Becoming Modern: The Work of Farquar’s Recruiting Officer

           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.

Camp Followers Become a Major Type of Character

We do not think of camp followers as middle or even aristocratic women nor as a major type of theatre character. The lower class wives and dependents of active duty military men in Humours of the Army that Alice Snecker and Moll are our image today. As individual representatives of people and as characters in a play, thet are largely invisible. For hundreds of years, such women would be in danger of dire poverty, food insecurity, and homelessness.

There is another camp follower in Shadwell’s Humours of the Army. Belvedera is Brigadier Bloodmore’s niece disguised as a just-arrived, young, well-connected recruit named Hickumbuz. She is seeking the fiancé that she jilted. Wilmot, is a gentleman with family and a large estate. He is disguised as a recruit named Straitup and is seeking death because of his broken heart. Belvedere has letters of introduction allegedly from Bloodmore’s sister that ask him to take Hickumbuz into his regiment. Because the troops are desperately in need of reinforcements, Hickumbuz is given the rank of lieutenant and commands Wilmot’s unit. They do not recognize each other in their uniforms and personae. The audience sees a proud, higher class man adjusting to the life and status of a private and a young officer without an imposing physique trying to establish company discipline and command.

The play highlights an important historical fact. Regardless of class and economic status, all of the women who follow their military loved ones endure the “grueling journey” of the voyage and march to Portugal. Belvedera, Alice, Moll, Mrs. Bloodmore, Victoria, and Leonora have all experienced it and refer to having passed “all the hazards in the World.” Even the Brigadier’s wife says she knows “too well the Plague of trudging after a Soldier.”

The part of Belvedera was first played by the beautiful comic star, Susana Mountford, who was admired for her physical comedy—for posture and pose, facial expression, gesture, and lively personality. Belvedera, in Juan Pablos’s words, is “a new iteration of the typical runaway girl in pursuit of the man she loves,” and became one of the most frequently performed characters on the British stage. Like her, these were not impoverished or without strong families and came to have a variety of timely reasons for their interventions in the orderly recruitment and deployment of men. Some want to “rescue” the man from service as Nancy does in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Camp. It is a well-developed account of a woman’s hope of earning William’s discharge becoming her decision of whether or not to follow him, thereby becoming a camp follower, or trying to persuade him to desert or resigning herself to waiting anxiously for his return. Some, like Eliza in The Flitch of Bacon have disguised themselves and pretended to be part of the husband’s recruiting or deployed party. Nancy and Eliza, like Belvedera, are of the social class of women in comedy-of-manners courtship plots, not lower class.

Belvedera was identified in the printed cast list for the first performance in 1713 as “the Female Officer.” The play was frequently revived, especially in times of national military crises. Not only does the play feed civilians’ curiosity about the camps, but with the emphasis on the “Female Volunteer,” Humours of the Army intersects with an unusual theme that arose in the 1740s from what came to attention as a national failing: regiments not standing and fighting. Oglethorpe tried to protect the Georgia colony and attacked St. Augustine, but his men deserted in large numbers. The fleet failed at Toulon twice, once unable to capture or destroy a single Franco-Spanish ship. Enraged at the fleet’s failure to engage the French at Ushant in November 1744, Admiral Vernon demanded the answer to “a simple question: ‘Did you fight or did you not?’”

When Bonnie Prince Charlie invaded Scotland to reclaim his throne in 1746, at Falkirk the dragoons and most of the royal regiments simply fled in disarray toward Edinburgh. In February, “The Female Volunteer: or, An Attempt to Make Our Men Stand” was published, and the incomparable Irish actress Peg Woffington performed it repeatedly in a redcoat uniform. She took over the part of Belvedera (now identified only as the “Female Officer”) and other parts in which she could model and represent military masculinity better than many of the men strutting through London. The character type and theme of the romantic woman who becomes a camp follower proliferated and powered the success of many playwrights and actresses.

Getting to Know Camp Followers

When I began the research for Women in Wartime, I was simply looking at how wartime women were represented on the stage. What were they like? What did they do? In what familiar plots did they appear? The content of this blog draws upon and stands upon the foundation of numerous diligent researchers. My book supplies both citations and a historical appendix.

