1710." This is the edition identified by Professor Kenny as printed for T. Johnson at The Hague for import into England.[4] It also offers us a different version of Archer's speech, retaining all the words of version A but mending the sense and grammar by keeping "besides" and carrying "Thousand" down to follow "Ten." Version C runs as follows: "and let me tell you besides, that this Two hundred Pound, with the experience that we are now Masters of, is a better Estate than the Ten Thousand we have spent." Johnson reissued the play in 1720, again with version C of Archer's speech.

The solution of T. Johnson or his reader may strike us as attractive because it is at once thrifty with the words and plausible in its sense. As we

shall see, the solution has appealed to many later editors. It nonetheless lay forgotten for nearly two centuries, thrust aside by a powerful competitor. A new edition of The Works of the late Ingenious Mr. George Farquhar appeared in 1728 and announced itself as "Corrected from the Errors of former Impressions."[5] Among other errors addressed was the B version of Archer's speech which had appeared in "former Impressions" of the Comedies and Works. The text in 1728 agreed with version C in carrying version A's "Thousand" down to follow "Ten" but, finding "besides" superfluous, omitted it. Version D accordingly reads as follows: "and let me tell you, that this two hundred Pound, with the Experience that we are now Masters of, is a better Estate than the ten thousand we have spent." Professor Kenny persuasively argues that "the theatre seems the most likely source" for other revisions to be found in the 1728 text, and its D version of Archer's speech may also represent playhouse tradition. If so, we may assume that it discards "besides" because the word adds little to the sense and slows a syntax soon to be further delayed by the parenthetic "with the Experience that we are now Masters of." Whatever its logic, version D reappeared in subsequent eighteenth-century "Impressions" of the Works, as well as many separate editions of the play, and was, indeed, the most favored version until late in the nineteenth century. It was adopted for the various collections of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, most of them made up of separately published plays, which claimed that their texts were "regulated from the prompt books" in use at the Theatres Royal, or taken "from the prompt books," or "marked with the variations in the Manager's book," or "as performed," or "accurately printed from the acting copies." These collections—Bell's British Theatre, The New English Theatre, Inchbald's British Theatre, Sharpe's British Theatre, Oxberry's New English Drama, and others, some of them issued more than once —offer, or at least claim to offer, the acting version of Archer's speech, although there was obviously much copying of one from another. By 1763, in an edition of the play for J. Rivington, "Two hundred Pound" had become "two hundred pounds," and the variant was transmitted to all subsequent editions adopting version D. When version D seemed near the end of its textual life, an 1871 edition of the play in Dicks' British Drama (reissued in 1879 in Dicks' Standard Plays) retained "pounds" and added another variant by deleting "a" and "Estate," so that the final clause runs: "is better than the ten thousand we have spent." But these variants do not affect the disposition of "besides Thousand" and so may be included in version D.

If we accept Professor Kenny's description of the 1728 edition of the Works, in which version D first appeared, and if, with considerably more

caution, we accept the claim of the later collections that their texts were based on prompt books, then we can say that version D represents a long-lasting theatrical tradition. Many eighteenth-and nineteenth-century audiences, we may suppose, heard Archer assure Aimwell that they had spent £10,000 in London. For a long time, indeed, version D met with very little competition. Dublin editions of 1729, 1753, and 1775 adopted version B and simply omitted "besides Thousand," no doubt because they were set, at least in the first instance, from one of the London editions issued prior to 1728.[6] In the nineteenth century, though, version B reappeared as what we may call an editorial alternative to the theatrical tradition represented by version D. Leigh Hunt adopted version B for his Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, published in 1840 and reissued in 1849, 1851, and 1860. Version B also appeared in Alexander Charles Ewald's Dramatic Works of George Farquhar in 1892 and in H. Macaulay Fitzgibbon's edition of the play for the Temple Dramatists in 1898. Since these editions leave the passage unglossed, we cannot tell whether the editors took version B from one or other of the early eighteenth-century editions or arrived at it independently when confronted with the garbled reading of Q1.

The latter hypothesis seems the more probable, and an independent solution to the garbled reading of version A looks to be almost certain in the case of the only other rival to version D to appear between 1728 and 1906. Version E has no text: everything from "and let me tell you" down to "we have spent" is omitted, presumably on the grounds that Farquhar's intended meaning is irretrievably lost. Version E appeared in a series called Cumberland's British Theatre, first published in the 1820's and reissued in the 1860's. It seems unlikely that the decision to excise the passage was made by John Cumberland, the publisher, or by his compositor. More probably, the decision was made by George Daniel, who is often listed as the editor of Cumberland's British Theatre, although he was officially credited only with the biographical and critical notices prefixed to the plays. Daniel's solution to the problem of version A, cutting instead of untying the knot, has found no support. It remains one more eccentricity in an eccentric textual history.

