Grains of Allowance: Liberty, Toleration, and Justice in George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer

Abstract

This article examines the representation of the justices of the peace in George Farquhar’s 1706 play The Recruiting Officer. I place this play in the context of Farquhar’s work of literary criticism, “A Discourse Upon Comedy” (1701), in which he claims “Liberty and Toleration” as guiding principles for his home-grown, anti-Aristotelian aesthetic. The political, legal, and theatrical history surrounding the 1688 English revolution and its aftermath frames my examination of the justices’ position at the intersection of local and national legal procedures. The Recruiting Officer interrogates the justice of the peace’s role in recruiting and conscription during the War of Spanish Succession. Justices of the peace in The Recruiting Officer, I argue, enable inquiry into liberty and toleration’s limits and costs in their use of discretionary power and informal mediation. The situational and empirical legal judgments of Farquhar’s justices render a pattern for moral judgments allowing for a temporary and tame personal license—“grains of allowance”—relative to cynical Restoration rakishness. Legal and quasi-legal relationships drive the plotlines of The Recruiting Officer—whether in representing recruiters empowered to enlist men, local justices’ roles in military conscription, contractual aspects of the marriage bond, or extramarital encounters, real and imagined. Farquhar uses the justices’ characters to suggest that the balances of power at home, in the community, in the government, and in the global theaters of war are all interlinked, mutually sustaining, and prone to destabilization. I maintain that the play invites critique of the law, the military, and marriage, but avoids, in its fundamental optimism and good humor, a trenchant satire on any of these institutions.