Thomas Durfey’s «Love for Money, or The Boarding School» (1691)

Thomas Durfey’s Love for Money (1691) uses a boarding school in Chelsea as the setting for an amusing series of love intrigues. Characters include a long-lost heiress and her impoverished suitor, a mercenary jilt, a libertine rake with a touch of the gull, a bragging French coxcomb, and two hoydenish romps courted by fortune-hunting schoolmasters with treats of custard and cheesecake. An imperious plotting lady, together with her henpecked husband and her rascal lover, provide timely anti-Jacobite satire. This critical edition offers a fully annotated text and an introduction that places the comedy in its literary and theatrical context. The editors review Durfey’s career and his redefinition of the comedy of wit, veering towards the exemplary in line with the moral values of the new regime.