Chapter 35 - Afterlives 2: Theatre

Summary

Since enjoying a successful premiere run in London in 1773, Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy She Stoops to Conquer has been a fixture on stages across the world. In North America and Australia, it has remained a mainstay on the stages of both bigger and smaller cities since the late eighteenth century (e.g., in the case of the USA, there have been eight significant Broadway and Off-Broadway revivals since 1905). And A. Lytton Sells has written of the play’s perennial popularity on the French stage. By contrast, Sells informs us that Goldsmith’s other full-length play, The Good Natur’d Man (1768), ‘never appealed much to the French’. It did not appeal much to theatre producers and companies in the other countries just mentioned either. This chapter provides an overview of the stage histories of Goldsmith’s two major dramatic works, giving particular emphases to British and Irish stage histories.