Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole

CHAPTER ONE

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians

A spectre is haunting political theatre, and that is the spectre of Bertolt Brecht. His radical theory and practices brought a transformative political consciousness to modern drama. Brecht chose not simply to interpret the world through theatre, but to change it. For his innovative exploration of economic and social conditions through stage plays, Brecht today might be regarded as a Marx of modern theatre. Following his death in 1956, the playwright’s endeavours to align theatre production with movements against oppression and empire continue to provide an exemplary model of politically engaged artistry.

Post-mortem, Brecht enjoys and suffers from the classical status he once described as an inhibiting factor in creative work. His political playwriting is now singled out for special recognition and praise (‘a modern classic’) despite repeated efforts he made to create theatre collectively. Throughout his life he entered into creative collaborations, long periods of rehearsal with assistants, other writers, resident actors, designers, dramaturgs and co-directors all contributing to stage production. The author of Mother Courage, Galileo,The Caucasian Chalk Circle andThe Threepenny Opera also depended on others for translations, musical scores, readings of works in progress. Originality or a highly personal statement was not the primary goal in such productions as Die Dreigroschenoper. His 1928 adaptation of John Gay’s play benefited greatly from collaboration with others, notably composer Kurt Weill, and some song lyrics came from the satirist and critic Karl Kraus.

The collaboration included other artists, deceased; and here in Brecht’s drawing on the past we can begin to sense how he was part of a larger theatre movement (a collective as it were) that went back to the eighteenth century, and has continued beyond the life of its writers. Eighteenth-century plots, characters and musical innovation became his, with variation, through adaptation. The Threepenny Opera’s libretto was based onThe Beggar’s Opera, a ballad opera John Gay wrote in 1728. Gay himself received encouragement and an idea for his play from Jonathan Swift, and a musical score from Johann Pepusch, who based his tunes on existing popular ballads. When Brecht’snew version opened in Berlin two centuries later, he emerged as its popular and financially successful author; but he did so with considerable help. His play in which a gangster named Macheath dreams of founding a bank began with a German translation of Gay’s text by Brecht’s assistant, Elisabeth Hauptmann.

Brecht’s ‘collaboration’ with eighteenth-century writers Gay and Swift for The Threepenny Opera extended and renewed (or in his term, reutilized) attempts by the earlier authors to intervene in political and social discourse through their art. If political theatre history is now haunted by Brecht’s spectre, that is partially because he went back in time for co-authors as well as forward in his collaborations. ‘Every writer creates his own precursors’, Borges once observed (Borges 72). Brecht created not just his precursors, but also his collaborators; they include a number of other radical eighteenth-century authors—more than Swift and Gay—some of whom have yet to be acknowledged as his comrades.

Late in his career, Brecht adapted Farquhar’s 1706 play, The Recruiting Officer. His reutilization of such classics was part of a new direction in theatre, but it had a retroactive impact on older plays as well, as Brecht reframed both the theory and practice embodied by Augustan and Georgian plays. These plays now can be seen as early forms of Epic theatre. When the German playwright began to develop his concept of Epic theatre, he distinguished his kind of plays from the ‘Aristotelian’ model. According to Aristotle theatre offered a tragic hero with whom spectators could identify emotionally, and see as their own representative on stage. Brecht preferred to offer spectators an anti-hero, someone like The Threepenny Opera’s gangster Macheath, or Captain Plume inTrumpets and Drums, Brecht’s version of The Recruiting Officer; these characters may be likeable scoundrels, but they cannot be called tragic heroes. Their anti-heroic careers began in the eighteenth-century plays of Farquhar and Gay, and Brecht extended their run.

Brecht’s Epic theatre concepts are well known by now; but their antecedents in eighteenth-century theatre practices deserve more attention. John Gay disrupted his anti-hero’s action with songs long before Brecht. An induction scene featuring a beggar at the opening of Gay’s ballad opera was not quite the same as Brecht’s projection of intertitles on a half curtain, or the prologue opening Caucasian Chalk Circle. But these three forms of preview encouraged the audience to relax and see human conditions in all their unvarnished and varied motivation, which was social and economic as well as psychological. For Brecht this meant actors had to go beyond psychological motivation, beyond the so-called Stanislavsky method through Epic acting, and understand the social conditions and relationships that affected far more than their individual characters. The actors who first created the roles of Macheath and Captain Plume also employed techniques different from Stanislavsky’s, and in some regards were closer to the acting Brecht sought than to other modern methods, as prologues and other direct addresses by the English actors to their audience acknowledged no imaginary fourth wall between actor and spectator.

