George Farquhar - Works Referencing Farquhar

Works Referencing Farquhar

• The 1987 play, Our Country's Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker, revolves around the story of 18th century Australian convicts attempting to put on Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer. Wertenbaker's play is based on a novel by Thomas Keneally.
• Bertolt Brecht set his adaptation of The Recruiting Officer, called Pauken und Trompeten, in America during the Civil War.
• In Act III of She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith, Kate Hardcastle asks her maid, "Tell me, Pimple, how do you like my present dress? Don't you think I look something like Cherry in the Beaux Stratagem?" A theatrical notice in the New York Times for February 7, 1885 remarked that at that date Goldsmith's allusion was "all that the stage known of George Farquhar for many a year."
• Alexander Pope famously refers to the playwright in "The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated," where he comments (line 288), "What pert low Dialogue has Farqu'ar writ!" (It has been argued that this is not an attack by Pope on Farquhar, but an illustration of "how seldom ev'n the best succeed" two lines earlier.)