I began this research and writing with plays in a period I thought I knew extremely well in a warm-up chapter to be titled “In the Shadow of Marlborough’s War.” Among them were Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, Steele’s Lying Lover, and Centlivre’s Beau’s Duel. My first publication had been on a text I believe should be attributed to Defoe, “A Short Narrative of the Life and Actions of His Grace John, D. of Marlborough” (Augustine Reprint #168, Year 28, 1973-74). I wrote it while I worked on my dissertation, and in crazed-graduate student mode had even read most of Winston Churchill’s 4 -volume biography of his ancestor. I was prepared!

And then there was Charles Shadwell and his camp followers. In his Humours of the Army (1713) set in a frontline camp on the peninsula, a major enters with much-needed recruits followed by two common soldiers’ wives who were definitely not the stereotyped daggle-tailed sex workers. They had shared the trip from Falmouth, Cornwall, then the five-day trip to Lisbon, and then the ten-day march to the camp. They are greeted by a matter-of-fact Serjeant who questions them. One wife offers the fact that she carried her husband’s knapsack from Lisbon and asks, “what is the main Sign of a Wife, but doing all his Drudgery?” He advises her to leave her husband and hire herself out to wash the linen of a higher class group of officers, the grenadiers.

Shadwell, like Farquhar and Steele, had served in the army in the same war and lived and worked beside such women. Everything changed. Immediately, what I didn’t know exploded my peaceful, confident plan for what I expected to organize. I discovered that military officers observed that the married soldiers “fared better” and did more because of the work of “their husbands’ mules.” As the historian Barton Hacker said, “Women’s work was necessary … and so taken for granted as to be all but ignored.” Detailed regulations underscored their importance. Some were put on the muster rolls and many were assured paid work. For example, officers were to divide their laundry among sergeants’ wives, and soldiers’ laundry was to be distributed in equal proportions among the other women of the companies. Those without appointments could still earn money by accepting bachelors and lower class clients. As my book documents and describes, at this time the women who accompanied the men into the field were essential parts of the infrastructure. They gathered firewood, cooked, did laundry, gave first aid, mended clothing, foraged for food, set up and broke camp, carried extra gear, and a few were teamsters. After an early battle in the War of the Spanish Succession, General Marlborough ordered all of the widows with his troops to begin serving as nurses immediately and to be paid subsistence.

Humours of the Army became an essential part of theatre history for the rest of the century and changed my interpretation of The Recruiting Officer. The next post will continue these stories of the camp followers.

Who Makes Meaning? What Work Does My Book Do? Military Recruiting

A student wrote of my book, “What I found most interesting were … resonant examples of wartime women and the similarities that continue to be exemplified in the present day.” The most critical and challenging need when war or even the threat of war arises is recruitment. The US Army just announced that over the next two years it will have to reduce the number of soldiers they expect to have and that they believe that they will be 50% below their recruiting goal on 1 October 2020. As military needs arose all over the globe and roiling diplomatic relations with Russia and China increased, Air Force recruiters fanned out to the premiers of Top Gun Maverick with boxes of lanyards and mugs. They and the Navy hoped for the ”bump” the 1986 Top Gun delivered.  In August the Air Force was still 4,000 below its goal.

My new booktraces how actresses and plays with new, revolutionary parts for them became powerful recruiting forces. The U.S. Army needs 57,000 new soldiers a year, and, at the beginning of the American Revolution, England, a much smaller country than ours, needed to recruit 80,000 Navy men, 60,000 Army men, and substantial numbers of women who provided important parts of the infrastructure.

The student continued with her first example of similarities to today: “The female body as an object of war propaganda.”  Beginning in 2005, the Department of Defense (DoD) created a series of videos similar to those pioneered in my book. A phenomenally successful 10-minute play, The Parting Lovers later called “Nancy,” opened in 1739 at the beginning of the War of Jenkins Ear, the war in declared after the appearance before Parliament of the captain with his ear in a bottle, allegedly cut off by the Spanish. It played on the London stage and all over the country for the rest of the century. The author, Henry Carey, was inspired by seeing “a young Fellow hurried away by a Press-Gang, and follow’d by his Sweet-heart; a very pretty Wench, and perfectly neat, tho’ plain in her Dress; her Tears, her Distress, and moving Softness, drew Attention and Compassion from all who beheld her.”

