Thomas d'Urfey

Thomas d'Urfey (26 February 1723) was an English writer and playwright. He wrote plays, songs, jokes, and poems. He was an important innovator and contributor in the evolution of the ballad opera.

Life D'Urfey was born in Devonshire and began his professional life as a scrivener, but quickly turned to the theatre. In personality, he was considered so affable and amusing that he could make friends with nearly everyone, including such disparate characters as Charles II of England and his brother James II, and in all layers of society.

D'Urfey lived in an age of self-conscious elitism and anti-egalitarianism, a reaction against the "levelling" tendencies of the previous Puritan reign during the Interregnum. D'Urfey participated in the Restoration's dominant atmosphere of social climbing: he claimed to be of French Huguenot descent, though he might not have been; and he added an apostrophe to the plain English name Durfey when he was in his 30s. He wrote 500 songs, and 32 plays, starting with The Siege of Memphis, or the Ambitious Queen in 1676. This first play was a failure, but he responded in the following year (1677) with a comedy, Madam Fickle, which proved more successful.

His plays include A Fond Husband (1676), The Virtuous Wife (1680), and Wonders in the Sun, or, The Kingdom of the Birds (1706). In 1698 he wrote The Campaigners as a reply and satire of Jeremy Collier's anti-theatrical scourges. When it was performed Mary Lindsey took the part of the nurse although her major contribution was to sing a comedic ballad. His multi-volume Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy, written between 1698 and 1720, is a collection of songs and ballads. d'Urfey's play The Injured Princess is an adaptation of Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Durfey wrote widely in a witty, satirical vein, usually from a courtly point of view, and his works are a compendium of comedic ideas with brisk, complicated plots carried out in lively dialogue.

His songs, which were often introduced into his plays, The Campaigners (1698) The Bath (1701) The Old Mode and the New (1703)