Authors

Irish · 1677–1707

George Farquhar

George Farquhar was an Irish Restoration playwright whose final two comedies — The Recruiting Officer (1706) and The Beaux' Stratagem (1707) — are among the most theatrically alive works in the English comic tradition. He wrote The Beaux' Stratagem while dying of illness and poverty at thirty; it was completed weeks before his death. His comedies move the action out of London drawing rooms to country inns and recruiting parties, giving English comedy a new social and geographical range.