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Kelly vs. Goldsmith: the Bailiffs in The School for Wives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
Extract
Students of the eighteenth-century English theater are familiar with the bitter rivalry between Oliver Goldsmith and Hugh Kelly. The two had been friends until January 1768, when Kelly's False Delicacy and Goldsmith's The Good Natur'd Man opened within a week of each other. The Good Natur'd Man was moderately successful, but whatever satisfaction Goldsmith might otherwise have taken in this fact was marred by the overwhelming popularity of Kelly's comedy. To add to Goldsmith's discomfiture was the chagrin of having had one scene in his play hissed off the stage because of its low humor. In large measure, the reception given Goldsmith's first comedy influenced his intentions in his second: She Stoops to Conquer is an example of “laughing” comedy, deliberately set against the sentimental variety written by Kelly.
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1978
References
NOTES
1 Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford, 1966), V, 90, n. 2.
2 Kelly's remark on Wycherley, Congreve, and Vanbrugh is in his collection of essays entitled The Babler (1767), No. 70, p. 27. The quotation from False Delicacy is from Lord Winworth's final speech of the play.
3 Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, V, 102–03.
4 Quoted by Forster, John, The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, Fifth Edition (London, 1871), II, 340, n.Google Scholar
5 The London Stage, 1747–1776, ed. George Winchester Stone, Jr. (Carbondale, 1962), III.
6 LA 362. I am grateful to the Librarian of The Huntington Library for permission to quote from the Larpent Ms.
7 The London Stage, 1747–1776. III, 1786.
8 The two scenes are crossed out in the Larpent Ms. The first four editions contain an unmotivated, inconclusive reference to unspecified bailiffs who pursue their quarry offstage before “turning down the [wrong] court” (pp. 42–43). The bailiffs were not listed in the Dramatis Personae until 12 October 1774 (The London Stage, 1747–1776), III, 1840.