Thomas Durfey’s Love for Money; or, The Boarding School (1691): A Critical Edition

Originally launched in 2020, this Peter Lang endeavor answers a scholarly need met back in the 1960s and 1970s by the Regents Restoration Drama series, namely, to issue well-edited, annotated imprints of single plays. Although the New Mermaids, now published by Bloomsbury, includes the odd canonical title by William Congreve or Richard Brinsley Sheridan, no other press in recent years has attempted the same. As with the other three plays in this series, this edition of Love for Money; or, The Boarding School (1691) balances accessibility with “the flavour of the original language” (42). To that end, the editors have silently modernized “accidentals like spelling, word-division, italicisation, and capitalisation” but retained colloquialisms and deliberately idiosyncratic spellings (42–43). Love for Money more than satisfies the goals of the series: to illustrate “the richness and diversity of Restoration drama” and showcase “dramatic texts that have not attracted much critical attention but display the most popular generic formulas of the time and introduce a wide array of suggestive topics.”1The well-written introduction unpacks how Thomas Durfey reconceptualized established comic formulas for a post-1688 Whiggish outlook. The appetitive rake and the romantic beau now serve the nascent sentimentalism of 1691. Rather than bedding half of London, the libertine Jack Amorous is so besotted with his mistress that he fails to see her unfaithfulness. Rather than hunting for a fortune, the beau Will Merriton despairs at the revelation of his beloved Mirtilla’s considerable estate since the “dross of gilded luxury ne’er can equal the glittering ore of our sublime contentment” (167 (4.2.104–5)). Also serving exemplary ends are the avaricious oldsters who teach by negative precept. Jack’s uncle, Sir Rowland Rakehell, not only drains his nephew’s estate but also swindles the infant orphan entrusted to his care out of three thousand pounds annually. Even worse, he believes that he succeeded in selling her into slavery in the Indies. Nearly as repugnant is Old Zachary Bragg, the father of Ned, a sharper kept by Lady Addleplot. He blackmails his son for money, steals his possessions, threatens him with violence, and humiliates him at every turn. The women are little better. Lady Addleplot cuckolds her husband with Young Bragg, plots against the new Whig regime, and abandons her daughter to the educationally dubious boarding school of the play’s title (likely inspired by Durfey’s brief employment at Josias Priest’s school in Chelsea). Betty Jiltall fleeces Jack Amorous, her keeper, while attempting to shake down additional funds from Monsieur Le Prate, the French fop mouthing patriotic encomiums to Louis XIV.Durfey’s sentimental comedy of 1691 is a far cry from the winking libertinism of George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676) or Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677). The bad characters—and Love for Money brims with them—are truly repellant. If their actions cannot dissuade spectators from debauchery, then their eventual comeuppance drives home that vice does not pay, especially the quest of “love for money.” Fortunately, Durfey’s dramaturgic instincts leaven the occasional descent into heavy-handed moralizing: the baddies, while repugnant, are very funny indeed. For his comic and romantic characters, Durfey drew, as the excellent stage history discloses, on the United Company’s considerable stable of talent: William Mountfort, Charlotte Butler, Anne Bracegirdle, and (cross-dressed as Lady Addleplot) the inimitable comedian Anthony Leigh. Well costumed and, according to the prompter, John Downes, “justly Acted,” the comedy “took well” with spectators (33). Revived well into the eighteenth century, Love for Money continued to be a crowd-pleasing vehicle.Among the “suggestive topics” explored in the introduction are the cataclysmic social changes that occurred over the four decades of Durfey’s career. Aside from John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell, no one else in the period was as long-lived or productive as Durfey, and, like many, he trimmed his politics and his plays to suit the times. The editors separate these respective strands in their close reading of Love for Money, whereas a thoroughgoing cultural analysis might have better illuminated the more singular aspects of the play. The details here are striking, such as Durfey’s choice of Chelsea for the setting, the allusions to slavery and the Indies, and Sir Roland Rakehell’s savage attacks against Christianity (apparently not censored). None of these are addressed, nor is the exoticism of Young Bragg’s various yarns, ranging from his family’s putative Arabian and African origins to his service in helping the Holy League recapture Budapest from the Turks in 1686 (135). Especially surprising is the lack of discussion of “the Indies”—not even glossed—and the slave trade, an omission even more striking given recent scholarly interest in these topics.Page constraints invariably force editors to make choices, and an introduction to a critical edition will not encompass the same scope as a monograph. Clearly, an introduction to a critical edition will not have the same scope as a monograph. Other improvements, however, could have been more easily implemented. Future editions in the series need more thoroughgoing annotations, especially given that these plays are aimed at a “wide reading public” (42). Among readers, only specialists will recognize words such as “tope” (1.1.180), “stiver” (1.1.445), “canting” (2.1.59), “mundify” (2.1.246) “tallowed” (2.1.282), or “buck-basket” (2.2.46). Additionally, interspersing textual variants among the glosses forces readers to pick through a crowded lower page. Perhaps future editions could move the variants—admittedly of little interest to most general readers—to an appendix? The selection of texts used for explanatory notes is sometimes idiosyncratic. Why, for instance, did the editors cite the 1749 Thomas Newton edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost rather than the Restoration editions of 1667 or 1674—the ones to which Durfey would presumably have had access (and available at Early English Books Online)?2 These are, of course, picayune flaws in an otherwise very good critical edition, and one hopes that Peter Lang will publish many more in the future.