It would be absurd to argue that all the theory and practice of Epic theatre existed in eighteenth-century plays such as The Beggar’s Opera,or in their performance; but significant anticipations of Brecht’s political theatre can be discerned in satiric and comic plays of the period. Other authors besides Gay and Farquhar were writing what could be called eighteenth-century Brechtian plays. The German author did not adapt or even admire all their works; but these artists (including Brecht) shared concerns given to them by history itself—particularly events related to wars of the period, to a stock market scandal of 1720, ongoing bribery and questionable banking. Brecht’s friend, the critic Walter Benjamin once observed that Marx ‘became a teacher of satire’ as he illuminated ‘the debased and mystified relations between men in capitalist society’, and ‘it is with Marx that Brecht has gone to school’ (Benjamin 1977: 84). But Brecht the political satirist and anti-capitalist also learned from Swift, Gay, Farquhar, and the history of banking in England. Henry Fielding, Charlotte Charke, David Garrick and Samuel Foote also became eighteenth-century Brechtians without knowing it, to the extent that their plays anticipated Brecht’s concerns with empire, conquest and capital accumulated on the backs of the poor and the oppressed. This eighteenth-century group’s self-reflexive humour and mockery of theatre conventions also preview components of transparency Brecht would later consider features of Epic theatre. When E.P. Thompson called for ‘more studies of the social attitudes of criminals, of soldiers and sailors, of tavern life [in the eighteenth century]’, he did not have Gay’s criminals or Farquhar’s soldiers in mind. He was asking for more labour history and sociological studies, but ironically he added ‘we should look at the evidence, not with a moralizing eye (Christ’s poor were not always pretty), but with an eye for Brechtian values’ (Thompson 1966: 59). Those Brechtian values can be found in some of the period’s plays.

The eighteenth-century writers and activists who initiated comic, public forms of resistance to empire, patriarchy and plutocracy contributed to a larger, continuing series of protests that extends from their day to the recent satire of the Yes Men, Kneehigh and Michael Moore, and to the theatrical activism of the Ruckus Society, Reclaim the Streets and Occupy Wall Street. Equally important, the vision of resistance promoted through Brecht’s art can be seen as a crystallization of historical developments that began with eighteenth-century responses to newly created banks, stock exchange scandal and military recruitment; prophetic Augustan and Georgian artists questioned these developments and their harmfulness, through humorous and innovative theatre.

Misery as a Commodity from Swift and Gay to Brecht

Brecht set The Threepenny Opera in the London of Queen Victoria, not John Gay’s eighteenth century. The play’s ‘Cannon Song’ (‘The troops live under / The cannon’s thunder / From the Cape to Cooch Behar . . .’) evoked colonial war in Kipling’s India. Costumes for the 1928 Threepenny premiere made the characters look like Berliners. Kurt Weill’s music at times made Macheath and his cohorts sound like cabaret artists. The production was not simply a respectful tribute to the 1728 version; although ostensibly setting it in London’s Soho district, Brecht and company showed Berliners of 1928 their own corrupt society in distorted comic form. Leading the charge onstage was a criminal who wanted to become a banker.

In Brecht’s version the early capitalism of John Gay’s England is gone; the industrial revolution has arrived, and Jeremiah Peachum’s firm mass-produces beggars. The five basic types of misery his employees replicate are displayed in Peachum’s showroom. Outfit B in the firm’s collection costumes the victim of war and Outfit C garbs the victim of industrial progress; the latter represents a form of misery not yet well-established in John Gay’s time. These crises are sources of profit for Peachum, an early beneficiary of what Naomi Klein has called the ‘shock doctrine’ of ‘crisis capitalism’. Human misery is regarded as economic opportunity by the Peachums of the world, as long as they can trade on it.

