The Soldier's Fortune by Thomas Otway

First published: 1681

Type of work: Drama

Type of plot: Comedy of intrigue

Time of work: c. 1680

Locale: London

Principal Characters:

• Captain Beaugard, a military officer out of service
• Lady Dunce, in love with Beaugard
• Sir Davy Dunce, her elderly husband
• Courtine, Beaugard’s friend and companion
• Sylvia, Sir Davy Dunce’s niece
• Sir Jolly Jumble, an old rake turned pimp, a neighbor of the Dunces

Critique:

Restoration comedy, clearly and openly written to entertain and to create laughter, was intended chiefly for the corrupt courtiers of the time who patronized the London stage. As a result the comedy was witty, cynical, often crude, and by most standards immoral. Thomas Otway’s THE SOLDIER’S FORTUNE is more or less a typical example. While some of the comic effect is that of the comedy of manners, much of the comedy depends on grossness, sex, and even the absurd for its humor. The characters are stock figures found again and again in Restoration drama: the elderly cuckold, the young wife, the disbanded officer, the loyal and shrewd servant, the male bawd, the young female who despises both men and marriage for a time. It should be noted, however, that the vague military background of Beaugard and Courtine is usually credited to Thomas Otway’s own military service on the Continent during the 1670’s.

The Story:

Captain Beaugard and Courtine, his companion-in-arms, returned to England from Flanders after a military campaign in the Low Countries. On their arrival they found themselves short of funds, for they had been paid in debentures which they had cashed at a discount. While they were bewailing their low state of affairs, Beaugard received a handful of gold pieces in exchange for his picture. Sir Jolly Jumble, an aged rake turned bawd, had brought him the money, saying that a fine and beautiful woman had arranged with him to get the picture for her because she was highly enamored of Beaugard. The woman was Lady Dunce, whose name at the time meant nothing to Beaugard. She had been in love with him a long time; however, when he went off to the wars she despaired of ever marrying him and finally accepted the suit of Sir Davy Dunce, a tobacco-chewing, onion-eating man of about sixty-five, not at all to the taste of a young and beautiful woman in spite of the size of his fortune.

Like most marriages so arranged, this one had proved a poor match. Sir Davy Dunce was an exceedingly jealous husband and fearful that he should be made a cuckold. His wife, still in love with Beaugard, disliked her husband and welcomed a chance to have an affair with the military gallant. With Sir Davy and Lady Dunce lived their niece Sylvia, who disliked the idea of marriage because of her observations of her aunt’s plight. Next door to the Dunces lived Sir Jolly Jumble, an elderly rake who was only too glad to assist Lady Dunce in her amorous adventure, for Sir Jolly still enjoyed vicariously what he could not enjoy at first-hand.

Lady Dunce, deciding to use her rather thick-witted husband to further her own designs, gave him Beaugard’s picture and told him the gallant had been paying her unwelcome attentions. By sending her husband to return the picture and give Beaugard a message, she hoped he would further her designs and at the same time be convinced of her virtuous intentions. Sir Davy Dunce did exactly as his wife directed, but at first Beaugard did not comprehend the double meaning in the message that Sir Davy Dunce delivered. Misunderstanding, Beaugard thought he had been jilted by a woman who had made overtures of her own to him. In hope of revenge, Beaugard dispatched his servant to play some rascally trick upon Sir Davy. Meanwhile, Courtine had met Sylvia, but when he began to court her the young woman rejected his advances and treated him scornfully.

While Beaugard and Courtine were commiserating each other over their trials and misfortunes, Lady Dunce appeared. Seeing her, Beaugard realized that she was Clarinda, the girl whom he had loved and who had returned his affections before he went to the wars. Beaugard, hurt because he still supposed himself jilted and refusing to believe that she still loved him or wished to engage in an affair, doubted that she had sent him a ring as a token. He also tried to return the gold pieces she had sent him by Sir Jolly.

Shortly after she had gone, Sir Davy Dunce reappeared; he had forgotten to deliver the ring, which he believed a gift that Beaugard had sent to Lady Dunce. Beaugard, realizing the sincerity of Lady Dunce’s affections for him, played up to Sir Davy Dunce by pretending that he had experienced a change of heart and was now heartily sorry for his attempt to steal the affections of such a virtuous wife. Simple-minded Sir Davy fell into the trap as quickly as he had fallen a victim to his wife’s machinations. While Beaugard talked to Sir Davy, Courtine talked to Sylvia, who promised him a rendezvous on her balcony that night, at Sir Davy’s house near Covent Garden.

Beaugard’s servant went to Sir Davy and pretended that he was a messenger from the Lord Mayor, sent to invite Sir Davy to a dinner and a conference. Sir Davy fell for the ruse and rushed away, only to return unexpectedly and find Lady Dunce and Beaugard in each other’s arms. After Beaugard had fled, Lady Dunce persuaded her husband that Beaugard had forced his attention upon her after breaking into the house. Sir Davy Dunce vowed revenge. He found Beaugard’s servant, whose identity he did not know, and through him hired an assassin to kill Beaugard. Sir Davy hated to part with his money, but finally he himself became so frightened by the assassin that he paid one hundred pounds for the deed. Beaugard’s servant went immediately to his master to report what had happened. Beaugard, the servant, and Sir Jolly Jumble planned to turn the situation to their own account.

