Cast of Characters

Lady Felicity Brasenose, fictitious London salonnière, (middle-aged).

Colley Cibber (1671 – 1757), playwright, actor, theatre manager, eventually (1730) poet laureate. Literary friend of Vanbrugh, literary enemy of Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot. Author of “Love’s Last Shift” (1696) and other plays. Completed Vanbrugh’s “The Provok’d Husband” in 1728.

Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), playwright, architect (of Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace), advisor to George I. Author of “The Relapse: Or Virtue in Danger” (1696), a highly successful sequel to Cibber’s “Love’s Last Shift,” as well as other plays.

Louis Frederick (Ludwig Friedrich) Bonet (1670-1762): Citizen of Geneva, Minister of King of Prussia in London (1696-1719), then “syndic” and senator in Geneva. Trained in medicine and law, proselytizing Protestant. FRS 1711; Berlin Academy 1713. [Member of anonymous Royal Society Commission of 1712 established to adjudicate the Newton-Leibniz priority controversy concerning the invention of the calculus.]

John Arbuthnot (1667-1735): Scottish born and Scottish educated, physician to Queen Anne, some mathematical (statistical) knowledge, wit and satirical writer, friend of Pope, Swift, John Gay and Thomas Parnell (founding member of Scriblerus Club in 1714). FRS 1704. [Member of anonymous Royal Society Commission of 1712 established to adjudicate the Newton-Leibniz priority controversy concerning the invention of the calculus.]

Margaret Arbuthnot (? – 1730), wife of John Arbuthnot, mother of 6 children.

(Role to be played by same actress as Lady Brasenose.)

Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754), French born and French educated mathematician, spent his adult life since 1688 in England. Unmarried. FRS 1697, Berlin Academy 1735, Paris Academy of Sciences 1754. [Member of anonymous Royal Society Commission of 1712 established to adjudicate the Newton-Leibniz priority controversy concerning the invention of the calculus.]

(Role to be played by same actor as Cibber.)

Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (1664 – 1753), Basel-born Swiss mathematician with Geneva family connections, had met Leibniz in Hanover, the Bernoullis in Basel and other mathematicians before coming to London in 1687. Called “the Ape of Newton” with latent homosexual feelings to Newton which were reciprocated. Unmarried. FRS 1688.

[Instigator of Newton-Leibniz priority controversy.]

(Role to be played by same actor as Cibber.)