In spite of Mrs. Behn’s placid assertion in her address ‘To the Reader’ that she has only taken ‘but a very bare hint’ from a foreign source, _Le Malade Imaginaire_, the critics who cried out that _Sir Patient Fancy_ ‘was made out of at least four French plays’ are patently right. Sir Patient is, of course, Argan throughout and in detail; moreover, in the scene where the old alderman feigns death, there is very copious and obvious borrowing from Act III of _Le Malade Imaginaire_. Some of the doctors’ lingo also comes from the third and final interlude of Molière’s comedy, whilst the idea of the medical consultation is pilfered from _L’Amour Médecin_, Act II, ii. Sir Credulous Easy is Monsieur de Porceaugnac, but his first entrance is taken wholesale from Brome’s _The Damoiselle; or, The New Ordinary_ (8vo, 1653), Act II, i, where Amphilus and Trebasco discourse exactly as do Curry and his master. The pedantic Lady Knowell is a mixture of Philaminte and Bélise from _Les Femmes Savantes_. The circumstance in Act IV, ii, when Lucia, to deceive her husband, appends Isabella’s name to the love-letter she has herself just written, had already been used by Wycherley at the commencement of Act V of that masterpiece of comedy, _The Country Wife_ (4to, 1675, produced in 1672), where Mrs. Pinchwife, by writing ‘your slighted Alithea’ as the subscription of a letter, completely befools her churlish spouse.
Molière’s comedies, which were so largely conveyed in _Sir Patient Fancy_, have been a gold mine for many of our dramatists. From _Le Malade Imaginaire_ Miller took his _Mother-in-Law; or, The Doctor the Disease_, produced at the Haymarket, 12 February, 1734, and Isaac Bickerstaffe, _Dr. Last in his Chariot_, produced at the same theatre 25 August, 1769. In this farce Bickerstaffe further introduces the famous consultation scene from _L’Amour Médecin_, a play which had been made use of by Lacy, _The Dumb Lady; or, The Farrier made a Physician_ (1672); by Owen Swiney, _The Quacks; or, Love’s the Physician_, produced at Drury Lane, 18 March, 1705; by Miller, _Art and Nature_, produced at the same theatre 16 February, 1738; and in an anonymous one act piece, which is little more than a bare translation under the title _Love is the Doctor_, performed once only at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 4 April, 1734.