"She Stoops to Conquer" by Oliver Goldsmith

She Stoops to Conquer was first performed in 1773 at the Covent Garden Theatre in London. I have seen it as a Digital Theatre presentation of the  National Theatre/ Out of Joint co-production performed at the Theatre Royal Bath in 2003.

It's a classic farce, founded on the premise that two travellers are made to believe that Mr Hardcastle's house is an inn and he is an innkeeper. Subplots include two courting couples.

The characters: 

• Mr Hardcastle is the homeowner who loves telling stories about the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene who fought together during the War of Spanish Succession in the early 1700s; if Mr H was with them as a young man, the play must be set no later than 1750.
• Mrs Hardcastle, his wife, longs to go to fashionable London. She also wants her son, Tony, to marry her niece, Constance, so that the girl's jewels (which she keeps) are kept in the family.
• Tony Lumpkin, Mrs Hardcastle's son by her first marriage, spends his time down the local pub, The Three Pigeons, hunting and playing practical jokes. He does NOT want to marry Constance.
• Kate Hardcastle, the daughter of the house. Mr H has arranged for her to meet, with a view to marrying, Mr Marlow, son of his old friend Sir Charles Marlow.
• Mr Marlow's problem is that, although he enjoys seducing lower class women, he is tremendously shy with women of his own class: "Among women of reputation and virtue he is the modestest man alive; but his acquaintance give him a very different character among creatures of another stamp: you understand me." (Act 1)
• George Hastings, travelling companion of Charles Marlow, who loves Constance and plans to elope with her.
• Constance Neville wants to elope with Hastings but only if she can get hold of her fortune (in the shape of the jewels kept by Mrs H) first.
• Assorted servants, revellers and Marlow's father.

Selected quotes:

• "Here we live in an old rumbling mansion, that looks for all the world like an inn, but that we never see company." (Act 1): Mrs Hardcastle almost immediately foreshadows the main plot.
• "I love everything that's old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine; and I believe, Dorothy (taking her hand), you'll own I have been pretty fond of an old wife." (Act 1)
• "You may be a Darby, but I'll be no Joan" (Act 1) This was already a proverbial phrase. It seems to have originated in 1735 when Henry Woodfall, who had been apprenticed to printer John Darby, wrote a peom called The Joys of Love Never Forgot which talked about the love of "Old Darby, with Joan by his side."
• "MARLOW: We were told it was but forty miles across the country, and we have come above threescore. HASTINGS: And all, Marlow, from that unaccountable reserve of yours, that would not let us inquire more frequently on the way." (Act 1) Some things never change!
• "Zounds, man! we could as soon find out the longitude!" (Act 1) This comment, expressing the difficulty of following Tony Lumpkin's directions, was hugely topical. Determining longitude was a difficult navigational problem (latitude was easy) which had led to shipwrecks such as in 1707 when four large naval ships under the command of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell were wrecked on the Isles of Scilly with the loss of nearly 2,000 men as a result of not knowing their position accurately. This triggered the British government to offer a prize for whoever could determine an accurate way of determining longitude, which was won by John Harrison with his invention of the chronometer, the prize being awarded in 1773, the year this play was first performed.
• "I have often seen a good sideboard, or a marble chimney-piece, though not actually put in the bill, inflame a reckoning confoundedly." (Act 2)
• "An impudent fellow may counterfeit modesty; but I'll be hanged if a modest man can ever counterfeit impudence." (Act 2)
• "One of the duchesses of Drury-lane." (Act 2) Drury Lane is a street very close to Covent Garden where this play was first performed; the 'duchesses' would have been prostitutes plying their trade among the theatregoers.
• "This is Liberty-hall, gentlemen. You may do just as you please here." (Act 2) The phrase 'Liberty-hall' first appeared in a song written in 1770 by George Alexander Stevens, an actor who performed at the Covent Garden Theatre. The song imagines the construction of 'Liberty-Hall', framed by (King) Alfred (the Great), whose corner-stone is Magna-Charta, threatened by "Courtlings of ribband and lace, The spaniels of power" (almost certainly a reference to the later Stuart kings Charles II, who loved spaniels, and James II), whose doors were "thrown open" after "Revolution had settl'd the crown" (probably referring to the 'Glorious Revolution' when James II was chased out of England and replaced with William of Orange and his wife Mary, another action settled by the Duke of Marlborough when, as plain John Churchill, leading the troops blocking the road to London, he defected to William.   
• "I no more trouble my head about Hyder Ally, or Ally Cawn, than about Ally Croker." (Act 2) Hyder Ali was the Sultan, military leader and de facto ruler of Mysore, an Indian Kingdom, who fought two wars against the East India Company at the time they were trying to establish British colonial rule in India. Ali Cawn (or Khan) is difficult to track down. There was a complaint made by his widow against Warren Hastings, Governor General of India, in which she claims that he was a Prince who was imprisoned by Hastings and, after she had ransomed him, hanged and delivered to her dead, but her published Remonstrance refers to the impeachment trial of Hastings which took place after the play was first performed (although the scandal might have predated the play). Ally Croker was an Irish ballad composed about 1725 by Larry Grogan in which the narrator rails against the girl who dumped him, whose real name is Alicia Crocker. 
• "Bully Dawson was but a fool to him." (Act 3) Bully Dawson was a swaggering gambler in London at the time of Charles II. He appears in the Newgate Calendar after he was robbed at gunpoint of 18 guineas won at the gaming tables by one Davy Morgan. He was supposed to be a model for the character Captain Hackhum in The Squire of Alsatia, a restoration comedy by Thomas Shadwell written in 1688. He was also mentioned in the 2nd number of the Spectator, the magazine written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in 1711. 
• "when a girl finds a fellow's outside to her taste, she then sets about guessing the rest of his furniture. With her, a smooth face stands for good sense, and a genteel figure for every virtue." (Act 3)
• "Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no fibs." (Act 3) This is believed to be the origin of the saying (more usually: Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies)
• "They say women and music should never be dated." (Act 3)
• "Please your honour, liberty and Fleet-street for ever!" (Act 4)
• "What think you of the Rake's Progress, for your own apartment?" (Act 4) Hogarth's 'A Rake's Progress', a series of prints showing the consequences of a libertine's lifestyle engraved by William Hogarth, was published in 1735.
• "The Dullisimo Maccaroni." (Act 4) A 'macaroni' was a dandy, a fop, a young man dressed in extravagant fashion. The name derived from the membership of the Macaroni Club, founded in 1764 for those returning from the Grand Tour. There are suggestions that these young men had, in their travels abroad, developed a taste for macaroni, the Italian pasta but they might also have acquired their name from the Italian word for a fool: 'maccarone'. Alternatively they could have been called after the word 'macaronic', an adjective describing verse that is written in a mixture of two or more languages; perhaps they regularly used words from abroad as an affectation.
• "this is all but the whining end of a modern novel." (Act 5)

October 2024;

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God