Drama in the Restoration and the eighteenth century: Goldsmiths She Stoops to Conquer

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8. Drama in the Restoration and the eighteenth century:

Goldsmiths She Stoops to Conquer

Restoration Age (1660-1688): from the restoration of Charles II to the English throne (who was a
Stuart and returns from the French royal court) to the Glorious Revolution, the beginning of the
reign of William and Mary (as joint monarch, limited power to them).
1642-1660 the theatres closed, no performances were allowed by the theatre-hating Puritans, but
the publication of dramatic works never stopped.
After 1642 theatrical life had to be recreated, revised, started afresh. No actors, no places to
playnew generation in London with little practice.innovations and changes introduced in the
English theatres. Some of them had important effects on the English stage to the end of the 18th c.
Changes:
1. a monopoly of theatrical enterprises created. Charles II gave privilege of forming companies,
presenting playes and building theatres to 2 managers only.
The Kings Company played at Drury Lane and the Dukes Company played in Covent Garden.
Both theatres indoor, bigger and less intimate than the old Globe.
The Licensing Act of 1737-1843: limited the number of London theatres to 2 in the winter season
stage sensorship
1843 Henry Fieldings satires on Sir Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister at the time.
Licensed theatres in the provinces: Bath, Bristol, Liverpool.
2. Women act on stage. The old custom of boys playing womens roles ended, most effective.
Doubtful issue the presence of women on stage.
3. The new playhouses built to a different design. The proscenium arch (picture-frame
introduced by I. Jones into England) to separate the forestage (main acting area becoming
smaller and smaller) from the deep stage, later to separate the audience from the stage.loss
of intimacy actors

audience (curtain create distance between them); the beginning of the

modern stage. Seating areas: the pit, boxes and galleries; no standlings: everybody seats.
4. the use of painted scenes, changeable scenery and machines increased greatly, adapted
from the court masques and Continental Opera. More emphasis on spectacle. Painted scene
flats on moveable frames could be slid on-stage from both sides. A depth perspective could
be created with these new devices. Side scenes, a hanging border at the top.
More beautiful, expensive and historically more accurate costumes, mainly for the tragedies.

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Light from 3 sources: the lighted auditorium (where the audience is set), the footlights around the
forestage, oil lamps and candles behind the proscenium and each of the wings. (Audience:
aristocrats and members of the Royal Court.)
5. the days programme enlarged: additional entertainment (singing and dancing) in the
interlude between the acts of the play.
King Charles II and his courtierss taste determined the drama of the Restoration period. Exile in
France at the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King. The exiles enjoyed the plays of Molire, French and
Italian opera and balletexpected to see the glory of the heroic tragedy, the music and the
spectacular scenery of the operas, the complex bustle of the intrigue comedies and actresses in the
theatres at home.
After Charless triumphant return to England in 1660: a sense of relief and renewal, a mood of
national euphoria (patriotic theatre)a number of heroic dramas written. The central themes:
courage and love. The setting: a distant land. The hero torn between his passion for a lady and his
honour or duty to his country. These unreal characters are rage and speak loudly, often in hyperbole.
The action of the play is grand, often revolving around the conquest of an empire. The best-known
English author of heroic tragedies: John Dryden (1631-1700).
But the Restoration Age was cynical, people didnt trust deep convictions neither in life nor in
literature. The main characteristic of the new literature: From the head, not the heart. The
human brain had taken over, was in complete control. Good manners replaced passion, wit
replaced eloquence in drama. Also the beginning of the scientific age: the Royal Society founded
1662 (Sir Isaac Newton 1642-1727, law of gravity).
Ben Jonson had a strong influence on the periods comedy.
1. turned comedy from the romantic to the satiric-realistic.
2. pointed comic writers in the direction of character types based on the theory of humours.
3. defined comedy as an image of the times.
4. made prose the normal medium of satiric comedy.
5. Showed how interlocking intrigues and colliding characters could serve as a plot.
Plays dominating the period: comedies of mannerrealistic, mirrored the foibles of society.
Main ingredients: lust, cuckoldry, intrigue, witty language. Typical characters: fops, would-be
wits, jealous husbands, coxcombs. One of the most talented playwrights: William Congreve (16701729), The Way of the World.
Turn of the century: these comedies seriously attacked: their questionable morality. Drama had to
look for support to businessmen and their families. Growing sentimentalism. The Restoration
comedy of manners replaced by sentimental comedy/reformed comedy through most of the
18th c. Comedy: less witty, less intellectual, less shocking and much duller. Stress on easy tears and
middle-class virtue. No humour, no reality. The domestic trials of every-day, middle-class couples
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portrayed. Domestic tragedies the tragedies of the time. Such sentimental plays lived on till the
middle of the 19th c, but didnt dominate the stage from about the turn of the century.

Oliver Goldsmith (1730?-74)

Born on November 10 1728 at Pallas, in the west midlands of Ireland. His father: a generous and
unworldly Protestant clergyman. His character is the model for Dr Primrose, the vicar in The Vicar
of Wakefield (1766), Goldsmiths novel. Not enough money to send Oliver to Trinity College
Dublin (where his father and Olivers elder brother was educated) as a normal undergraduate,
instead as a sizar (as a poor student he has to perform some menial tasks in return his free
education, room and meal). Lack of money and and his scarred face by smallpox made him
unhappy and sensitive about his appearance. He got on badly with his tutor, escaped once, his
brother took him back and persuaded the authorities to take him back. He composed ballads (were
sung in the streets), played the flute. He was generoud when was in funds. His father died in 1747.
Oliver graduated in 1749 and spent nearly 3 years at home, during which he tried several ways of
money earning, but he didnt succeeded (being a candidate for ordination, a privat tutor, lost his
money while trying to emigrate, gambled away the money given to him to study law in Dublin). In
1752 he went to the University of Edingburgh to study medicine. After 2 years he moved to Leiden
(Holland) and continued attending lectures at the uneversity there for nearly a year. Then he started
his European tour through Flanders, France Switzerland and Italy and survived by playing the flute
and disputing philosophical points publicly in universities. He learned about continental intellectual
life (His essay: An Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, 1759). He arrived in
England in 1756, worked as a chemists assistant, as a proof reader for the printer and novelist
Samuel Richardson, as a teacher and as a hack writer. He tried to obtain a post in India as a surgeon,
in 1759 he took up literary hack work, wrote essays for various magazines. He began to write a
series of Chinese Letters in 1760 for the daily Public Ledger, and was very successful.

She Stoops to Conquer

Goldsmith crated a comic situation by a practical joke and added some typical ingredients of
comedy: 2 pairs of lovers, battle the youngthe old, considerably individualized characters (Tony,

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Marlow, Mr Hardcastle). Excellent comedy of errors with mistaken identities, places and the jewels
changing hands in an absurd, farcical manner.
Tolerance, humanity in itthe eariler Restoration comedies lacked almost completely. The sole
test of character is natural goodness. Setting changed from the urban drawing-roomthe country.
Critic of London society.
Tony: a boorish anti-fop (faragatlan piperkc).
Marlow: an anti-rake (lvhajhsz).
Kate: a witty, beneficent, romantic (disguise) and pragmatic heroine.

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