and George Lillo: The London Merchant (1731)

With respect to the Restoration, the most significant change was the emergence of

‘domestic tragedy’ or ‘bourgeoisie tragedy’. Though Renaissance domestic tragedies were being reworked (such as A Yorkshire Tragedy, 1606 or Arden of Faversham, 1591?, the latter by Lillo himself), and Otway, Southerne (during the Restoration) or Rowe (at the turn of the 17th-18th century) also experimented with ‘private tragedy’ (as Lillo himself acknowledges in his Prologue), the audience was also aware that Lillo was breaking new ground.

George Lillo (~1693-1739) was of Flemish and English decent and was a Dissenter (like Daniel Defoe). He was the son of a jeweller and followed his father’s trade. His literary career started with the imitation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in Silvia, or The Country Burial, (1730) – this play was not well-received. The London Merchant, or The History of George Barnwell (1731), however, was an immense success, both at home and abroad (especially in Germany – see Lessing!). At least Lillo’s aim is far removed from good-natured benevolism: he wishes to enforce emotionally the consequences of sinfulness; on his stage death is really the ‘wages of sin’. His originality is to eliminate the aristocracy and blank verse: his heroes are middle-class people and they speak in (cumbersome and heavy) prose.

What he puts forward as a kind of ‘theory’ of tragedy in his Prologue to the play is not very original: he refers to Dryden, having said that tragedy is the most “excellent and useful kind of writing”. Lillo seems to believe that catharsis (the word is not used by him) is the

“correcting” of “criminal” passions by exciting them, and a passion can be criminal either by nature or through being present in excess. Lillo thus offers his tragedy with an ordinary subject-matter as a kind of ordinary ‘cure’ of the senses and moral feelings (he uses the words

“remedy and disease”) and, defending his practice of putting ordinary characters on the stage instead of princes, he appeals to the common sentiments, present in all of us. He admits that

“Tamerlane” (Marlowe’s hero: Tamburlain), Bajazet (by Racine) or Cato (by Addison) are useful examples, too but he has “attempted to enlarge the province of the graver kind of poetry” and claims: “Plays founded on moral tales in private life may be of admirable use, by carrying conviction to the mind with such irresistible force as to engage all the faculties and principles”. Then he quotes quite a lot from Hamlet, mainly passages in which Hamlet talks about catching “the conscience of the King” and about the power of the theatre to stir emotions.

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Lillo’s source was an old ballad about a naive apprentice seduced by a harlot and driven to steal and murder. Lillo not only revived the Elizabethan tradition of working from a well-known and highly popular story but he set the play in Elizabethan times and he had expert knowledge on Elizabethan literature and dramaturgy as well. The first-night audience came to Drury Lane prepared to laugh: “many gaily-disposed sprits brought the ballad with them, intending to make ludicrous comparisons between the ancient ditty and the modern play. But the play spoke so much to the heart that they were drawn in to drop their ballads, and pull out their handkerchiefs” – a contemporary account recalls [Quoted by David W.

Lindsay, “Introduction” In: The Beggar’s Opera and Other Eighteenth-Century Plays, Introduced by David W. Lindsay, London: Everyman, 1995, p. xxvii].

12.4.2. The play

There are, indeed problems with the protagonist, Barnwell: he is passive and basically uninteresting – more a stupid victim than a tragic hero. There are attempts to parallel his career with Satan’s, the “grand apostate” (II;2) but this is not very convincing, either.

Thorowgood and Trueman are too good and too true (Thorowgood is almost like God Himself, with the exception that he does not want to listen to Barnwell’s confession); Maria (a favourite name for a chaste woman in the age) professes affection for Barnwell belatedly. The only powerful figure is the she-villain, Millwood (cunning, beautiful, and destructive) but there is no attempt to show something which would also make her human. The play rather resembles a morality-play, with black or white characters fighting for the soul of the protagonist, yet here everyone is ready to give a faithful and detailed description of his or her state of mind. The usual problem occurs: the ‘bad person’ (though this time a woman, which is more interesting yet, from another point of view, equally stereotypical) starts to dominate the play, remaining the single memorable character (though never willing to ‘reform’).

The language of the play carries the solemn decorum of the age: it often resorts to stereotypical constructions (“haughty and revengeful Spaniards”; “our happy island”, etc.,

“as...as”-constructions) and the honest and thoroughly good Thorowgood keeps repeating that it is not birth (noble or low) but work and character which make a man, and that we are here to serve the other. Maria – who is in a Miranda-like relationship to Thorowgood – dutifully repeats that “high birth and titles don’t recommend the man who own them to my affection”.

There is an attempt at perfect (and didactic) symmetry in dramatic composition: Millwood, in Scene 3, will draw a parallel between the Spaniards mentioned in Act I, Sc.1, and herself (trying to ‘invade’ Barnwell); while there is “entertainment” in Thorowgood’s house, there is

“entertainment” – for Barnwell – at Millwood’s, too. The greatest charge brought against Millwood by her maid, Lucy, is that she is ‘arbitrary in her principles’ (she cannot be calculated) and this is precisely something Barnwell cannot endure: he cannot take uncertainty. There is a constant appeal to general principles (e.g. Millwood: “It is a general maxim among the knowing part of mankind that a woman without virtue, like a man, without honour and honesty, is capable of any action”.) From this she concludes that she should seduce inexperienced youths: she has already picked 18-year-old George Barnwell and she asks the following question: “Now, after what manner shall I receive him?” (cf. Congreve!) while – like Richard III – she is ready to deceive Barnwell and “mean the contrary” to what she speaks. When Barnwell decides to leave – to have supper with her, and to ‘press her hand’

– he knows that he will “lose [his] innocence, peace of mind and hopes of solid happiness”.

According to Trueman, one of Barnwell’s greatest merit was that his life was “regular”. Act II starts already with Barnwell confessing his being a thief, he knows that “public shame and ruin must ensue” and that he “speaks a language” which is “foreign” to his “heart”. There is some ‘metatheatrical interest’ (“which part am I reluctant to act?” – Barnwell asks} but when

he is ready to repent, Millwood and Lucy appear in person and present a (false) story of inheritance, money and jealousy. Barnwell turns to the audience: “Now you, who boast your reason all-sufficient, suppose yourselves in my condition”. The greatest trouble with what Barnwell is going through seems to be that it is irrational, which brings about disorder and disorder “levels” “all distinctions”. At the beginning of Act III, Thorowgood talks about merchandise as a “science” and claims that its greatest merit is to establish “intercourse between nations” (‘internationalising the world’): the merchant’s task is to collect the

“blessings of each soil”. It is only from the conversation between Lucy and Blunt (Millwood’s servants) that we learn that Barnwell was persuaded to kill his rich uncle (this is “chaos” in itself). The Uncle has some premonitions about death knocking on his door (a Gothic element); Barnwell tries to borrow from Macbeth’s vocabulary but he soon relapses into general terms: “This earth, the air and water seem concerned even that’s not strange: the world is punished and Nature feels the shock, when Providence permits a good man’s fall”. In Act IV, Lucy tells Thorowgood everything but it is too late; Millwood is ready to give Barnwell up for murder (since he brought no money with him); Barnwell tries to keep up the image of the ‘woman in love’ in vain (Blunt remarks that the Devil “seduces to sin and then betrays to punishment”); and Barnwell knows that he will be “suspended between heaven and earth” (i.e. will be hanged). Thorowgood has an ‘interview’ with Millwood and surely, for poor Barnwell temptation was great since even Thorowgood admits that she fires the blood

“that age had frozen long since”. There is a strong anti-Hobbsian attitude; Millwood says that

“All actions are alike and indifferent to man and beast, who devour and are devoured as they meet with others weaker or stronger than themselves”. She blames priesthood for her destruction and Thorowgood partly agrees (!) but tries to distinguish between religion and superstition. Millwood does talk about women being slaves and gives a speech about corrupt judges (in a vocabulary somewhat reminiscent of King Lear’s). Act V is in itself a sermon:

according to Thorowgood, Millwood’s example should “learn us diffidence, humanity and circumspection”. Millwood is unable to repent (she is given over to the Devil); Barnwell does repent, he is visited by the good Master (Thorowgood), the true friend (Trueman, who will lie down on the ground with him: “you propose an intercourse of woe – pour all your griefs into my bosom”) and Maria (who now confesses her love to Barnwell). Barnwell says: “I now am what I’ve made myself” – it is up to man to decide about his future, it is not Fate who brought him destruction but his own bad decision.

12.4. Oliver Goldsmith: She Stoops to Conquer

It may sound surprising but Oliver Goldsmith’s (1730 or 31-1774) reputation as a playwright is solely based on the two comedies he wrote: The Good Nature’d Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer, or the Mistakes of a Night (1773, the second half of the title was the original one, the first half was added only a few days before the performance). Goldsmith turned to drama when he already was an established essayist, novelist and poet and even historian because he started his career by writing such popular books as the History of England or History of the Earth. He excelled in all genres; the essay-series called Chinese Letters (1760, later reprinted under the title The Citizen of the World) established him as a professional writer; his poems The Traveller (1764), and especially The Deserted Village (1770) secured him a place among the finest poets of the time, and his novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) made him one of the best known men of letters. It was only his premature death (because of a chronic kidney-disease) which prevented him from becoming even greater but he is more than a chapter in literary history: he is still performed and read; he is still alive.

Goldsmith came from Ireland and kept his “Irish brogue” all through his life; his parents were Anglo-Irish on both sides; his father, a clergyman (a vicar) of the Established

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Church served the Anglican parish in Lissay, Westmeath, where Goldsmith grew up. He received his BA degree from Trinity College Dublin in 1750, then he studied medicine, first at the University of in Edinburgh and later at various continental universities (among them at Leiden) but it is doubtful if he ever took a medical degree (this did not prevent him form practising as a physician for a while and calling himself Dr. Goldsmith). He travelled widely in Europe (in the Netherlands, France, Switzerland and Italy) but soon became penniless, so in 1756 he became a Grub street hack-writer in London and this is when his literary career started. Although he became an active playwright in the last phase of his life, he had had a lively interest in the theatre from the start; in Chinese Letters, for example, he attributes great importance to the English theatre as a national institution, yet he complains about the poor taste of the public and thinks that actor-managers of the time are given too much importance.

He wrote Essay on the Theatre shortly before She Stoops…and there he draws a comparison between what he called “the weeping sentimental comedy” and “laughing and even low comedy”.

Sentimental comedy, in Goldsmith’s term, is “a species of bastard tragedy”, i.e. a mixture of tragic and comic elements in the sense that here the audience has to commiserate with the characters and emphasis is on harmony restored after a great turmoil, whereas in the laughing comedy, i.e. in “true comedy as defined by Aristotle”, we may laugh at our own absurdities. Goldsmith’s sentimental comedy corresponds to the traditional romance-comedy (such as The Tempest) and laughing comedy is a mixture of the satirical comedy and farce.

Interestingly, The Good Natur’d Man does contain sentimental traits, since the hero is reformed from senseless benevolism to common sense, which, of course, might be taken ironically as well and the play might be read as precisely the parody of sentimental comedy.

She Stoops to Conquer is not only a better play but is also full of farcical elements (discoveries, deceits, errors, misunderstandings, eavesdropping, etc.) and finally not only the

“real” Kate Hardcastle is discovered but the hero finds his “true self” as well.

She Stoops… is often compared to Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem, where two fashionable gentlemen tour the provinces to find wives and fortune and one of them, who disguises himself as the other’s footman, thinks he has seduced Cherry, the barmaid. In Goldsmith’s play, two gentlemen go down to the country to meet ladies honourably and one of the thinks he has seduced Kate, the barmaid: in Act 3, Sc., lines 231-33 there is even a direct reference to Cherry and, thus, to Farquhar’s play. This is also an important scene because it is here that Miss Kate Hardcastle really “stoops to conquer”, i.e. she ‘lowers herself to the level of the barmaid’ to win Marlow’s heart (the phrase occurs eventually in Act 4, Sc. 1 line 245, when Miss Hardcastle decides to keep the “character” [the barmaid’s role] in which

“she stooped to conquer” but will tell her “papa” that poor Marlow was deceived into thinking that he was at an inn.

In this comedy, indeed, the wheel turns upon place: where the characters think themselves to be and whether thy think themselves to be in place, or to be out of place. After all, it turns out that when they think themselves to be in place (they think they are right, in a right position) then they are out of place (they are the odd men or women out) and vice versa.

The play even thematises the in-s and out-s: Mrs. Hardcastle remarks that Tony Lumpkin, his son (whom she mistakenly believes to be in love with Miss Neville, her niece) “fall in and out ten times a day” (Act II, Sc. 1, line 550); Hastings, still under the impression that Mr.

Hardcastle is the inn-keeper, tells him “So what with eating above stairs, and drinking below, with receiving your friends without, and amusing them within, you lead a good pleasant bustling of it” (Act II, Sc. 1, 213-215) and, quite remarkably, in the Prologue to the play (written by David Garrick, the greatest actor of the age and the manager of the rival theatre at

Drury Lane)¹⁶⁶ mock-mourning the “death” of the laughing comedy, we hear in the very first lines: “Excuse me sirs, I pray – I can’t yet speak – / I’m crying now – and I have been all the week! / ‘Tis not along this mourning suit, good masters; I’ve that within – for which there are no plasters!” (Prologue, lines 1-4). I’ve that within is a direct reference to Hamlet: “ ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother […] I have that within which passeth show” (Hamlet, I, 2, line 75 and 85), which points towards the well-known question as to the relationship between pretence, illusion, and irony; whether the outside already informs (or should inform) one of the inside or whether the outside is (only) there to conceal the inside. And even the very word inn might be a pun on the preposition in, and from the inn, at one point, Mr. Hardcastle wants to throw Marlow out, when Marlow thinks himself to be most in.

In terms of movement, the one who gives an impetus to practically all the characters is Tony Lumpkin, Mrs. Hardcastle’s son from her first marriage, the typical country booby, a stock-character in the comedies of the age. Tony, playing tricks on his obsessive mother and still her favourite, “comes of age” (and also into his inheritance) at the end of the play, yet he is the only person to be left without a partner when the curtain falls: he is the only real odd-man-out. It is Tony who makes Marlow and Hastings believe that Mr Hardcastle’s old manor house is an inn (and it is pointed out by Mr. Hardcastle himself that it does “look like” an inn), it is Tony who sets his mother and Miss Neville (Kate Hardcastle’s cousin and Hastings’

fiancé) on a “round trip” in Act IV, i.e. the ladies believe they have made forty miles while they are in fact in the Hardcastle-house again. But there is even a further circular movement involving Tony: he steals Miss Neville’s jewels (her inheritance) from Mrs. Hardcastle (who keeps it for the day when Tony marries Miss Neville), yet when Hastings entrusts the jewels to Marlow, Marlow, believing that they are most secure in the hands of the “innkeeper’s wife”, sends them back by a servant to Mrs. Hardcastle. Finally, of course, they will be given to Miss Neville when all the mistakes are cleared up; Tony disclaims her, and she may marry Hastings. Thus, place serves as a mask here in the first place, as a place of harmless deception, where people are able to unmask themselves and to be who they really are and to find whom they really love.

This already takes us from the horizontal movements of the play (in and out, moving around) to its vertical movements: Marlow and Hastings go down to the old-fashioned house deep in the English countryside from London and they appear to be fashionable “Frenchmen”

for the servants; the very title suggests that stooping is necessary to overcome the hypocrisy and the sentimental, pre-set values of upper-middle social relations in order to be happy, since it should not be forgotten that in both the main- and the sub-plot there is a pre-arranged marriage: Marlow’s and Kate’s was arranged by Mr. Hardcastle and Sir Charles, Marlow’s father and Toby’s and Miss Constance Neville’s is almost arranged by Mrs. Hardcastle. It is all the more ironic that Marlow and Kate fall in love while being, after all, obedient to the patriarchal fathers; they ultimately do what they are expected to do socially, yet they can only establish the impeccable social match personally: Marlow can only fall in love with Kate Hardcastle (because of his upbringing, because of his natural bashfulness) when he believes that she is the barmaid of the house, i.e. that she is a kind of “available” country girl, and Kate still has to say she is “poor relation” in order to transform Marlow from a seducer to a potential suitor. Marlow’ thinks there is a Kate and there is a Miss Hardcastle and he has to marry the latter while he has fallen in love with the former and his tremendous luck is that in the end it turns out that they are the same person. That the inn is a “better place” than, or at least is a rival of, the respectable middle-class manor house is further thematised in the play by showing us, in Act I, a real inn, where, again, Tony is the cheer-leader. If the manor-house

for the servants; the very title suggests that stooping is necessary to overcome the hypocrisy and the sentimental, pre-set values of upper-middle social relations in order to be happy, since it should not be forgotten that in both the main- and the sub-plot there is a pre-arranged marriage: Marlow’s and Kate’s was arranged by Mr. Hardcastle and Sir Charles, Marlow’s father and Toby’s and Miss Constance Neville’s is almost arranged by Mrs. Hardcastle. It is all the more ironic that Marlow and Kate fall in love while being, after all, obedient to the patriarchal fathers; they ultimately do what they are expected to do socially, yet they can only establish the impeccable social match personally: Marlow can only fall in love with Kate Hardcastle (because of his upbringing, because of his natural bashfulness) when he believes that she is the barmaid of the house, i.e. that she is a kind of “available” country girl, and Kate still has to say she is “poor relation” in order to transform Marlow from a seducer to a potential suitor. Marlow’ thinks there is a Kate and there is a Miss Hardcastle and he has to marry the latter while he has fallen in love with the former and his tremendous luck is that in the end it turns out that they are the same person. That the inn is a “better place” than, or at least is a rival of, the respectable middle-class manor house is further thematised in the play by showing us, in Act I, a real inn, where, again, Tony is the cheer-leader. If the manor-house