Brecht may have derived Peachum’s cynical attitude toward beggars in his play from another source besides The Beggar’s Opera. Few beggars appear onstage in Gay’s play; but they fill the pages of Jonathan Swift’s essays, which propose new methods of control over the men, women and children begging on the streets of Dublin. The Swiftian hoards seem to merge with Berlin’s unemployed of 1928 in The Threepenny Opera to form the army of beggars Peachum commands. Peachum threatens to disrupt a royal coronation by filling London’s streets with poor people including his employees, but not only them.

If Brecht did not read Swift’s essays himself, perhaps Elisabeth Hauptmann, who read English well enough to translate John Gay’s play, first noticed that Jonathan Swift urged Dublin beggars to wear badges. Whether or not she found it for Brecht, Swift’s 1737 proposal for giving badges to Dublin beggars has a counterpart in the opening of The Threepenny Opera, where Peachum berates a young scamp named Filch for begging without a licence. All of London’s street life becomes property of Peachum’s firm, as it parcels out territory to beggars and costumes them in outfits that win empathy and alms from passers-by.

Swift: ‘My first question to those who ask an alms, is, Where is your badge?’

Brecht’s Peachum to Filch: ‘Any man who intends to practise the craft of begging in any of one of [our fourteen districts] needs a licence from Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum and Co.’ (Brecht 1979: 7).

Brecht imbues his Peachum (as opposed to John Gay’s) with a heightened awareness of the poverty and misery present in London, because his business requires it. While Brecht’s Peachum ‘regards misery as a commodity’ (as Walter Benjamin suggested), Swift, or rather his pseudonymous stand-in writing ‘A Modest Proposal’, called for the commodification of beggars’ industry through the sale of their infants for dinner delicacies. Peachum is no butcher of beggars or their young in Brecht’s play; more a master of theatrical arts, he trains his employees to win pity as actors might. The Beggar King knows that well-to-do spectators will pay small coins in response to effective portrayal of personal suffering, while the sight of unadorned, artless poverty merely repels them.

Jonathan Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ to slaughter infants stands as an early, grimly humorous contribution to debate on international trade, or a mockery of it, as he claims the succulent flesh of Ireland’s children will add ‘some thousand carcasses in our exportation of barrelled beef’. Peachum’s business in a later, more enlightened era brings no gourmand’s harm to children, who could be kept alive and employed at a young age, given the lack of child labour laws—one difference among many between Brecht’s industrial-age satire and Swift’s.

Swift provided inspiration for Gay’s version of the play as well as Brecht’s. In a letter of 30 August 1716, he proposed that his friend Gay consider writing ‘a Newgate pastoral among the whores and thieves there’. A mere twelve years later, on 29 January 1728, The Beggar’s Opera premiered scenes set in the Newgate prison district of London; while not terribly pastoral or idyllic in its conversations about murder, theft and hanging, the play periodically parodies dreams of brotherhood.

Macheath Reads Marx

Both playwrights refer to banking as well as begging, but their references reflect very different stages of capitalism. Gay’s famous highwayman and his interest in bank business are introduced when Peachum asks his wife: ‘Was Captain Macheath here this morning, for the bank-notes he left with you last week?’ Such banknotes became widespread after 1694, when the Bank of England was founded to raise funds for England’s war against France. In Capital Marx found that 1694 date tremendously significant; the opening of a bank to fund a war and create national debt (war debt to a large extent) provided the foundation for

the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt . . . At their birth the great banks, decorated with national titles, were only associations of private speculators, who placed themselves by the side of governments and, thanks to the privileges they received, were in a position to advance money to those governments (Marx 1975: 920).

By 1728 notes stolen from the Bank of England or its patrons had become a source of income for Macheath. In Brecht’s 1928 version, Macheath no longer wants to sell stolen banknotes; he wants to run a bank. He knows huge profits from banking are legitimate, even if they exploit clients to the limits of the law and beyond. ‘What’s breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank? What’s murdering a man compared with employing a man?’ asks Brecht’s aspiring banker, who seems to have read Marx, or at least shares a Marxian concept of bankers and factory owners (Brecht 1979: 76). If Macheath read Marx’s description of bankers as ‘bandits’ and ‘gamblers’ in Volume III ofCapital, he would have found additional confirmation that his background was suitable for banking (Marx 1981: 600).

