Historical Fiction Notes: She Stoops to Conquer

Scene from a 1905 product of She Stoops to Conquer (source)

The Vicar of Wakefield read so quickly and was so satisfying that I decided to proceed immediately to the other well-known work by Oliver Goldsmith, namely his comedic play She Stoops to Conquer.

The play was first performed in London in 1773,  seven years after the publication of The Vicar of Wakefield, and a year before Goldsmith's death at age 46. It is probably more well-known today than the novel, and from my personal observation it lingers on reading lists in high schools and colleges more so than his novel does. Walking through a college bookstore, one might easily find a stack of cpies of it on the shelves as assignment in a theater class.

One reason is that as a play, it is shorter and more accessible, and has a timeless romantic aspect that would be appealing to modern audiences. The preposterous conditions of the story are designed to create exactly the universal awkwardness of young courtship that nearly everyone has felt at one time or another, by the time they reached the age of sixteen.

Moreover, despite many similarities in style and content between the two works, the subject matter of the play is both lighter and tighter than the novel. It has the same comedic trajectory, but takes place over the course of one evening instead of over years (i.e. Aristotelian Unity of Time), and it does not include at all any of the philosophic discussions of the novel.

Instead it is mostly a ribald romp through among characters at a country inn, with only one other major location, which occurs in the first act (cf. Unity of Place).  One can easily why it would make for good classroom discussion among high school students learning drama.

As in the Vicar of Wakefield, the story of She Stoops to Conquer includes multiple episodes in which characters utterly misinterpret the motivations and even the identities of other people. Here it is played for purposes of romance, and in this it invokes no small amount of comparison with Shakespeare's deceptions in As You Like It.

The title itself refers to a young woman, of wealthy middle class background and good manners, who attempts to evoke the more assertive side of a diffident young bachelor by pretending to be a bar maid. This allows him to drop his plaguing shyness around "nice" women and become the kind of man that she is actually attracted to (this motivation is stated really clearly by the young woman herself).

The resolution of the romance of course will see the synthesis of the two sides of the gentleman's character into a whole self with a healthy masculine balance of both deference and assertiveness.

For purposes of my research, the play was among the most fruitful in answering some burning questions I had formed regarding such issues as the process of acquiring lodging at roadside inns in Georgian England.

It's one thing to say "people stayed at inns." It's another thing entirely to recreate the process, step by step, in a way that is historically accurate. What did one do, after one walked into the door? What would one expect to find exactly?

It's the kind of thing one would want to know, say, in case one were a time traveler to that era, and wanted to blend in without giving oneself away. One would need a guidebook, exactly as if one were in a foreign country where the customs were strange.

In She Stoops to Conquer, Goldsmith furnishes the process of checking into a roadside inn in step-by-step daily through the dialog and action of the characters. From the way they interact, one gains a tremendous amount of insight into what guests and hosts expected of each other.  In this way, the play comes as close to being the time traveler guidebook I mentioned as anything one could want.

I read novels slowly, but I normally read plays in one day. Doing so is usually rather easy, and lets the entire action flow in one's mind without interruption (as it is meant to). At the end of the play, I was able to see a pattern in Goldsmith's comedies that is easy to describe: things start of merrily and the characters are all somewhat happy. Then a series of cascading misfortunes occur, partly driven by misapprehension among the characters (in The Vicar of Wakefield, there are actual villains causing evil, but in the play, there are not any).

Things get really bleak and all seems lost. The "black moment" arrives when it seems like tragic consequences will overwhelm the story and leave the characters all in sorrow. Then, by proactive actions of certain characters, and the revealing of the true motivations of various characters, the situation is rescued in dramatic fashion. Order and merriment are restored to the universe.

And they say Hollywood invented such endings! Pschaw!

Portrait of Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) by the famous Georgian portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Wikipedia: "Goldsmith settled in London in 1756, where he briefly held various jobs, including an apothecary's assistant and an usher of a school. Perennially in debt and addicted to gambling, Goldsmith produced a massive output as a hack writer for the publishers of London, but his few painstaking works earned him the company of Samuel Johnson, with whom he was a founding member of "The Club". There, through fellow Club member Edmund Burke, he made the acquaintance of Sir George Savile, who would later arrange a job for him at Thornhill Grammar School. The combination of his literary work and his dissolute lifestyle led Horace Walpole to give him the epithet inspired idiot. During this period he used the pseudonym "James Willington" (the name of a fellow student at Trinity) to publish his 1758 translation of the autobiography of the Huguenot Jean Marteilhe."

Goldsmith was described by contemporaries as prone to envy, a congenial but impetuous and disorganised personality who once planned to emigrate to America but failed because he missed his ship. At some point around this time he worked at Thornhill Grammar School, later basing Squire Thornhill (in the Vicar of Wakefield) on his benefactor Sir George Savile and certainly spending time with eminent scientist Rev. John Mitchell, who he probably knew from London. Mitchell, sorely missed good company, which Goldsmith naturally provided in spades.Thomas De Quincey wrote of him 'All the motion of Goldsmith's nature moved in the direction of the true, the natural, the sweet, the gentle.

His premature death in 1774 may have been partly due to his own misdiagnosis of his kidney infection. Goldsmith was buried in Temple Church in London. The inscription reads; "HERE LIES/OLIVER GOLDSMITH". There is a monument to him in the centre of Ballymahon, also in Westminster Abbey with an epitaph written by Samuel Johnson."