Thomas Durfey's 'Love for Money, or The Boarding School' (1691)

This is the first critical edition of Thomas Durfey's Love for Money, or The Boarding School (1691). The text is fully annotated and the Introduction sheds light on the stage history and text publication. It also discusses the author's revision of dramatic models to align his work with the moral values promoted after the Glorious Revolution.

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.

Autorentext
María José Mora and Manuel J. Gómez-Lara are associate professors of English at the Universidad de Sevilla, Spain. They are members of the Restoration Comedy Project, which aims at reassessing the comic production of this period. They are working on an electronic database, as well as editing long-neglected pieces of this dramatic corpus.

Inhalt

Introduction 1. The author 2. The play 2.1. The beginnings of Durfey's dramatic career 2.2. Love for Money and comedy after the Glorious Revolution 3. Stage history 4. The text