All this might be past literary history, and no more than an amusing link between Swift, Gay, Brecht and Marx, except that in our own age, bankers have become beggars. With great finesse, heads of some of the world’s leading financial institutions secured huge government-financed bailouts in the past decade. While their accomplishments are not often described as begging, like Brecht’s Peachum modern bankers have learned to profit from human misery, and employ the appearance of poverty to accumulate wealth. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders said in a December 2010 speech on the bailout of American banks, ‘the American people have learned the incredible, jaw-dropping details of the Fed’s multi-trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street and corporate America’, and they learned it from the Senator among others (Sanders 29). Sanders revealed that secretly trillions, not just the publicly disclosed billions, had been loaned by the Federal Reserve to distressed American banks and investment firms in their hour of need. (Banks in other countries were bailed out, too.)

In Brecht’s Threepenny Novel, written after his 1928 play, Macheath becomes a banker. Instead of stealing his way into a bank, he informs his reluctant partners: ‘For this purpose, it would be best if I entered the bank as, shall we say, Director of Business Investments’. Brecht also wrote some wry lyrics for a ‘Song to Inaugurate the National Deposit Bank’. Not used in the Threepenny production of 1928, the song (in a translation by Willett and Manheim) gives advice on

. . . getting capital to start.

If you’ve got none, why reveal it?

All you need to do is steal it.

Don’t all banks get started thanks to

Doing as other banks do?

Here it seems quite possible that Brecht remembered Marx’s description of bankers as bandits. Macheath also enters the world of high finance in Brecht’s Threepenny screenplay (partially realized by a Pabst film in 1931), where Peachum, police chief Brown and the Knife all become bank directors before the film ends.

If a sequel to Brecht’s play and novel were written today (and it should be) in light of recent events, members of the new Macheath firm would not need to steal—they could simply announce their insolvency and secure a government bailout of billions. Prominent bankers of our era have become wily beggars. As they receive enormous loans to keep their businesses afloat, they can say they are serving the public—building on public trust as it were, or at least public financing, although their profits remain private. Of course these beggars, like the one who claims to be the author in the opening of John Gay’s ballad opera, also are actors (and not necessarily financially impoverished ones) in a scenario of their own devising. Moreover, they are far more successful than Macheath in evading arrest; as of this writing (in 2015) not one director of a large American bank has been convicted of a crime, although Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Chase—all leading banks—have been fined billions of dollars, and then returned to profitable business, after negotiating (an advanced form of ‘begging’) a settlement with the Department of Justice and the Attorney General. Macheath and Peachum could learn a great deal from these modern businessmen. (John Gay’s Macheath seemed to know where the money was when he counselled his gang to steal from money lenders—‘Have an eye upon the money-lenders’, Act III, scene iv—but the banking industry was young and inexperienced in those days. Now it has considerable expertise in crime and criminal investigations.)

The transformation of a beggar into the author of opera, the conversion of a gangster into a banker, followed by the turning of bankers into wealthy beggars and actors, three episodes of theatrical and social history, were set in motion by the 1694 founding of the Bank of England and its issue of banknotes, followed by the first crash of England’s stock exchange with the South Sea scandal of 1720. South Sea stock rose quite high and then fell fast, as a result of which John Gay lost a fortune, £20,000 by his estimate, after some stock had been given to him by a benefactor. In 1721, Gay’s friend Swift commemorated such losses in a poem, ‘The South-Sea’, one stanza of which read:

Thus the deluded Bankrupt raves,

Puts all upon a desperate Bet;

Then plunged in the Southern waves,

Dips over Head and Ears—in Debt.

Fellow-satirist William Hogarth responded to the debacle with ‘An Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme’, an engraving that displayed a merry-go-round of financial speculation, along with a London monument—a pillar ‘erected in memory of the destruction of this City by the South Sea in 1720’. The City survived the financial scandal, and John Gay was not exactly turned into a beggar after the crash; but he was more aware of financial malpractice when he wrote The Beggar’s Opera in the years that followed.