Beaugard went to Sir Davy Dunce’s home, where Lady Dunce and Sir Jolly Jumble arranged him to look like a corpse. When Sir Davy Dunce returned, he saw the supposed body and became fearful that he might be implicated in the crime and be hanged as an accomplice. In his fright he was easily persuaded by his wife and Sir Jolly to go off to another part of the house to pray while Lady Dunce tried to resuscitate the corpse in her room. After Sir Davy had gone, his wife and her lover had a long interval to themselves in her apartment. In the meantime Sir Davy prayed and imagined he saw ghosts, devils, and all kinds of evil spirits. Toward morning Sir Jolly Jumble proposed that he and Lady Dunce take the supposed corpse to Jumble’s house next door for further treatment, a plan to which Sir Davy Dunce eagerly agreed.

During the same night Courtine had kept his rendezvous, albeit somewhat drunk, with Sylvia at her balcony. Sylvia tricked him twice. First she left him dangling for a time in a loop of rope midway between the ground and the balcony. Then she had her servants tie him up after he had collapsed from too much drink. When he awakened from his stupor, she chided him unmercifully, but before long they were confessing their love for each other. Sylvia promised to marry Courtine if he would be a faithful, active, and devoted husband to her. He was only too willing to agree.

Once Beaugard’s “body” had been removed to Sir Jolly Jumble’s house, Sir Davy felt more secure. Calling the watch, he told them that a murder had been committed. Then he led them next door, where he expected to find a corpse whose death he could lay to Sir Jolly. When they entered the house, however, they found no dead man. Instead, they discovered an angry Beaugard with his sword in his hand. Beaugard told Sir Davy that the conspiracy to kill him meant that Sir Davy would have to acknowledge his wife as Beaugard’s mistress, an admission the knight was only too glad to make, since conspiring to murder was a capital offense at the time. Courtine and Sylvia arrived to announce their plans to marry. Thus the four young people found happiness in love—Courtine and Sylvia through marriage, Lady Dunce and Beaugard in an acknowledged arrangement that left her free from Sir Davy’s unwanted attentions.

Further Critical Evaluation of the Work:

Otway is best known as the author of VENICE PRESERVED, a steamy tragedy of romance and politics that, despite its defects, stands head-and-shoulders above the mediocre tragic output of the Restoration period (Dryden’s work excepted). As a writer of comedy, however, Otway is considerably outclassed by such contemporaries as Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. Lacking their elegance, subtleties of tone, and rapier wit, Otway takes refuge in broad and often coarse effects. His talent is for low comedy, comedy of situation, not comedy of manners or of character. He focuses on the underside of life, rather than on its falsely glittering surface. Unfortunately, such comedy is difficult to appreciate on the printed page; the success of a farcical work like THE SOLDIER’S FORTUNE depends largely on the skill of the principal comic actors, those playing Sir Jolly Jumble and Sir Davy Dunce.

This is not to say that Otway’s comedy is entirely lacking in wit: there is, for example, the long dialogue between Courtine and Sylvia who discuss their future marriage entirely in agricultural imagery with such statements as: “you shall promise to keep the estate well-fenced, and enclosed, lest sometime or other your neighbor’s cattle break in and spoil the crop on the ground. . . .” But most of the time, the knaves and fools claim center stage. Even Courtine, suspended by a rope under his mistress’ balcony, and then trussed up in a drunken stupor, can hardly be compared to the typical Restoration gentleman-rake.

Otway’s play does convey a far more immediate sense of time and place than other contemporary comedies, whose closed-in world seems limited to the salon, the bed-chamber, the coffee-house, and St. James’s Park. Seldom a scene goes by without some reference to the recent Commonwealth period, the pre-Commonwealth (Rump) Parliament, loyalty to the king, the unsettled state of the nation, foreign wars, and other concerns of the larger world outside. Occasionally, the action stops completely while Beaugard and Courtine discuss (as mouthpieces for Otway) such matters as the undeserved preferment of former rebels, the stings of genteel poverty, or the ungrateful attitude of the nation in peacetime to her savior in time of war, the military. And indeed, only a former soldier could have written Lady Dunce’s vivid speech to Beaugard after the consummation of their love: “What think you now of a cold, wet march over the mountains, your men tired, your baggage not come up, but at night a dirty, watery plain to encamp upon, and nothing to shelter you but an old leager cloak as tattered as your colors?”

If Otway resembles any major Restoration comic dramatist, it is Wycherley, whose cynicism about human behavior and whose sense of degraded humanity is somewhat like his own. In viewing the spectacle of a “beastly, unsavory, old, groaning, grunting, wheezing wretch” who, through a systematic process of deceit and intimidation, is made to serve as whoremaster of his wife, we are forced to acknowledge that the playwright has demonstrated the truth of Courtine’s opening observation that the world is “so thronged and crammed with knaves and fools, that an honest man can hardly get a living in it.”