She Stoops to Conquer

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The action of She Stoops to Conquer (1773) is largely confined to a night and a day in Squire Hardcastle's somewhat dilapidated country house: Young Marlow, on his way there to meet the bride his father has chosen for him, loses his way and arrives at the house assuming it is an inn. The prospect of meeting the genteel Miss Hardcastle terrifies the diffident youngster; but the serving-girl Kate - in fact, Miss Hardcastle, who chooses not to clarify the misunderstanding - immediately catches his fancy and cannot complain of a lack of ardour in her well-born suitor. After a series of trifling confusions and the inevitable eavesdropping-from-behind-a-screen, all is resolved so pleasingly that the comedy has been a favourite with amateur and professional companies and their audiences for over 230 years.

Oliver Goldsmith's comedy was a milestone: yes, it's fast and funny, almost farcical at times, a great night out, and so on, but it's also a psychological masterpiece written at the time when English society began its stately progress towards its admirable class system.
"A bomproof comedy...Oliver Goldsmith's play is about the clash between town and country, between varying degrees of pretension."
'Against Sean Crowley's elegant blank canvas of a set, which allows a home to be mistaken for an inn, Goldsmith's themes of class and snobbery unfold with delicious clarity. The performances are both ticklish and sophisticated - the actors step outside the action to address the audience directly - and yet played for traditional laughs and tremendous relish.'

Oliver Goldsmith was an Anglo-Irish author, playwright, dramatist, and poet who lived from 10 November 1728 to 4 April 1774. Goldsmith claimed to a biographer that he was born on November 10, 1728, yet his exact birthdate and year are unknown. He was either born in the Smith Hill House in the vicinity of Elphin, County Roscommon, or at Pallas, close to Ballymahon, County Longford, Ireland. His schooling seems to have mostly given him a liking for expensive clothing, card games, Irish tunes, and playing the flute. Goldsmith, a perpetual debtor and gambling addict, wrote a ton for London's publishers while working as a hack writer on Grub Street. To publish his 1758 translation of the memoirs of the Huguenot Jean Marteilhe, he assumed the alias ""James Willington"" at this time. His contemporaries regarded him as envious, impulsive, and disorganized, with a history of planning to immigrate to America but failing because he missed his ship. The incorrect diagnosis of his kidney ailment before his untimely death in 1774 may have contributed to it. Goldsmith was laid to rest in London's Temple Church. At the location of his interment, a memorial honoring him had previously been erected, but it had been destroyed in a 1941 air strike.