Gay, like Hogarth, was no friend of those who benefited from the South Sea Bubble. One of the greatest beneficiaries, Robert Walpole, became England’s first Minister, and his corrupt government, strengthened by its handling of national debt, bribery and deals with the Bank of England, was a prime target of satire in The Beggar’s Opera. Song lyrics were directed at Walpole, especially when he sat in the audience on opening night and heard Lockit, the ballad opera’s Newgate jailer, sing:

When you censure the age,

Be cautious and sage,

Lest the courtiers offended should be.

If you mention vice or bribe,

’Tis so pat to all the tribe

Each cries—That was levelled at me.

Walpole heard the lyrics, and joined in the refrain to the delight of the audience watching him watch The Beggar’s Opera. ‘Does Walpole think you intended an affront to him with your opera?’ Swift asked Gay in a letter dated 26 February 1729. ‘Pray God he may’, Swift added. Gay got his wish. The Minister endured the indignity of being associated in public with vice, bribery and the highwayman Macheath in 1728, but by December of that year his government had banned production of Gay’s next stage play, Polly.

Regrettably neglected by theatres ever since, Polly brings Macheath back to the stage as a black-faced West Indian pirate at war with colonial British settlers; he takes on the British empire—or part of it—while the title character is sold into slavery. (Both Polly and Macheath escape slavery while in the West Indies.) Would the play have provoked more government repression if staged? It became victim of some new censorship without being staged in 1737; when Henry Fielding tried to adapt Gay’s Polly and open it that year, his theatre was closed. (Details are provided in Chapter Fifteen.)

The Historical Register for the Year 1736, Fielding’s next-to-last play before censorship took hold in 1737, featured a corrupt politician announcing his position on money: ‘All we have to consider relating to money is how we shall get it’ (Fielding 1967: 20). How those with influence secured their wealth is suggested by historian A.L. Morton, who writes that during this period votes of Parliament members

were not (often) actually bought for cash down. Instead they were secured by sinecures, jobs, contracts, titles, favours to the family or to friends of members. The vast government patronage was freely used for party purposes (Morton 1968: 303).

‘For of all Beggars, I look upon a Minister’s Follower to be the meanest’, one of John Gay’s characters said in his play, The Distress’d Wife (1734). Then again, cash was not forgotten in the politics or culture of the time. The character of Sterling observes in Garrick and Colman’s comedy, The Clandestine Marriage (1766): ‘What signifies your birth and education, and titles? Money, money, that’s the stuff that makes the great men in this country.’

Gay, Swift, Fielding, Brecht (and sometimes Garrick and Colman) chose to contest inordinate wealth, empire, illegitimate authority, capitalist cronyism and widespread injustices within their society by writing satires; their pamphlets and plays promoted public discourse on greed and power. Swift in several essays and Gulliver’s Travels, Brecht in his Threepenny Opera andThreepenny Novel and screenplay based on the novel, explored theft, poverty, patriarchy and political corruption. All these themes were also addressed in The Beggar’s Opera and Polly. To the degree that Brecht’s theatre shared such concerns with Fielding, Gay and Swift, some of his satire could be called Swiftian, or Fielding-like; but it also can be said that Swift, Gay and Fielding, while very attentive to the follies of their own time, were early Brechtians.

The German author’s association with the eighteenth-century Brechtians was not entirely welcomed by the critics who first noticed it. When The Threepenny Opera opened he was accused of plagiarism in Germany (stealing from Villon and others); but as Lotte Lenya noted, it was always ‘Brecht’s procedure’ ‘to adapt, reinterpret, re-create, magnificently add modern social significance; or in his detractor’s eyes: to pirate, plagiarize, shamelessly appropriate’ (Brecht/Bentley 1964: v).

Besides German critics crying theft in response to Die Dreigroschenoper, English critics responded adversely to Brecht’s adaptation of George Farquhar’s 1706 comedy, The Recruiting Officer, first staged under the title of Trumpets and Drums by the Berliner Ensemble in 1955. Some ink was spilled in a war of words over Brecht’s Farquhar adaptation, in an episode that deserves to be reconsidered, along with the practices of political theatre and stage satire under dispute. Brecht’s theatre, his eighteenth-century precursors such as Farquhar, Swift and Gay, and prospective audiences for their radical stage art who are still with us today might benefit from the spilling of a little more ink on this subject.

