George Farquhar: A Migrant Life Reversed

Description

George Farquhar (1677-1707) is one of the most successful and enduringly popular Restoration playwrights. His two masterpieces, The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux' Stratagem, are still regularly performed today. Yet aspects of Farquhar's biography, and in particular his Irish roots and family life, have remained obscure. This is the first study to treat Farquhar's works as documents of migration and the fragmented identity that resulted. Told in reverse chronological order, beginning with Farquhar's last and best-known works, it reveals previously undiscovered material about his life and connections. Born in Londonderry, Farquhar arrived in London at the end of the 1690s but struggled throughout his life to find acceptance in the English literary culture. David Roberts explores how Farquhar used comedy to negotiate his Anglo-Irish Protestant identity while perpetually being treated as an outsider. George Farquhar: A Migrant Life Reversed challenges traditional critical thinking on historiographic approaches to scholarly biography and offers a complex but highly readable account of the interpenetrating pasts, presents and futures of the migrant writer.

David Roberts is Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Dean of the Arts and Media at Birmingham City University, UK. Recent books include Thomas Betterton (2010), The Library of a Seventeenth-Century Actor (2012), Restoration Plays and Players (2014), and Games for English Literature (2016), co-authored with Izabela Hopkins. Articles in major journals including Shakespeare Quarterly, ELH, New Theatre Quarterly, and The Times Literary Supplement. My biography of Betterton was shortlisted for the American Library Association Theatre Book Prize and longlisted for the Society for Theatre Research Book Prize.

This captivating biography, full of previously undiscovered material, tells the story of Restoration playwright George Farquhar in reverse: from his death in poverty, through the success of The Beaux Stratagem and A Recruiting Officer, and ending with his birth in Londonderry. Essential reading not only for those interested in Farquhar or eighteenth-century theatre, but also in the literature of the dispossessed, George Farquhar: a Migrant Life Reversed is the first study to combine elegant readings of Farquhar's plays with migrancy criticism. Farquhar, it shows, was not just one of the most charming, funny and elusive of Restoration playwrights; he was also more acutely aware of cultural dislocation, and hence more modern, than any other writer of the period. * Tiffany Stern, The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK *