“The Air We Breathe”: Warfare in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer

Abstract

George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), performed after England’s stunning victory at the Battle of Blenheim (13 August 1704) during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), stages Captain Plume’s efforts to prepare English recruits for warfare. In this essay, I specifically consider Plume’s “Recruiting Airs,” a regime that not only impresses recruits but also recalibrates the feedback loop between climate and England’s physical and social bodies. Indeed, as the eighteenth-century doctor John Arbuthnot codifies, early modern climatic theory posits that the air produces, and, therefore, can alter England’s physical bodies. Plume’s airs permeate the town and deterritorialize Shrewsbury’s villagers. In different ways, the women, Melinda and Sylvia, apprehend the rapid upheavals recruitment causes, but Plume’s alliances with the town’s elite as well as Shrewsbury’s surprising associations with England’s colonial periphery indicate that the penetration of war-making into England’s rural communities is too entrenched to challenge.