Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer: "The Laughing Comedy" vs. "The Sentimental Comedy"

Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer is not merely a comedy; it is a deliberate intervention in the theatrical culture of its time. Goldsmith, along with his friend Richard Brinsley Sheridan, sought to rescue the stage from the sentimental comedy that had dominated the eighteenth century, a genre characterised by moral instruction, tearful reconciliations, and the triumph of virtue over vice. In its place, Goldsmith championed the “laughing comedy”, a form rooted in wit, satire, and farce, which sought to provoke laughter rather than tears. Through its use of mistaken identity, social satire, and comic dialogue, She Stoops to Conquer exemplifies the laughing comedy and demonstrates its superiority as a vehicle for both entertainment and moral critique.

The sentimental comedy, popularised by playwrights such as Richard Cumberland, was built upon the principle that theatre should instruct through emotion. Its plots typically featured virtuous heroes and heroines who endured hardship with patience and piety, and its resolutions rewarded their goodness with prosperity and happiness. Vice was punished, virtue was celebrated, and the audience was invited to weep at the beauty of moral rectitude. Goldsmith regarded this as fundamentally false to human nature. In his essay On the Theatre, he complained that sentimental comedy presented “faults, but not vices; misfortunes, but not distress”, and that its characters were so perfect as to be unbelievable. He argued that the true purpose of comedy was to expose folly through laughter, not to celebrate virtue through tears.

She Stoops to Conquer embodies this philosophy from its opening scene. Where sentimental comedy would have presented Mr Hardcastle as a figure of unimpeachable virtue, Goldsmith gives us a man who is kindly but also irascible and frustrated by his wife and stepson. Mrs Hardcastle, far from being a virtuous matriarch, is a vain and scheming woman whose pretensions are mercilessly satirised. Tony Lumpkin is a drunkard and a trickster, not a paragon of filial piety. Even the romantic hero, Marlow, is a hypocrite whose modesty crumbles the moment he believes he is addressing a social inferior. Goldsmith populates his play with flawed, foolish, and thoroughly human characters, and he invites us to laugh at them rather than weep for them.

The play’s wit is central to its identity as a laughing comedy. Goldsmith’s dialogue sparkles with epigrams, double meanings, and comic reversals. When Marlow says, “I vow I like the freedom of an inn,” the audience laughs because they know he is not in an inn at all, and because his words expose his own folly. When Kate declares, “I’ll stoop to conquer,” she offers a witty summary of her entire strategy, one that delights through its cleverness. The play is full of such moments, in which language becomes a source of intellectual pleasure rather than sentimental instruction. Goldsmith trusts his audience to appreciate the humour of a well-turned phrase, and he never stoops to manipulate their emotions.

Farce is the third pillar of Goldsmith’s anti-sentimental approach. The central misunderstanding—Marlow’s belief that Hardcastle’s house is an inn—generates a cascade of comic confusion that no sentimental comedy could rival. The dramatic irony is relentless: we watch Marlow insult his prospective father-in-law, flirt with his prospective bride under the illusion that she is a barmaid, and generally behave with a rudeness that would be shocking if it were not so funny. The farce is not gratuitous; it serves to expose character and satirise social pretension. Marlow’s behaviour reveals the class prejudice that lies beneath his veneer of modesty. Mrs Hardcastle’s delusion that she is travelling to London exposes her foolish vanity. Farce, in Goldsmith’s hands, is a tool of moral and social criticism.

The effect of this approach is to create a comedy that is both intellectually satisfying and genuinely funny. Sentimental comedy, for all its moral earnestness, often left audiences feeling manipulated. Goldsmith’s laughing comedy respects its audience enough to let them draw their own conclusions. It does not tell them what to feel; it invites them to laugh at folly and, in doing so, to recognise it in themselves. The play’s enduring popularity is testament to the success of this approach. It has survived for over two centuries not because it preaches virtue but because it celebrates wit, exposes hypocrisy, and reminds us that laughter is a more effective corrective to human folly than tears. In rejecting sentimental comedy, Goldsmith created a comedy that is sentimental only in its generous view of human nature, and laughing in its refusal to take human pretensions too seriously.