A Joke in The Recruiting Officer

60 Fielding clearly privileges the outlook of his masculine author and narrator,andelevates Sophia as an exemplar of receptive, demure femininity, Ms. Gardiner proposes a strained metaphorical reading of the relation between writer/producer/husband and reader/consumer/wife and suggests a far more passive role for the latter than the narrator ’s frequent addresses to his audience indicate. Chapters on Lennox’s The Female Quixote, Sarah Fielding and Collier’s The Cry, and Austen’s Mansfield Park examine these writers’ redefinition of the boundaries between public and private authority in an effort to create a position of power for female critics. Overall, Ms. Gardiner’s readings are provocative, well crafted, and original. She shrewdly describes how The Female Quixote exposes male authors’ anxiety over the disruption of gendered hierarchies (and the prospect of professional competition) offered by female readers and writers of romance; yet in the novel, Lennox validates her right to engage in the business of criticism by showing her ability to dispel romance and reform those characters enthralled by it. Ms. Gardiner goes on to claim thatFielding and Collier’s The Cry more radically demands a space for female critics in maintaining that acts of love, friendship, and generosity—the cultivation of affectional ties that was the moral duty of domestic women—form the basis of proper reading and evaluation as well. Finally, she argues that Mansfield Park’s challenge to the dominance of gentlemen in matters of morality and taste emerges from the confines of domesticity itself: for both Austen and her heroine Fanny Price, home provided a sanctuary in which to develop the kind of independent thought and interpretive skills that allowed them to read ‘‘outside of the law given by socially authorized professionals and intellectuals.’’ Ms. Gardiner succeeds completely in dismantling the ‘‘binary canon’’ of male and female writers. Regulating Readers does not isolate women in a separate tradition, but demonstrates the remarkable complexity of authors’ struggles to gain authority in an increasingly commercial literary culture. However, the book’s thesis could benefit significantly from a more comprehensive study of criticism: Addison, Steele, and Haywood were not the only periodical writers engaged in the effort to define the occupation of the critic, and as the century progressed, their influencemayhavebeenovershadowed by others (Johnson comes to mind). Moreover, in claiming that women author/critics transgressed patriarchal norms by violating the autonomy of the public and private spheres, Ms. Gardiner oversimplifies the complicated ideological views throughout the century on female writing and reading. Yet overall, Regulating Readers adds a distinctive and wholly new dimension to our understanding of fiction’s role in criticism’s long and contentious history. Linda Zionkowski Ohio University A JOKE IN THE RECRUITING OFFICER Peter Dixon Captain Brazen, in George Farquhar’s Recruiting Officer (1706) is, among other things, a reincarnation of the Plautine miles gloriosus, and therefore prompt to ex- 61 aggerate his martial prowess. Falsely claiming to have fought at the battle of Landen, he boasts that he had ‘‘two and twenty Horses kill’d under me that Day.’’ To this evidently tall story Mr. Worthy responds with polite skepticism—‘‘Then, Sir, you rid mighty hard’’—and Mr. Balance with a sly jest: ‘‘Or perhaps, Sir, like my Countryman, you rid upon half a dozen Horses at once.’’1 The perplexed Brazen asks for an explanation of the jibe, but none is forthcoming. The equally perplexed reader has received only one crumb of editorial assistance to date: John Ross’s conjecture that Balance’s ‘‘Countryman’’ may have been the Mr. Evans who performed acrobatic feats on horseback in London theaters and at Southwark Fair between 1703 and 1705.2 To make Evans the butt of the joke is to overlook the improbability of his having ever ridden (as distinct from controlling or driving) six horses at once. Eighteenthcentury performers regularly compassed two or three horses, but audiences had to wait until 1827 for something more spectacular, a circus act devised by Andrew Ducrow (who must have been somewhat above average height) which concluded with his lying across the backs of five horses simultaneously.3 It is therefore improbable that Balance is alluding to the extravagant claims of an actual horse rider...