The Works of Aphra Behn, Volume IV

ARGUMENT.

Sir Patient Fancy, a hypochondriacal old alderman, has taken a second wife, Lucia, a young and beautiful woman who, although feigning great affection and the strictest conjugal fidelity, intrigues with a gallant, Charles Wittmore, the only obstacle to their having long since married being mutual poverty. However, the jealousy and uxoriousness of the doting husband give the lovers few opportunities; on one occasion, indeed, as Lady Fancy is entertaining Wittmore in the garden they are surprised by Sir Patient, and she is obliged to pass her visitor off under the name of Fainlove as a suitor to her step-daughter, Isabella, in which rôle he is accepted by Sir Patient. But Isabella has betrothed herself to Lodwick, a son of the pedantic Lady Knowell: whilst Lucretia Knowell loves Leander, the alderman’s nephew, in spite of the fact that she is promised by her mother to Sir Credulous Easy, a bumpkinly knight from Devonshire. Lodwick, who is a close friend of Leander, has been previously known to Sir Credulous, and resolving to trick and befool the coxcomb warmly welcomes him on his arrival in town. He persuades him, in fine, to give a ridiculous serenade, or, rather, a hideous hubbub, of noisy instruments under his mistress’ window. A little before this Lady Knowell with a party of friends has visited Sir Patient, who is her next neighbour, and the loud laughter, talking, singing and foppery so enrage the precise old valetudinarian that he resolves to leave London immediately for his country house, a circumstance which would be fatal to his wife’s amours. Wittmore and she, however, persuade him that he is very ill, and on being shown his face in a looking-glass that magnifies instead of in his ordinary mirror, he imagines that he is suddenly swollen and puffed with disease, and so is led lamenting to bed, leaving the coast clear for the nonce. Isabella, however, has made an assignation with Lodwick at the same time that her stepmother eagerly awaits her own gallant, and in the dark young Knowell is by mistake escorted to Lucia’s chamber, whilst Wittmore encountering Isabella, and thinking her Lady Fancy, proceeds to act so amorously that the error is soon discovered and the girl flies from his ardour. In her hurry, however, she rushes blundering into Lucia’s bedchamber, where she finds Knowell. It is just at this moment that Sir Credulous Easy’s deafening fanfare re-echoes in the street, and Sir Patient, awakened and half-stunned by the pandemonium, is led grouty and bawling into his wife’s room, where he discovers Knowell, whom Lucia has all this time taken for Wittmore; but her obvious confusion and dismay thereon are such that Sir Patient does not suspect the real happenings, which she glozes over with a tale concerning Isabella. Meantime the serenaders are dispersed and routed by a band of the alderman’s servants and clerks. Sir Credulous courting Lucretia, who loathes him, meets Knowell bringing a tale of a jealous rival able to poison at a distance by means of some strangely subtle venom, upon which the Devonshire knight conceals himself in a basket, hoping to be conveyed away to his old uncle in Essex, whereas he is merely transported next door. Sir Patient, who surprises his lady writing a love-letter, which she turns off by appending Isabella’s name thereto, is so overwhelmed with her seeming affection and care for his family that he presents her with eight thousand pounds in gold and silver, and resolves to marry his daughter to Fainlove (Wittmore) without any further delay. But whilst he is gone down to prayers and Lucia is entertaining her lover, the old nurse informs him that his little daughter Fanny has long been privy to an intrigue between Knowell and Isabella, whereupon, in great perturbation, he rushes upstairs again to consult with his wife, who hurries Wittmore under the bed. Sir Patient, however, warmed with cordials which he quaffs to revive his drooping spirits, does not offer to quit the chamber, but lies down on the bed, and the gallant is only enabled to slip out unobserved after several accidents each of which nearly betrays his presence. Upon the marriage morning Isabella in a private interview rejects her pseudo-suitor with scorn and contumely, whereat Knowell, who has of intent been listening, reveals to her that it is his friend Wittmore and no real lover who is seemingly courting her, and with his help, whilst Sir Patient is occupied with a consultation of doctors (amongst whom Sir Credulous appears disguised as a learned member of the faculty), Isabella and Knowell are securely married. Lady Knowell, who has feigned a liking for Leander, generously gives him to Lucretia, Sir Patient’s attention being still engrossed by the physicians who assemble in great force. Soon after, at Leander’s instigation, in order to test his wife, Sir Patient feigns to be dead of a sudden apoplexy, and for a few moments, whilst others are present, Lucia laments him with many plaints and tears, but immediately changes when she is left alone with Wittmore. The lovers’ plans, however, are overheard by the husband, who promptly confronts his wife with her duplicity. Amazed and confounded indeed, he forgives Leander and his daughter for marrying contrary to his former wishes; and when Lucia coolly announces her intention to play the hypocrite and puritan no more, but simply to enjoy herself with the moneys he has settled on her without let or proviso, he humorously declares he will for his part also drop the prig and canter, and turn town gallant and spark.

SOURCE.