William Archer inaugurated the dominant twentieth-century tradition when editing four of Farquhar's plays for the Mermaid Series in 1906. Ignoring (perhaps in the root rather than the derived sense of the word) the long ascendancy of version D, Archer supplied in a note the reading of Q1 and remarked that "Editors have been content simply to drop out the unintelligible words 'besides Thousand.'" Archer referred, that is, to version B and almost certainly had Ewald's edition in mind, perhaps Hunt's and Fitzgibbon's also. We need not suppose that he knew about the eighteenth-century life of version B. Nor need we suppose that he knew about T. Johnson's two

editions of 1710 and 1720, even though Archer solved the problem of Q1 by adopting version C and referring to it as "my emendation," which, he insisted, "is less sweeping than the silent deletion of two words."

Archer's Mermaid edition was reissued in 1949 and 1959, and most twentieth-century editors have adopted his solution, although none gives him credit and only one, A. E. Morgan in 1935, gives credit to T. Johnson or his reader.[7] Version C appeared in Louis A. Strauss's 1914 edition for the Belles-Lettres Series and Frederic and James W. Tupper's Representative English Dramas from Dryden to Sheridan, published in the same year. It can be found in such anthologies as Eighteenth Century Comedy, edited by W. D. Taylor in 1929 then revised by Simon Trussler in 1969; Plays of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, edited by Dugald MacMillan and Howard Mumford Jones in 1931; British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan, edited by George H. Nettleton and Arthur E. Case in 1939 and still widely used in the revision (of the commentary only) by George Winchester Stone, Jr., first issued in 1969; and Brice Harris's edition of Restoration Plays for the Modern Library, which first appeared in 1953 and is still in print. Charles Stonehill, noting that version B "omitted ['besides Thousand'], in desperation," favored version C for The Works of George Farquhar in 1930 (reprinted 1969), an edition replacing Ewing's as standard and now in its turn replaced by Professor Kenny's, and the same version can be found in several individual texts of The Beaux Stratagem, among them one published in 1928 with an introduction by Bonamy Dobrée and those edited by Eric Rothstein for the Crofts Classics in 1967, by A. Norman Jeffares for the Fountainwell Drama Texts in 1972, and by Charles N. Fifer for the Regents Restoration Drama in 1977. J. Hamard's English and French edition of 1965 (La Ruse des Galants) also features version C.

In our own century, generations of college students and, we may guess, of playgoers have known Archer's speech in version C, just as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most readers and, we are assured, most playgoers knew the speech in version D. In the twentieth, it is true, there have been occasional rivals to version C, and they include most of the possibilities. To be sure, if twentieth-century editors have known about George Daniel's version E, and it seems unlikely that they have, they must also have found it, in Archer's terms, too "sweeping" for adoption.[8] But, as noted, version A has been resurrected for the conservative texts of Cecil A. Moore in 1933 and Professor Kenny in 1988. Then, too, Archer may have discredited version B, but he did not succeed in extinguishing it. An Everyman collection of Restoration Plays, introduced by Sir Edmund Gosse in 1912 and reprinted into the 1960's, offers version B, which can also be found in an anthology of The Chief British Dramatists edited by Brander Matthews and Paul Robert Lieder in

1924, in Norman Marshall's 1953 edition of Three Restoration Comedies, and in Vincent F. Hopper and Gerald B. Lahey's 1963 college text of The Beaux Stratagem. Even version D enjoyed a fleeting second life when John Earle Uhler adopted it in 1929 for his edition of The Best Eighteenth Century Comedies.[9]

The twentieth century has also witnessed the birth of yet another version of Archer's speech. In 1923 David Harrison Stevens included The Beaux Stratagem in Types of English Drama 1660-1780 and produced what we must call version F of Archer's speech by retaining "besides" from version A but omitting "Thousand": "and, let me tell you besides, that this two hundred pound, with the experience that we are now masters of, is a better estate than the ten we have spent." With the pointing mended by omitting the comma after "and," version F reappeared in Michael Cordner's 1976 edition of The Beaux Stratagem for the New Mermaids. The logic of version F would seem to be that "besides" may be retained as harmless enough, whereas retaining "Thousand" and making it grammatical in the manner of versions C and D would entail a major change in the sense for which there is no authorial and no true textual authority.

The various attempts to mend the sense of Archer's speech, or at least those represented by versions C, D, and F, evidently assume that "besides Thousand" must represent two separate additions to the passage which were made by Farquhar himself. I have found no exemplar reflecting the assumption that we have to deal with authorial substitution rather than addition. And yet version B, discarding "besides Thousand," makes a certain kind of sense, hence, we may suppose, its occasional reappearance in modern texts as well as its occasional adaptation into version F. Discussing version A, William Archer also explained the sense of version B at the same time as he insisted that it needed clarification: "'the ten we have spent' (implying, of course, 'ten hundred pound') is a feeble and almost impossible phrase."

The phrase is certainly unusual and offers us an elliptical parallelism perhaps appropriate in a text merely to be read but just as certainly ambiguous in a text to be performed. The same thought perhaps occurred to Farquhar, who accordingly sacrificed parallelism to clarity and wrote "Thousand" into his manuscript as a replacement for "Ten," not to change the meaning or enlarge the reckoning but to specify the sum without ambiguity. At the same time, perhaps, he wrote in "besides," not as an adverbial addition (which later proved sufficiently superfluous to be dropped from version D) but as a prepositional substitute for "with." I am proposing that Farquhar meant his revised text to read as follows: "and let me tell you, that this Two hundred Pound, besides the experience that we are now Masters of, is a better Estate than the Thousand we have spent." By alphabetical progression we should call this version G, which, I believe, makes better sense in immediate

context, in the larger context of a play so preoccupied with specific sums of money, and perhaps in terms of the social realities it to some extent addresses.

