She Stoops to Conquer

Summary

She Stoops to Conquer, or The Mistakes of a Night, is a comedy in five acts first performed at Covent Garden on 15 March 1773. Goldsmith wrote it as a laughing comedy in opposition to the fashionable sentimental comedy of his time. Mr Hardcastle, an old-fashioned country gentleman who loves everything old, has arranged for his daughter Kate to meet young Charles Marlow, son of his friend Sir Charles Marlow. Marlow has a peculiar weakness: he is tongue-tied and bashful with ladies of his own class but easy and forward with barmaids and servants. On the way to the Hardcastle house, Marlow and his friend George Hastings stop at an alehouse, where Tony Lumpkin, Mrs Hardcastle's idle and mischievous son by her first marriage, tells them that they are far from their destination and that a nearby inn will lodge them. The inn is in fact Hardcastle's house. Marlow and Hastings therefore treat their host as an impertinent innkeeper, ordering him about and criticising the supper, while Hardcastle is astonished at the young man's insolence. Hastings, who discovers the joke, keeps it secret because he hopes to elope with Constance Neville, Mrs Hardcastle's niece, whom Mrs Hardcastle intends to marry to Tony so as to keep her jewels in the family. Kate, having seen Marlow's stammering shyness in a formal interview, discovers that he takes her for a barmaid when she wears a plain dress, and she stoops to that role to win him, finding him charming and honest once he is at ease. Tony, who has no wish to marry Constance, helps the lovers by stealing the jewels and then by driving his mother around in the dark for hours before landing her in the horse pond at the bottom of her own garden. At last Sir Charles arrives, the mistakes are cleared up, Marlow learns that the barmaid he has fallen in love with is Kate herself, and Tony, discovering that he has come of age, refuses Constance, freeing her to marry Hastings. The play is one of the few eighteenth-century comedies still regularly performed, loved for its farce, its warm characters and its affectionate picture of English country life.

Top Lessons

• Manners and character

  Marlow behaves differently to people of different classes. True courtesy is the same to all.

• Humility that wins

  Kate stoops to a humbler role and so discovers Marlow's real character.

• Comedy of errors

  One lie by Tony sets off a chain of mistakes.

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