SOURCE: Holland, Peter. “Durfey's Revisions of The Richmond Heiress.” Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 216 (1979): 116-20.

[In the following essay, Holland notes that a revised version of Durfey's The Richmond Heiress, one that eliminated much of the satirical force of the original, demonstrates the diminishing appeal of satiric comedy in the 1690s.]

Thomas Durfey's The Richmond Heiress was first performed in April 1693; it was not a success. Dryden wrote to Walsh on 9 May:

Durfey has brought another farce upon the Stage: but his luck left him: it was suffered but foure dayes; and then kickd off for ever. Yet his Second Act, was wonderfully diverting; … The rest was woefull stuff, & concluded with Catcalls; of which the noble Dukes of Richmond and St Albans were chief managers …¹

Normally the play would have been expected to have sunk for ever but Durfey, whose opinion of his own merits was high, was not to be put out. In the November issue of The Gentleman's Journal, Motteux noted

Mr. Durfey's Richmond Heiress has been Revis'd, and Acted several times, with Alterations and Amendments.

(p. 374)

An apparently unique copy of the second edition of The Richmond Heiress in the library of King's College Cambridge gives evidence of Durfey's revised version of the play for the November revival. The book was in the library of Boris Ord and was left to King's on his death in 1962; it now forms a part of the Keynes collection (shelf-mark Keynes C.8.70A).

The title-page reads as follows:

THE / Richmond Heiress: / OR, A / Woman Once in the Right. / A COMEDY, / As it is now Acted / At the THEATRE ROYAL, / By Their Majesties Servants. / Newly Revis'd with Alterations and Amendments. / (Rule) / The Second Edition. / (Rule) / Written by Mr. DURFEY / (Rule) LONDON, / Printed for Samuel Briscoe, over against Will's Coffee-House / in Covent-Garden. 1694.

The text has a complex collation, primarily due to the attempt of the publisher to use as many as possible of the available printed sheets of the first edition, adding the new material in a series of cancels: A⁴ [-A1, ±A2], B⁴, C⁴ [±C2:3,4], D⁴, E⁴ [lacks E1,2], F⁴ [lacks F4], G⁴ [±G3], H⁴ [-H4] I⁴ [±I1, I1 + χ1, I2 + χ2]. The pagination is madly inaccurate. The volume lacks three leaves (E1, E2, F4) and is something of a bibliographical nightmare.

Three of the changes from the first quarto (1693) had been made in a copy of Q1 now in the Huntington Library (shelf-mark 123058); this copy contains the cancellans G3 and the additional leaves χ1 and χ2, the latter being bound out of place following A3². The second edition was never advertised in the Term Catalogues nor entered in the Stationers' Register. It seems likely that the text was set with the help of the theatre prompt-book. On one unrevised but reset page (H1a), there is a new marginal direction: ‘[Sir Charles. T. Romance, Shink. Guiak. Constable’. This is placed a few lines above the entrance for these characters and is clearly a prompter's call marking. It is probable that, for this page at least, the printer used the theatre prompt-book.

What of the changes to the play itself? The largest single change was Durfey's elimination of two characters, Dick Stockjobb and his wife, and their sublot. Dick Stockjobb is fondly uxorious, a happy man who does not realise that he is made a cuckold by his wife, ‘a trim, gay Coquette, yet pretending to Religion and Good-breeding’ (Q1 A2b). Mrs. Stockjobb meanwhile gives up her lover, Hotspur, and takes up with Tom Romance, ‘a young, vain, fluttering, lying Fellow’ (Q1 A2b). In a thoroughly conventional scene, borrowed from Dryden's The Kind Keeper (1680), Mrs. Stockjobb and Tom Romance make love offstage while her husband guards the door, resisting Hotspur's attempts to enter. In the end Hotspur does succeed in disillusioning the cuckold and discomfiting Mrs. Stockjobb. So far the subplot seems a mundane and conventional piece of anti-cit comedy and one is not sorry to see it go. But the subplot is also marked by an extraordinary venom against stockjobbing. Stockjobb himself is not simply a speculator but also ‘against the Government’ (Q1, A2b). The entire sordid plot is couched in a repeated trade metaphor: as Stockjobb guards his wife and her lover, Hotspur points out ‘There's the Trade going forward too, this is Stockjobbing with a Vengeance’ (p. 35); at the end, Hotspur mocks Mrs. Stockjobb, ‘I think I have spoyl'd your Market pretty well here’ (p. 56). Durfey in this satire is following the example of Shadwell. Shadwell's last play, The Volunteers (Drury Lane, November 1692), was subtitled The Stock-Jobbers and has one brief scene showing the stockjobbers at work. But Durfey's satire also has an intricate connection with the main plot of The Richmond Heiress, where money is the sole force that moves a man to marry. The play ends in a pattern of frustration and irresolution; there are no marriages at all. It is ironic then that Dick Stockjobb, the traditional foolish cit, should be almost the only character to be even marginally better off.