Aimwell and Archer are not only gentlemen but younger brothers as well, Aimwell certainly so, Archer at least claiming to be so, and the portions of younger sons were notoriously small. True, they seem to have combined their resources, but £10,000 would represent the sum of two remarkably handsome portions. Young Fashion in Vanbrugh's The Relapse has an annuity of £200, or had one until he mortgaged it for £500; his elder brother has £5,000 a year and can afford to lay out £10,000 to purchase a title. Benjamin Wou'dbe in Farquhar's The Twin-Rivals has a portion of £1,500; his elder brother is heir to £7,000 a year. These sums no doubt involve an element of literary flourish,[10] but the large discrepancy between an heir's portion and his younger brother's corresponds well enough to social realities.[11]

In the immediate context of Archer's speech there is also a notable discrepancy between £200 and £10,000, so that, if version C or D is accepted, £200 would require huge augmentation from "experience" in order to constitute "a better Estate than" £10,000. Archer, we should remember, describes Aimwell and himself as "moderate People." But the C and D versions of his succeeding claim push optimism into an almost absurd extravagance. Moreover, how did two "moderate People" manage to run through £10,000 in what seems to be not too much time? Benjamin Wou'dbe, though a profligate, still needed two years to spend his £1,500 and a further £500 in loans. When Cherry seeks to entice Archer into marrying her by telling him she has £2,000, he calculates that "the Fortune may go off in a Year or two." Perhaps we should ask not only how much money but also how much time Aimwell and Archer spent in London before coming to Lichfield. Then too, Archer is tempted, if briefly, by Cherry's £2,000. He and Aimwell regard Dorinda's £10,000 dowry as a sufficient prize, even when divided between them, and yet, if we accept version C or D, they have just run through £10,000 in London. These financial discontinuities, more obvious, to be sure, in a reading than in a performance, disappear if we suppose that Farquhar meant to assign the two younger brothers £1,200 between them, of which they have £200 left, that he first wrote "Ten," meaning ten hundred, then revised it for clarity to "Thousand."

But Farquhar wrote The Beaux Stratagem while sick and dying, declared that his illness prevented him from amending its faults, and left it with clear signs of hasty or careless plotting, especially in the resolution. Should we not, then, be cautious of explaining a crux in terms of logic and consistency? I acknowledge the objection but answer that terms producing inconsistency cannot be thought more defensible. We have some textual authority for assuming that Farquhar first meant his beaux to have spent ten (hundred)

pounds in London. We have none for assuming that he eventually meant them to have spent ten thousand. Yet, by unauthoritative emendation, most twentieth-century texts of the play, as well as many earlier ones, make Aimwell and Archer spend £10,000.

Such a sum, we have to say, represents an interpretation as much critical as textual. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it has found its way into critical discourse. I said that version C (or D) produces inconsistency, and so it does in terms of strict financial accounting and calculation. Symbolically, though, as I think its defenders would argue, version C makes the sum spent by the beaux consistent with the £10,000 dowry that Mrs. Sullen brought to her marriage and the £10,000 available to Dorinda as a portion and to the beaux as a prize. Writing about The Beaux Stratagem, Ronald Berman bids us "begin by taking a look at the final cause of the play, the sum of ten thousand pounds. The efficient cause is only the attempt to get it. . . . It is the sum of money the beaux have spent, the sum they are after, the dowry of Mrs. Sullen, the dowry of Dorinda."[12] The equations are certainly neat, but one of the terms is suspect. Berman does not specify the edition he used, but it no doubt featured version C, so widely available in the twentieth century and often making editorial emendation look like authorial intention by omitting a textual apparatus that could contain the quarto reading and its crux. Berman's triad reappears, independently it seems, in Michael Cordner's discussion of the play. "Of great significance to . . . all [the principals] is the figure of ten thousand pounds. This is the amount that Archer and Aimwell have already spent in London; it is also the amount of Mrs. Sullen's dowry and of Dorinda's fortune."[13] Oddly enough, Cordner writes this by way of introduction to a text he has himself established which features version F of Archer's speech and the claim that the beaux have spent only ten (hundred) pounds.

I do not mean to sneer. Many years ago I myself wrote a critical essay about The Beaux Stratagem and, like others, referred to the sums of money so frequently mentioned in the play. By mere luck I had no occasion to talk about the sum Aimwell and Archer had spent. Had I done so, I am sure I would have accepted the £10,000 offered by the edition I used, that of Charles Stonehill, featuring version C. At that time I had not yet learned the lesson all literary critics ought to repeat daily to themselves: the text you are about to interpret has already been interpreted by the editor who established it; are you sure your interpretation does not take for granted a reading that is in fact arguable?

Notes