In a famous
essay in 1772, the author Oliver Goldsmith tried to make a comparison between
laughing and sentimental comedy.
Borrowing the
definition from Aristotle, Goldsmith called comedy "a picture of the
frailties of the lower part of mankind, to distinguish it from tragedy, which
is an exhibition of the misfortunes of the great."
The problem was,
in Goldsmith's view, British comedy had taken to detail the calamities of
people in the middle classes rather than poking fun at their foibles, as had
been done by comic writers of the Restoration, such as Colley Cibber and John
Vanbrugh.
He also claimed
to have history on his side. Though the Roman playwright Terence sometimes had
his comedies approach the quality of tragedy, Goldsmith observed that Terence always
stopped short of rendering his characters truly pathetic. In Goldsmith's opinion, the only
advantage of sentimental comedy was its novelty.
More
importantly, he warned of what we might be losing in giving up the genre
of laughing comedy for a comedy of sentiment:
It is true that amusement is a great
object of the theater, and it will be allowed that these sentimental pieces do
often amuse us; but the question is, whether the true comedy would not amuse us
more? The question is, whether a character supported throughout a piece, with
its ridicule still attending, would not give us more delight than this species
of bastard tragedy, which only is applauded because it is new?
Goldsmith tested
this hypothesis with his own play, She
Stoops to Conquer, which opened the following year at the Theatre Royal,
Covent Garden. George Coleman the Elder was manager of Covent Garden at the
time, and he did not particularly care for the piece. Neither did David Garrick,
who had turned down the play for Drury Lane.
On the advice of
Samuel Johnson, though, Coleman put the play into rehearsal with the actress
Mary Bulkley in the leading role of Kate Hardcastle. It ended up a success, and
the theatre even chose to use it for their season closer later that year.
At the end of
his essay, Goldsmith had written:
It is not easy to recover an art when
once lost; and it will be but a just punishment, that when, by our being too
fastidious, we have banished humor from the stage, we should ourselves be
deprived of the art of laughing.
