For the 2025 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies meeting, Jason Shafford and Caitlin Hubbard included my paper on their panel, “Over the Hills and Far Away,” and asked us to talk about the “remarkable reach across space and time” of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer. After a book of mine has been out for a while, I begin to see more things that it does, new topics, and significant books for which it calls.
When I started a new book, I had nothing but a title. Crisis Texts would explore plays written in response to major human crises—moments when a large portion of the population recognized they were living through a time of profound upheaval. It came to focus on what cultures do with women characters in times of wartime crises and what real women did to respond and even guide a nation. Thus, Women in Wartime is about sweethearts, wives, mothers, sisters, barmaids, provision sellers, seaport prostitutes—women more neglected than warrior women.
Plume—played by Robert Wilks, David Garrick, Spranger Barry, and Charles Kemble— may embody the figure of the Recruiting Officer, offering civilians an engaging glimpse into a new facet of military life. But alongside his co-star Silvia, portrayed by Anne Oldfield, I also saw Rose, Molly, Melinda, and the women in a mob. The first “Act for the Better Recruiting of Her Majesties’ Land-forces and Marines” of 1705 had been issued in 1704. Farquhar’s play opened in April 1706, and by then, recruiters were present in nearly every town. Their presence was new, and they occupied every space—they set up in markets, at major thoroughfares and cross streets, at taverns, and outside theatres. By the time the play debuted, recruiters were being met with verbal abuse, rock and bottle throwing, street blockades, and even stabbings.
The play gave eager civilians an informative look at recruiting, which it both demystified and began the work of normalizing and even humanizing recruiters. Silvia as Jack Willful is the most important performer of a recruiting officer, and the work she does on recruiting throughout the century is detailed, specific, lasting and extremely important. Seldom noticed is that when she performs in depth the part of a recruiter, she is competing with three different recruiters—Plume, Kite, and Brazen—who make her the object of their recruiting. Silvia even parodies Kite’s speeches. This allows significant comparisons. Together they are an exposé of the tricks and seductions used by recruiters. They perform the realities and moral implications of recruiting, and Silvia models honorable behavior. The male recruiters represent different ages, social classes, and performances of masculinity. As other women characters soon would, Silvia models better versions of masculinity and recruiting. The play and the wealth of sophisticated criticism on it well describe its immediate impact. Some scholars have emphasized how it captures the early recruitment movement, introduces its first recruiters, and reflects public responses from both men and women. Recruiters are humanized and gradually transformed into figures of gallant, heroic British military identity.
By the end of the century, as Silvia had, women characters dressed as recruiters, and some accompanied their lovers, as Eliza did in Dudley’s Flitch of Bacon (1778). Increasingly, in the plays, many middle-class belles married one. Silvia had been an anomaly, but by then it was a common patriotic conclusion. Women expressed their choices in original ways—Kitty Clive, for example, sat at her dressing table and interviewed suitors, scornfully rejecting the rich, including a Scottish laird. After that, dozens of plays featured a heroine with a trio of suitors whom she resists under her family’s pressure. Typically, there was an older, economically fallen but lavishly dressed aristocrat; a fabulously wealthy nouveau riche man—often foreign after 1785; and the man she ultimately chooses: a brave, exemplary English recruiter.
Only the history of performances reveals impact. At this point, I want to share a list of the work we can now see the play did as part of the modernization of the employment of women as characters.
First, Farquhar’s is one of a cluster of plays that, for the first time, put lower and lower-middle-class wartime women on the stage with gritty, mundane realism. Rose, played by the delightful Susanna Mountfort, has been much discussed. Her sex, her social class’s needs and desires, and her naivete are among the most narratively important and delightful aspects of the play. Although Molly, the mother of Plume’s illegitimate child, does not appear, she is very present and serves as Silvia’s motivation to correct Plume’s “recruitment” behavior. It is the opening salvo in drawing parallels between military recruitment and exploitative seduction. Plume explains they will take Molly with them and give her the status and benefits of a washerwoman. Being listed as a member of the company gave great security. Plume also promises to enroll the baby as a grenadier, “Francis Kite, absent upon furlough,” with continuous pay. Attaining these official positions fulfilled comedy’s function of happy provision for the needy, even as they exposed corruption at the highest levels and how the military was meeting its most practical needs. This practice began in the time of Charles II. It, along with Humours of the Army by Charles Shadwell, set the fashion for using army society (and later, a camp) as a setting for a play. It follows the disguised woman into the ranks as a recruit.