Brecht and Farquhar Take Over the National Theatre

The first foray in the battle over an eighteenth-century Brechtian named George Farquhar began when British critic Kenneth Tynan (favouring the Germany party in the dispute) praised Brecht’s production of Trumpets and Drums. The play based on The Recruiting Officer was performed in German by the Berliner Ensemble when it visited London in 1956. ‘Farquhar’s text has been surveyed by cool new eyes, against the larger vista of England at war . . . As a corrective [Brecht] is indispensable’, wrote Tynan (Tynan 1961: 453).

Adapting Farquhar’s play, Brecht engaged in reutilization (Umfunk- tionierung was his term for it, as noted by Hans Mayer) of a classic, an activity he practised earlier without the special terminology when transforming The Beggar’s Opera into The Threepenny Opera. Brecht relocated Farquhar’s 1706 play in a later period during which England was beginning to lose its war against the colonial rebels in America. This made Farquhar’s British recruiting officers counter-revolutionaries at the same time as it made their war a lost cause. The revised play glimpses the start of the end of British colonialism, and firmly historicizes the senselessness of recruiting and misleading young Englishmen into a losing battle. Although no one in the play is completely ready to admit the British are losing their war, resistance to recruitment and evasions or disloyalty of military duty in this version take on new significance.

Brecht’s appropriation of The Recruiting Officer continued when director William Gaskill staged the original Farquhar text at the National Theatre in 1963. Tynan served as Gaskill’s dramaturgical advisor—he was now collaborating on the production, offering advice at rehearsal instead of writing about the work on opening night as he had for Trumpets and Drums. A number of other British critics, rivals of Tynan, if you will, objected to the Brechtian qualities of the National Theatre performance of Farquhar’s play. ‘Brecht looms over it’, wrote Harold Hobson of the production and its theatre house. Hobson and other critics questioned Brecht’s presence in a once thoroughly British play. It was as if the German playwright had recruited leading British theatre artists to his cause. Sir Laurence Olivier, artistic director of the National Theatre, performed a role (Captain Brazen) in the same production about military impressment; had he too been impressed by Brecht?

Gaskill explained why he chose Farquhar’s original version over Brecht’s adaptation:

I saw no reason to put on an English translation of a German adaptation of a perfectly good English play. It is more pertinent to ask why Brecht should have chosen to adapt a comparatively little-known English classic . . . [Farquhar] saw that the Act of Impressment, which gave the final say in forcible conscription to the Justices, was a mockery because they were in league with the army. He saw the ruthlessness of the officers who were sent to beat-up for Marlborough’s army. He saw all this accurately but he was not indignant . . . Brecht took Farquhar’s observation as the basis for his own indignation at the exploitation of the working class. He substantially rewrote the play in his own terms and set it in the War of American Independence. It would be false to impose on Farquhar Brecht’s statement of the social situation but we cannot ignore in Farquhar those elements which excited Brecht to make his version (Tynan 1965: 11).

In this sense, Farquhar became a Brechtian, or Brecht became one of Farquhar’s recruits; and a new battle over Farquhar began long after the eighteenth-century wars had ended.

Brecht’s Spectre Arrives

Harold Hobson praised the National Theatre’s production of The Recruiting Officer in his review, but as noted already, he ended with an odd expression of

one doubt about the National Theatre. Brecht looms over it. Brecht was a considerable dramatist whose value lay in the tension between his genius and his theories. It will be sad if at the National Theatre we get the theories without the genius (Tynan 1965: 142).

Here it is—Brecht’s spectre has arrived, it ‘looms’ large; the year is 1963, less than a decade after the German playwright adapted Farquhar, and his spectre haunts England’s new national theatre. Or perhaps it only haunts the critics; the National Theatre’s artists are not so troubled.

