Table Of ContentFOUR GEORGIAN AND PRE-REVOLUTIONARY
PLAYS
Also edited by David Thomas and published by Macmillan Education
SIX RESTORATION AND FRENCH
NEOCLASSIC PLAYS
PHEDRA, THE MISER, TARTUFFE, ALL FOR LOVE,
THE COUNTRY WIFE, LOVE FOR LOVE
Four Georgian and
Pre-Revolu tionary
Plays
The Rivals
She Stoops to Conquer
The Marriage of Figaro
Emilia Gaiotti
Introduced and Edited by
DAVID THOMAS
Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick
Introduction, editorial matter and selection © David Thomas 1998
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~ First published 1998 by
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Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements vii
General Introduction viii
England: The Cultural and Political Context viii
France: The Cultural and Political Context x
Germany: The Cultural and Political Context xii
The Plays xiv
A Note on Eighteenth-century Theatre in England,
France and Germany xviii
A Note on the Texts xxiii
The Rivals
Introduction 1
Text 13
She Stoops to Conquer
Introduction 85
Text 93
The Marriage of Figaro
Introduction 151
Text 167
Emilia GaIotti
Introduction 233
Text 243
Bibliography 290
v
List of Illustrations
The original cast members of She Stoops to Conquer in a scene 92
from Act V: Mr Shuter as Mr Hardcastle, Mrs Green as Mrs
Hardcastle and Mr Quick as Tony Lumkin. Mezzotint by
W. Humphrey after a painting by T. Parkinson, 1775
A scene from Act IV of Le Mariage de Figaro, drawn by 166
St Quentin, reproduced from Beaumarchais, Le Mariage de
Figaro (Paris, 1785)
(Reproduced from the author's collection)
vi
Acknowledgements
In preparing this volume, I have had invaluable help from staff in
the Reading Room of the British Library, and the University
Libraries of Warwick and Bristol. I should also like to record my
thanks to the University of Warwick for generous research leave and
for making a grant to cover some of the costs involved in preparing
this volume for publication. In that context I would like to thank
Kate Brennan for helping to key in the play texts for this volume. My
thanks are also due to Professor W. D. Howarth, Emeritus Professor
of French at the University of Bristol, and Honorary Professor at
the University of Warwick, for his helpful comments on my intro
duction to The Marriage of Figaro. As ever, the staff at Macmillan
Press have given their unstinting help and support in bringing this
volume to publication. I am particularly indebted to my com
missioning editors, Margaret Bartley and Belinda Holdsworth. I
would also like to thank Valery Rose and Nick Allen for their
attention to detail in copy-editing and setting the text. On a more
personal note, I would like to thank Coucou Lyall for her warm and
untiring support.
vii
General Introduction
England: The Cultural and Political Context
After a century of rebellion and civil discord, provoked by power
struggles between a succession of Stuart monarchs and parliament,
the eighteenth century brought relative peace and stability to
English society. Following the death of Queen Anne in 1714, the
Protestant succession was guaranteed, in accordance with the Act of
Settlement of 1701, by inviting George I (great-grandson of James I
and Elector of Hanover) to be king of England. Speaking no English
and with little interest in his new kingdom, George I was content to
leave the government of the country to the group of powerful Whig
grandees who had engineered his accession to the throne. This
permitted the development of a system of government by cabinet,
consisting of senior members of the dominant party in the House of
Commons, presided over by a chairman or prime minister. Policy
decisions for most of the eighteenth century were therefore shaped
by elected politicians, including powerful prime ministers, such as
Walpole and Pitt, and by rivalry between the political parties (the
Tories and the Whigs), rather than by a destructive and damaging
struggle for supremacy between king and parliament.
In contrast to continental Europe, where middle-class aspirations
remained largely thwarted by various forms of absolute rule, the
power and wealth of England's middle classes had grown steadily
since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Catholic monarch
James II had been ousted from the throne by his own daughter
Mary and her Protestant husband, William of Orange. Throughout
the eighteenth century, international trade and commerce (including
the lucrative slave trade), as well as new opportunities for per
sonal investment, brought increased potential for advancement to
large numbers of people throughout the kingdom. Traditional
class barriers still existed, but education and enterprise enabled
viii
General Introduction ix
talented individuals to achieve a degree of social mobility that was
unthinkable elsewhere in Europe. Although there was much
grinding poverty, with all the brutality and suffering that followed
from it, there was also the possibility of gracious living for those
who knew how to benefit from an enterprise culture. The growing
wealth of the middle classes brought with it opportunities for local
craftsmen and artisans of all kinds, as well as architects and builders.
The style of furniture, interior decoration and architecture that
developed during the Georgian era represents a norm of functional
elegance which still inspires the work of modem designers and
architects. It was an age that likewise saw an unprecedented
blossoming in the worlds of the arts and letters.1
These are some of the positive achievements for which the reigns
of George I, II and III are remembered. But the Georgian era was also
an age of remarkable hypocrisy. The middle classes prided them
selves on their Protestant and even Puritan values, which led them
to demand the banishing of all crudity and obscenity from theatres
and places of public entertainment. Meanwhile, many were content
to make their fortunes from the slave trade and others engaged in
commerce with the kind of rapaciousness satirised in John Gay's
Beggar's Opera. The same people who expected plays and novels to
offer sentimental character drawing and plot lines were content to
ignore the poverty and degradation confronting them, on a daily
basis, in their towns and cities. Underneath the veneer of polite
manners, gentility and sentimental attitudes in literature, there was
a hard streak of selfishness and brutality just below the surface of
Georgian society. It was this that Sheridan was to reflect so
brilliantly in his icy masterpiece, The School for Scandal.
The eighteenth century began and ended with major wars: the
war of the Spanish succession in the first decade and the Napoleonic
wars in the last. The only trace of these momentous events in the
plays of the period is a fleeting reference to some of Marlborough's
victories in Farquhar'S play The Recruiting Officer (1706). By the
1770s, the effects of the direct censorship imposed by the Lord
Chamberlain's office and the indirect censorship exercised by the
theatre managers of Drury Lane and Covent Garden ensured that
contemporary playwrights avoided any subject matter that might
give the least offence. In the 1770s when Sheridan and Goldsmith
1. See John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the
Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997).