Why does Durfey cut the Stockjobbs? One reason was certainly to shorten the play. In the dedication to Q1 Durfey wrote of the success of the songs and dances (the part that Dryden approved of) but he added,

this had its Inconvenience by lengthening the whole Piece a little beyond the common time of Action, which at this time o'th Year I am sensible is a very great Fault, yet the worst of malice has granted me this, that there appeared no defect of Genius, whatever there might of Judgment.

(A2a)

The elimination of the Stockjobbs does save perhaps fifteen minutes in performance, even though some of their scenes are replaced by new material. Durfey may also have decided on cutting this particular part of the play because of the decidedly old-fashioned nature of the Stockjobb plot: cuckolding plays were definitely not in fashion in the 1690s. I wonder whether there might not also have been some pressure from the city. Shadwell's play, completed even though first performed after his death, has only the single brief scene to justify the subtitle fully, even though the Hackwells embody trade at its worst. Could the satire have been restrained by the nature of the theatre audience?

Though the Stockjobbs are eliminated, Durfey had to rewrite some of the scenes in which they had appeared with others. In Act II, for instance, Mrs. Squeamish is given many of Mrs. Stockjobb's lines without her French accent; at the end of the same scene, the characters exit separately and not to dinner at Stockjobb's house (Q1 p. 16). In Act III, Stockjobb's attempt to pacify Sir Quibble Quere, who has been insulted at dinner, is given to a footman, though whose footman he is and what the occasion for the insult was it is impossible to tell. Such pieces of rough cobbling in the revision are perhaps inevitable. More striking is the increased prominence given to the affair between Mrs. Squeamish and Shenkin, the welsh fop. They now have a brief scene of love on their own at the opening of Act IV, complete with a Welsh Song to a harp. Mrs. Squeamish protests at Shenkin's advances but, in traditional style, she comments as she runs off ‘I hope he is not such a Fool to take me at my word—’ (Q2 p²33 = F3a).

Without the citizen focus for his satire, Durfey turns more strongly on other targets in Q2. Perhaps the most significant is the change that comes over the character of Hotspur. Aptly named in Q1, Hotspur is ‘a rash, hot-headed, quarrelsom Fellow’ (Q1 A2b). He is obsessively and uncontrollably infatuated with Mrs. Stockjobb, even though he despises himself for it; much of his venom in the display of Stockjobb's cuckoldom stems from his anger at being replaced in Mrs. Stockjobb's affections. In the revised version such motivation has gone. Instead his anger is now less controlled because totally unreasonable. Deprived of a lover, his actions now appear more malicious and spiteful. In addition he is now far more emphatically mercenary. Overhearing Tom Romance's plan to send a letter to Sophronia, he rushes off to tell Tom's father, hoping thereby to help his friend Frederick who has designs on Sophronia himself; Tom, worried, rushes after him to bribe him to silence, ‘I know the Rogue is poor, and that's the only hope I have left’ (Q2 p. 32). The surprising thing is that Tom succeeds in his bribery, with a promise of £ 500 payable after Tom's wedding (Q2 p. 45). There is a trace of this action in Q1 (pp. 55-56) but it is rapidly passed over. There is no longer anything attractive about Hotspur. Nor does Durfey leave Tom Romance a shred of dignity. In Q1 he had been a fool; in Q2 he is callous as well. Tom now looks forward to his father's death with a viciousness like that of Dauphine in Jonson's Epicoene: ‘Lord, Lord, will he never die I wonder, I have been endeavouring to break his Heart this Ten Years, and, on my Conscience, I think he lives the longer for't’ (Q2 p. 45). In these two changes Durfey increases the fierceness of his satire on the hero of contemporary comedy; all are corrupt in this world of fortune-hunting and self-centred self-love.

