Publication Number 25

Los Angeles

William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
University of California
1950

GENERAL EDITORS

H. Richard Archer, Clark Memorial Library
Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
Edward Niles Hooker, University of California, Los Angeles
John Loftis, University of California, Los Angeles

ASSISTANT EDITOR

W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan

ADVISORY EDITORS

Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington
Benjamin Boyce, Duke University
Louis I. BREDVOLD, University of Michigan
CLEANTH BROOKS, Yale University
JAMES L. CLIFFORD, Columbia University
ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago
SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota
ERNEST MOSSNER, University of Texas
JAMES SUTHERLAND, Queen Mary College, London
H.T.  SWEDENBERG, JR., University of California, Los Angeles

INTRODUCTION

In the first decade of the eighteenth century, with comedy in train to be altered out of recognition to please the reformers and the ladies, one of the two talented writers who attempted to keep the comic muse alive in something like her “Restoration” form was Thomas Baker.[1] Of Baker’s four plays which reached the stage, none has been reprinted since the eighteenth century and three exist only as originally published.  Of these three the best is The Fine Lady’s Airs; hence its selection for the Reprints.

Baker’s career in the theatre was as successful as should have been expected by any young man who after his first play attempted to swim against rather than with the current of taste.  His first effort, entitled The Humour of the Age, was produced at D.L. c.  February 1701, and published March 22,[2] the author having then but reached his “Twenty First Year” (Dedication).  It must have been well received, for Baker speaks of “the extraordinary Reception this Rough Draught met with.”  Indeed, it has in it, despite some “satire,” a number of motifs which would recommend it to the audience.  Railton, the antimatrimonialist and libertine of the piece, is given the wittiest lines, but his attempt to seduce Tremilia, a grave Quaker-clad beauty, is frowned on by everyone, including the author; and when the rake attempts to force the lady, Freeman, a man of sense, intervenes with sword drawn and gives him a stern lecture.  In the end, when Tremilia, giving her hand to Freeman, turns out to be an heiress who had assumed the Quaker garb to make sure of getting a disinterested husband, the error of Railton’s ways becomes apparent.  At the same time his cast mistress, whom he had succeeded in marrying off to a ridiculous old Justice, is impressed by Tremilia’s “great Example.”  “How conspicuous a thing is Virtue!” says she, in an aside; and she resolves to make the Justice a model wife.  Despite much wit the play is thus, in its main drift, exemplary.