George Farquhar

David Roberts is Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Dean of the Arts and Media at Birmingham City University, UK. Recent books include Thomas Betterton (2010), The Library of a Seventeenth-Century Actor (2012), Restoration Plays and Players (2014), and Games for English Literature (2016), co-authored with Izabela Hopkins. Articles in major journals including Shakespeare Quarterly, ELH, New Theatre Quarterly, and The Times Literary Supplement. My biography of Betterton was shortlisted for the American Library Association Theatre Book Prize and longlisted for the Society for Theatre Research Book Prize.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: A Brief Life Forwards 1. A Life Reversed 2. 1709: A Widow’s Pension 3. 1707: Death-Bed Comedy 4. 1706: Military Comedy 5. 1704: In the Army 6. 1701: Moral George 7. 1700: The Irishman Abroad 8. 1698: Narratives of Arrival 9. 1696: Dear Bob 10. 1690: Farquhar Family History Notes Bibliography Index

This captivating biography, full of previously undiscovered material, tells the story of Restoration playwright George Farquhar in reverse: from his death in poverty, through the success of The Beaux Stratagem and A Recruiting Officer, and ending with his birth in Londonderry. Essential reading not only for those interested in Farquhar or eighteenth-century theatre, but also in the literature of the dispossessed, George Farquhar: a Migrant Life Reversed is the first study to combine elegant readings of Farquhar’s plays with migrancy criticism. Farquhar, it shows, was not just one of the most charming, funny and elusive of Restoration playwrights; he was also more acutely aware of cultural dislocation, and hence more modern, than any other writer of the period.