In spite of Mrs. Behn’s placid assertion in her address ‘To the Reader’ that she has only taken ‘but a very bare hint’ from a foreign source, Le Malade Imaginaire, the critics who cried out that Sir Patient Fancy ‘was made out of at least four French plays’ are patently right. Sir Patient is, of course, Argan throughout and in detail; moreover, in the scene where the old alderman feigns death, there is very copious and obvious borrowing from Act iii of Le Malade Imaginaire. Some of the doctors’ lingo also comes from the third and final interlude of Molière’s comedy, whilst the idea of the medical consultation is pilfered from L’Amour Médecin, Act ii, II. Sir Credulous Easy is Monsieur de Porceaugnac, but his first entrance is taken wholesale from Brome’s The Damoiselle; or, The New Ordinary (8vo, 1653), Act ii, I, where Amphilus and Trebasco discourse exactly as do Curry and his master. The pedantic Lady Knowell is a mixture of Philaminte and Bélise from Les Femmes Savantes. The circumstance in Act iv, II, when Lucia, to deceive her husband, appends Isabella’s name to the love-letter she has herself just written, had already been used by Wycherley at the commencement of Act v of that masterpiece of comedy, The Country Wife (4to, 1675, produced in 1672), where Mrs. Pinchwife, by writing ‘your slighted Alithea’ as the subscription of a letter, completely befools her churlish spouse.

Molière’s comedies, which were so largely conveyed in Sir Patient Fancy, have been a gold mine for many of our dramatists. From Le Malade Imaginaire Miller took his Mother-in-Law; or, The Doctor the Disease, produced at the Haymarket, 12 February, 1734, and Isaac Bickerstaffe, Dr. Last in his Chariot, produced at the same theatre 25 August, 1769. In this farce Bickerstaffe further introduces the famous consultation scene from L’Amour Médecin, a play which had been made use of by Lacy, The Dumb Lady; or, The Farrier made a Physician (1672); by Owen Swiney, The Quacks; or, Love’s the Physician, produced at Drury Lane, 18 March, 1705; by Miller, Art and Nature, produced at the same theatre 16 February, 1738; and in an anonymous one act piece, which is little more than a bare translation under the title Love is the Doctor, performed once only at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 4 April, 1734.

Monsieur de Pourceaugnac supplied Ravenscroft with material no less than three times. In Mamamouchi; or, The Citizen turn’d Gentleman, acted early in 1672, we have Sir Simon Softhead, who is Pourceaugnac in detail; in The Careless Lovers, produced at the Duke’s House in 1673, and again in The Canterbury Guests; or, A Bargain Broken, played at the Theatre Royal in 1694, we have in extenso Act ii, Scenes VIII, IX, X, of the French comedy. Crowne’s Sir Mannerley Shallow (The Country Wit, 1675) comes from the same source. Squire Trelooby, produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 20 March, 1704, and revived as The Cornish Squire at Drury Lane, 3 January, 1734, is ascribed to Vanbrugh, Congreve, and Walsh; but this, as well as a farce produced at Dublin in 1720 by Charles Shadwell and entitled The Plotting Lovers; or, The Dismal Squire, cannot claim to be anything but translations. Miller’s Mother-in-Law, again, includes much of Monsieur de Pourceaugnac; and Thomas Sheridan’s Captain O’Blunder; or, The Brave Irishman, produced at Goodman’s Fields, 31 January, 1746, is a poor adaptation. Mrs. Parsons abbreviated Molière to The Intrigues of a Morning, played at Covent Garden, 18 April, 1792, a jejune effort. Les Femmes Savantes was rather racily transformed by Thomas Wright into The Female Virtuosoes, and produced at Drury Lane in 1693. It was revived as No Fools like Wits at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 10 January, 1721, to anticipate Cibber’s The Refusal; or, The Ladies’ Philosophy, which had a run of six nights. Miller, in his The Man of Taste, once more had resource to Molière. His play was produced at Drury Lane, 6 March, 1735. It has no value.

Of all these borrowers Mrs. Behn is infinitely the best. Sir Patient Fancy is, indeed, an excellent comedy, and had she used more leisure might have been improved to become quite first rate. Perhaps she plagiarized so largely owing to the haste with which her play was written and staged, but yet everything she touched has been invested with an irresistible humour. A glaring example of her hurry remains in the fact that the ‘precise clerk’ of Sir Patient has a double nomenclature. In Act iii he appears as Abel; in Act iv, III, he is referred to as Bartholomew, and under this last name has an exit marked in Act v. This character is only on the stage twice and is given but some three or four lines to speak. Obviously, when writing her fourth act, Aphra forgot she had already christened him.

THEATRICAL HISTORY.

Sir Patient Fancy was produced at the Duke’s Theatre, Dorset Garden, in January, 1678, with an exceptionally strong cast which included both Betterton and his wife. It met with the great success it fully deserved. The critics, indeed, were not slow to detect Mrs. Behn’s plagiarisms, but the only real opposition was negligible disapproval of a modest clique, who a few years later vainly tried to damn The Lucky Chance. After the death of the two famous comedians Antony Leigh and James Nokes in December, 1692, Sir Patient Fancy, owing to the inability of succeeding actors to sustain the two rôles, Sir Patient and Sir Credulous, which had been created by this gifted pair, completely dropped out of the repertory of the theatre. It was not singular in its fate, for Cibber expressly tells us that D’Urfey’s excellent comedy The Fond Husband, and Crowne’s satirical City Politics, ‘lived only by the extraordinary performance of Nokes and Leigh.’