Second, taken with the succession of performances with increasingly major changes in script, Silvia’s part traces the evolution of the breeches part. These roles transformed and greatly enriched what would become the history of cross-dressed parts for actresses. In plays like Dryden’s Secret Love with Nell Gwynn, the point of the most beautiful woman dressed to fight was that, in single sword combat, she would assume the stance that stretched her coat across her chest, and her breasts would tumble out, as would her long, glorious hair. After 1706, that seldom happened. Decade by decade, the actions of military-dressed women and the ways their sex was revealed changed. Women dressed as soldiers began to perform the manual exercises. In the 1770s, Charlotte Walpole had a repertoire of popular parts, including one in which she performed to the drumbeat of “The Grenadier’s March,” the patriotic central song of The Recruiting Officer. Not only was it a way to display women’s bodies, but it argued their readiness to fight for their country. It became more common for women to surprise and control other characters with the revelation of their sex, as Florimel does in O’Keeffe’s The Positive Man (she is named after Dryden’s). This play is one of those that reverses the formulaic scene of a man teaching a woman to perform masculinity in uniform.
Third, Silvia’s part provides evidence of a major playground for experimentation with gender performance. In dozens of plays, women disguise themselves in their brothers’ uniforms. Not only does this call attention to the century’s growing awareness of the fluidity of gendered bodies, but it also invites comparisons between performances of military masculinity. In the second half of the century, a kind of saturation in the exploration of gender that becomes the judgmental commentary we expect today emerges. In Sheridan’s The Camp, Gouge imagines Nelly punished with the ducking stool, and she imagines him “whipped from Coxheath to Wharley Common.” The performance history shows how gender and reputation could be employed. The greatest stars of the century, like Peg Woffington and Ann Barry, played the part with the gendered identities they held. Woffington “opened her conquest of London” with it, at a time when Kitty Clive was starring in flirtatious, frolicking, decidedly feminine parts. During the second Jacobite rebellion, both were known for their military epilogues and prologues, spoken within gendered performances. Play after play offered such contrasts, and gender variants multiplied, as with the parts played by Margaret Farrell Kennedy in the last quarter of the century. In one breeches part, she is picked up by a press gang, and her physical body is examined, felt, and finally identified as female.
And this was the moment when Rachel Hopper, playing Silvia in March of 1744, first performed “The Female Volunteer.” Quickly identified with Woffington in uniform, it begins, “The Gazette said, Our Men retreat!” “If so, / ’Tis Time we women take the Thing in Hand.” “In Freedom’s Cause, we Patriot-Fair arise…,” and she promises they will “stand” and never retreat. As an entrée to military-themed plays with cross-dressed women, Silvia and the play were cornerstones in the fascinating history of the development of the concept of the woman patriot. This construction from The Recruiting Officer is both physical and social. In several plays, women characters tutor men in how to perform a masculine military figure. In McNally’s Retaliation, Lucy dresses and instructs Rupee in how to appear to be a soldier. Highlighting the sexual exploitation inherent in the manual exercises, she says, “Keep your breast full out—thus.”
Decade by decade, the plays developed settled contours. In fact, this fifth example could be a book in itself. It demonstrates how quickly the parts for women evolved and how The Recruiting Officer encouraged this work. The ubiquitous French-inspired maid gives way to Rose and a variety of lively English female creations. Farquhar took advantage of the women he had available. Mountfort played Rose, a lower-class ingenue whom Silvia seduces to rescue, and the tall, stylish star Jane Rogers played Mildred. Playwrights, managers, and the women themselves learned what women characters could do, and those characters became more intelligent, flexible, and layered with greater depth and subjectivity.
Finally, the most important thing the play does is begin the crucial development of the concept of the essential model of the woman patriot. They march with soldiers, marry them in the face of massed objections, wait for them through long, cold months, marry recruiters, are rescued from rich, “entitled” men by recruiting gangs (as in Plymouth in an Uproar), and promise to bear and raise future military men. Note that Plume, as well as Silvia, pledges to do this as a patriotic act equivalent to being a recruiter.