In that part of the play in which the Stockjobbs had never impinged there are only two major changes. Durfey adds a short scene between Tom Romance and Sophronia at the opening of the last act. The scene gives Sophronia yet another chance to prove that her vicious taunting warrants her title of the ‘Female plain-dealer’ (Q1 A2b). Earlier in the play however Durfey chooses to rewrite the crucial confrontation between Sophronia and Fulvia, the Richmond heiress of the title. Sophronia is anxious to disillusion Fulvia of her belief in Frederick's true love and constancy, especially since Frederick had once been engaged to her. In Q1 the dialogue is aggressive and rude: Fulvia and Sophronia each taunt the other with motives of envy, lust and avarice, in fact anything that comes to mind. In this shifting world of appearances the only motive that anyone could believe would be self-interest; as Sophronia puts it and Fulvia is eventually forced to concur,

Love may seem great, that in its self is small;
Looks cover thoughts and interest governs all

(Q1 p. 52)

Fulvia is finally convinced in a later scene; this dialogue can only end with her being unsure and demanding further proof. The crucial point of this scene in Q1 is the aggression between the two women. Comedy in the Restoration had depended on the alliance of the two young women against the hostile world, at least from the time of Ariana and Gatty in Etherege's She Would If She Could (1668). Durfey upsets the pattern, by showing how, in a vicious world, the ‘natural’, conventional sympathy of the women turns into envious malice, likewise governed by self-interest or, at least, afraid of such a controlling emotion. It is disappointing to find that this scene has been revised for the worse in Q2. Instead of the violent argument, Durfey gave his audience a conventional scene: Sophronia gives thumbnail profiles of her past suitors, amongst whom Frederick's name appears; Fulvia is surprised but has no reason to suspect Sophronia of lying. The list is an old and tired device; yet the fact that Durfey felt it necessary to revise the scene indicates how sharp and how disturbing the departure from convention must have appeared in Q1.

We are slowly learning to appreciate the importance of the comedies of the early 1690s in the development of a second period of satiric comedy after 1660. The Richmond Heiress appeared two years after Southerne's brilliant satire The Wives Excuse (Drury Lane, December 1691) and like Southerne Durfey ends his play in frustrated irresolution. There is nothing sentimental about Fulvia's decision in the face of the evidence of universal corruption: ‘Since such a general defect of honesty corrupts the Age, I'll no more trust Mankind, but lay my Fortune out upon my self …’ (p. 63). Yet satire was not really very popular and, in revising the play, the satire is diminished. As Dryden knew, it was not the satire but the songs that the audience would find ‘diverting’. Popular taste is a notoriously difficult entity to define but the transition from the unpopularity of the first version of The Richmond Heiress to the relative popularity of the revised version provides a clear example of a second-rate writer's attempt to please his audience. As Edward Ravenscroft found, satire was not the answer:

To day the tyr'd Satyr takes his rest,
And has at last himself a Fool confest:
In vain is all his Malice, or his Art,
He jerks, you grin, and damn him when you smart(3).

Notes

1. John Dryden The Letters ed. C. E. Ward (Durham, N. C., 1942) pp. 52-53.

2. This copy was described by R. A. Biswanger in his useful article ‘Thomas D'Urfey's Richmond Heiress (1693): A Bibliographical Study’ Studies in Bibliography 5.1952-53.169-178. Biswanger misinterpreted χ1 in the Huntington copy as a cancel I1 but, as the King's copy shows, he was misled by the fact that the Huntington copy lacks leaf I1, producing a meaninglessly abrupt ending in the middle of the previous scene.

3. E. Ravenscroft The Canterbury Guests (1695), Prologue, A1b.