This afterpiece, again by Fielding, is a translation-adaptation of Molière’s Le médecin malgré lui. I don’t know the Molière version well enough to give a good comparison, so will just make observations on this text while the memory of it is fresh. The plot is easy to relate: Gregory, a woodman, is forever getting into fights with his wife Dorcas; after being beaten by her husband, Dorcas takes her revenge by persuading two servants out looking for a doctor that Gregory is the best physician in the world, but will only admit it after being beaten. A beating ensues and Gregory finds himself ministering to Charlotte, the daughter of Sir Jasper, who has stopped speaking. Gregory prescribes punch, receives a fee, goes on a roll and gives prescriptions (including one for cheese) to several other patients eager for his attention. Just as he is heading home, he runs into Leander, Charlotte’s secret love, and he reveals that Charlotte has stopped speaking to prevent her forced marriage to Mr Dapper (wealthy, old and ugly – again). Gregory decides to smuggle Leander in to see Charlotte by disguising him as an apothecary. Whilst Leander is changing clothes, Dorcas appears: she receives some of the fees paid to Gregory for his medicines and tells Gregory that she was behind this ruse. Gregory soon spots a chance to pay her back, and has another doctor, one Dr Hellebore, take Dorcas into care as a madwoman. Leander returns, Gregory and he visit Sir Jasper, and Charlotte starts speaking to tell her father she’ll never marry Mr Dapper. Not knowing what to do, Sir Jasper obeys Gregory’s advice to leave Charlotte alone with the apothecary for a while. Dorcas then breaks in (having got free of Hellebore) and explains all. Sir Jasper is furious, but before he can do anything Leander (no longer disguised) and Charlotte return: Leander tells Sir Jasper he has just inherited a lot of money, and Sir Jasper blesses his union with his daughter. Everyone bursts into song and the play ends.

Writing this summary, I’m struck by the amount of retribution dealt out in the course of its two acts. The beating of Dorcas is avenged by the doctor-trick, and the doctor-trick by confinement in a mad house; meanwhile Charlotte pays her father back for his tyranny first by silence then by marriage to another. Yet for all this eye for an eye business – crucial to the play as a source of its slapstick antics – everything turns out right in the end, save for rather a lot of beating. The best violence comes when Sir Jasper’s servants do it to Gregory, all the time apologising and explaining that it’s for the higher good of getting him to come and cure Charlotte: “I ask pardon ten thousand times for what you have forc’d us to” says one, enlivening the farce with politeness.

One larger observation to finish. When Leander first meets Gregory, he explains that Charlotte’s illness isn’t real, and that if he has “any distemper, it is the love of that young lady your patient”. This is, of course, the real theme of the play: Gregory’s antics are the result of problems in his relationship with Dorcas, and everything else turns on love. We never learn the effect of the cheese Gregory prescribes because such results are not important, only the love-plot is. With this in mind, my favourite speech of the play is one spoken by Charlotte, in which she makes explicit the overriding power of love. The speech is all the more powerful for being one of the first times we hear her voice, and just what she has been bottling up.

SIR JASPER You shall have Mr Dapper –
CHARLOTTE No; not in any manner; not in the least, not at all: you throw away your breath; you lose your time: you may confine me, beat me, bruise me, destroy me, kill me; do what you will, use me as you will, but I never will consent; nor all your threats, nor all your blows, nor all your ill-usage, never shall force me to consent. So far from giving him my heart, I never will give him my hand: for he is my aversion; I hate the very sight of him; I had rather see the devil, I had rather touch a toad: you may make me miserable any other way; but with him you shan’t, that I’m resolved.