Another critic, David Pryce-Jones, also sights Brecht’s spirit in his review in the Spectator. He announces that the German author had chosen to ‘counteract’ the ‘mannered’ original of Farquhar ‘by rewriting the play, making it into something it is not by assuming that its action arbitrarily suited other circumstances’. While acknowledging that Gaskill has directed Farquhar’s text, Pryce-Jones sees the director making concessions to Brecht. ‘Mr. Gaskill has been unable to resist showing Farquhar’s progressiveness, and in the so-called comedy of manners he has discovered a social moral’ (Tynan 1965: 142). Here we go again, that Brechtian social consciousness descends like a pall, or so the critic suggests. Pryce-Jones wants his comedy unadulterated by Brechtian tenets (or is there a political consciousness already present in the 1706 text?) as he argues: ‘The two countrymen [in the play] who are pressed into the army were clowns, not victims to Farquhar, and the justices’ bench was a riotous satire and not a revelation of military and legal iniquity hand-in-hand.’

Perhaps the text of the play can offer more evidence than the critic to help readers determine the validity of such an interpretation. At one point in the play’s courtroom scene, Silvia Balance tells the judges that instead of forcing working-class men such as a collier to go to war they should send their ‘own lazy, lubberly sons . . . fellows that hazard their necks every day in pursuit of a fox, yet dare not peep abroad to look an enemy in the face’. Her accusations of class bias, written by Farquhar and not Brecht, are followed by a reading aloud of the Articles of War for mutiny and desertion (written by British legislators, not by Farquhar), meant to precede her own forced enlistment into the ranks:

No man shall presume so far as to raise or cause the least mutiny or Sedition in the Army, upon Pain of Death. And if any number of Soldiers shall presume to assemble amongst themselves for the demanding of their pay or shall at any time demand their pay in a mutinous manner, the soldiers shall be punished by Death . . . If any Inferior Officer shall refuse to obey his Superior Officer, he shall be punished with Death.

No revelation of ‘military and legal iniquity’ here? Death sentences meted out to those who demand their wages? There was cause for sedition, or contemplation of it, at the time. Early in the eighteenth century, laws enabling British conscription of the unemployed turned the army into a compulsory labour force, and the law itself may have abetted conscription of men ill-suited for service, or at least unwilling to serve. Farquhar witnessed such recruitment, and then wrote about it in his ‘riotous satire’. It was humorous, if not riotous, as the play mocked British law, order and military conscription.

Irving Wardle also argued with Gaskill and Brecht in his review of Farquhar’s play, noting that when Brecht rewrote the text he ‘gave it a strong element of social protest. But Farquhar, himself a former recruiting officer, saw the corruption and cruelty of the trade, and used it as comic material without advancing any moral conclusions’. The implication is that such conclusions were advanced by the director and his German source of inspiration. Wardle finds the scene in which two illiterate fellows are duped by recruiters going ‘far beyond the regions of comedy’, a foray ‘untypical of the remainder of the production which is, first and foremost, riotously funny’. (Again the critic clearly would prefer a riot of comedy without interruption.) At the same time Wardle himself admits that the original script ‘is not a typical Restoration piece. Its provincial setting, its breadth of social characterization, its sexual realism all set the play apart from the charmed circle of fops and wits which dominates the work of Farquhar’s contemporaries’ (Tynan 1965: 140). Might this ‘untypical’ writing by Farquhar be a factor contributing to Gaskill’s discovery of social protest in the 1706 play?

The debate suggests that Brecht was not the only one who turned eighteenth-century authors into Brechtians. He had notable assistance from Tynan and Gaskill in 1963. The Recruiting Officer and its critique of militarism once may have influenced Brecht’s plays, but today those who know Brecht’s mockery of recruiting officers inMother Courage and Trumpets and Drumscan read more into Farquhar’s lines, too; the English author’s text begins a dialogue Brecht continues. Some of the ironic statements about war and cannon fodder written for recruiting officers in Brecht’s Mother Courage might be suitable for delivery by Plume or Kite in Farquhar’s play.

Margaret Eddershaw, tracing the impact of Brecht on British authors and directors over forty years, notes that after two visits by the Berliner Ensemble, first in 1956 and again in 1965, theatre artists in London became more familiar with Brecht and he was ‘appropriated’ by their theatres (Eddershaw 1996: 5). Brecht himself appropriated British theatre earlier, as noted already. His affinity with some eighteenth-century plays might be seen more fully if the texts were staged today with a sensibility similar to Gaskill’s and Tynan’s, with their appreciation of Brecht’s attitudes toward theatre and society. His criticism of wealth, privilege, militarism