She Stoops to Conquer [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONIt is unlikely that the essayist and critic Charles Lamb would have included the four comedies in this volume in his personal canon of plays. In his survey 'On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century' {The London Magazine, April 1822), Congreve, Wycherley, and Farquhar represent all that is worth preserving before Sheridan and this highly selective choice is symptomatic of his desire to support comedy in its purest form, the investment in an 'idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening'. Artifice is here no weakness but an attempt to allow us a freedom from 'our fire-side concerns' that were, otherwise, unshunnable, our inability to evade the 'pressure of reality' producing a compulsion only to 'confirm our experience of it'.' This eloquent defence of comedic wonder has been formative in our own recent theatrical preferences, with the significant exception of Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, which remained a constant in the repertory of our own last century and Wild Oats, which, despite being the revelation of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1976-7 season at the Aldwych Theatre in London, is still more studied than produced. Fielding's The Modern Husband has no professional stage history in an unadapted form and, whilst The Clandestine Marriage has been filmed (1999) and occasionally makes it to the bigger theatres, it is usually an exercise in witty sentiment on the few times it is given an airing. This is, paradoxically, the pre-eminent reason for this edition: to help re-evaluate the pressures, welcome and not so, that were placed on the writer for the stage in the eighteenth century, and also the creative solutions that resulted.There is ample evidence that the audiences of mid-century onwards became less and less interested in vital contemporary issues. The politeness (with all that that entailed) of theatregoing was not just a free aesthetic choice; theatres sought a public's approbation as an economic necessity. Richard Tickell's 'Prologue' to Joseph Richardson's The Fugitive (1792) had the actor gaze out on the 'well-dress'd Pit' from whom he expects 'few perils' (1. 20):' Charles Lamb, Selected Prose, ed. Adam Phillips (Harmondsworth, 1985), 142.