This completely new edition of The Recruiting Officer contains a freshly-edited play text, with new annotations, in modern spelling. Tiffany Stern's comprehensive and engaging introduction discusses the author's career and gives a history of the play including its staging, critical interpretation, date and sources, putting it its context of the late Restoration and illuminating its theatrical vivacity.

Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer is set in Shrewsbury in 1704 and describes what happens in a country town when the army come to stay. With cross-dressing and confusion...

'He's a fool that marries, but he's a greater fool that does not marry a fool.'

This bawdy, hilarious, subversive and wickedly satirical drama pokes fun at the humourless, the jealous, and the adulterous alike. It features a country wife, Margery, whose husband believes she is too naive to cuckold him; and an anti-hero, Horner, who pretends to be impotent in order to have unrestrained access to the women keen on 'the sport'. A number of licentious and hypocritical women request Horner's services - the country wife among them.

The Country Wife has provoked...

A Jovial Crew, or the Merry Beggars, is a comedy about four noble lovers who join the beggar community for a pastoral life of dance and song. Or is it? Whilst maintaining its unremitting good humour, A Jovial Crew shows that the literary depiction of beggar life, and real beggar life, are profoundly different. Daily aspects of life in the beggar world - poverty, dirt, licentiousness - come as a surprise to the well-born, who are ultimately led to question their own values.

The last production mounted before theatres were closed for the English Civil War, A...