The Recruiting Officer
Recruiting Officer, The,a comedy by Farquhar , produced 1706 .
It deals with the humours of recruiting in a country town, with a vividness suggesting that the author drew on his own experience. The plot is slender; it presents Captain Plume making love to the women in order to secure their followers as recruits; Kite, his resourceful sergeant, employing his wiles and assuming the character of an astrologer, for the same purpose; while Sylvia, daughter of Justice Ballance, who is in love with Plume but has promised not to marry him without her father's consent, runs away from home disguised as a man, gets herself arrested for scandalous conduct, is brought before her father, and delivered over by him to Captain Plume , as a recruit. Captain Brazen , a rival recruiting officer, who boasts of battles and friends in every quarter of the globe, endeavours to marry the rich Melinda, but finds himself fobbed off with her maid.
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