Wars demand rapid, often drastic recruiting.  Women like Nancy when faced with quotas for each county and the cancellation of deferments for merchant seamen, dockworkers, and many others, greeted recruiting “gangs” by throwing bottles, rocks, and chunks of coal. Naval impressment was one of the causes of the Revolutionary War. Students resisted the draft and were killed in demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Plays like Nancy were employed in large numbers to change the image of recruiters.  Dread-naught, the head recruiter, becomes nicer to Nancy as the years pass and in a late century revision becomes an Admiral. Humanizing recruiters became the work of women in these and the DoD dramatizations.

Dread-Nought names the nation’s enemy and the personal benefit:  “Honour calls, he must obey;/ Love to Glory must give Way:/ Loaden with the Spoils of Spain,/ Triumphant he’ll return again” (251). The reference is to the division of prize money after the capture of an enemy ship, one of the most common recruiting baits. One of the earliest DoD videos highlights a young man explaining to his mother that military service Is a good way to pay for college. 

The eighteenth-century plays scrupulously publicized the monetary benefits recruits received. Enlistment money rose and began to include money for wives or mothers. Today the Amy is making much of offering up to $50,000 enlistment bonuses. For what we call “civilian acquired skills,” the U.S. offers up to $40,000, and England increased the same for blacksmiths, experienced dock workers, and even cooks. Some DoD videos include sons telling a parent that it is time they were on their own.

Few think of today’s military recruiting strategies as a legacy of eighteenth-century English plays, but the employment of actresses, the targets of persuasion, and the appeals within them are.

Who Makes Meaning?  What Does My New Book Do?

Last night UPS delivered a book including an essay of mine. The contributor’s list gave my title as Wartime Women: Intimate Conscripts on the British Stage rather than my publisher’s. For me, the book had always been about a group of some thousands of women and the playwrights and actresses who brought them to the London stage in the eighteenth century. It is the first study of theatrical representations of women with intimate connections to military men—sweethearts, wives, mothers, sisters, barmaids, provision sellers, seaport prostitutes, and more. Their relationships to active duty men made them recruits, volunteers, or even conscripts, women compelled into service by love, need, or duty. Like the impressed men, many would not have chosen this path.

I had often struggled with the marketing staff to avoid these women becoming stereotyped “warrior women,” and their title was the result of what they considered “searchable” words. The real women conscripts and the real characters played by other real women were not real to them. Cultural studies critics like me always ask, “What work does an artefact do?”

My book set out to do real work. I asked a specific question: How can theatre respond to wartime crises?  How are women used to meet the most urgent needs?

I answered these clear and simple questions and used them to continue my career-long exploration of what popular culture has come to do today. In Spectacular Politics, I demonstrated that mass popular culture began in the late eighteenth century with the mania for gothic plays that were recognized and criticized as threatening to “drive all other plays off the stage.” Theatres that held audiences of over 3,500 filled night after night enthralled by unimaginable evil, madness, and the sensations the plays raised in them. People screamed, cried, applauded, and even fainted.

The plays featured in my book also created a massive, addicted following.  From box office receipts, David Worrall estimates an audience of 3000 at The Death of Captain Faulknor (1795), a short, slight play about a victory off Guadeloupe. In theatres that held that size audience, some such topical plays ran many nights. The Mouth of the Nile (1798), for instance, played for thirty two as the audience celebrated Nelson’s victory over Napoleon. Frustrated conventional playwrights complained that people talked over or skipped the main pieces and flocked to their seats for these short, spectacular pieces.

Popular culture is easily available, affordable, familiar to a large number of people representing several social classes, and so widely discussed that first-hand experience is not always necessary. Like most popular culture, the plays were ephemera, produced by and part of a cultural moment. And how did a subgenre with a formulaic plot, character configuration, and mood achieve the status of mass popular culture?  What was the unusual appeal and what work was it doing for the society?

And, as important as the description of what theatre can do to contribute to military success, the more valuable is my exploration of not only the immediate work popular culture can do but of how popular culture is an important catalyst for change, often lasting change.

Women in Wartime is actually a case study in these things.  In a series of blogs, I will share what unexpected things I discovered about my subject, my readers, and myself. The blogs are inspired by two groups of meaning makers. One draws upon the observations about my project and methods that my professional friends made, and the other is based on evidence from the spontaneous and surprised enjoyments non-specialist readers shared with me.