She Stoops to Conquer: An Abridged Text

Subject: English as an Additional Language and English Literature
Level: Secondary
Age Group: 11-14 and 14-16
Order Number: 5280

She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith has, for over a century, been the most widely read and performed 18th century play in English Literature. The version provided here has been cut so as to be approximately one-third shorter than the original. The language has also been slightly simplified to make the play more accessible to both native speakers and ESL learners, while still retaining the feel of 18th century speech. A glossary of the archaic or less familiar words is featured at the end. Summaries and worksheets that explore the play in detail, from character relationships to literary devices such as irony, accompany every act.

In 1772 while he was working on She Stoops to Conquer Goldsmith published ‘An Essay on the Theatre’, in which he argued that comic drama in England in his day had become so focused on being polite that it had ceased to be funny. In his play he wanted to bring back the raw, laugh-out-loud, brand of humour that he admired in the comic plays and characters of Shakespeare, as well as of the great Restoration comedies written roughly a hundred years before – and that was exactly what he did.

In addition to making his audience laugh, Goldsmith also had a serious purpose in She Stoops to Conquer. He was Irish and middle class and his rough manner had made his socially elite university, Trinity College, Dublin, reject him. However, outside the front gate of this university, a larger than life, bronze statue of him now stands. In his play, he makes fun of a society in which class and wealth determine how people relate to one another.

The main pair of lovers in his play, Marlow and Kate, has to invent other characters for themselves in order to break out of the restrictive manners of their class and relate to each other intimately as man and woman. By making fun of class and manners in She Stoops to Conquer Goldsmith is the direct forerunner of the next great comic playwrights to revitalize the English stage more than one hundred and twenty years later, his fellow Irishmen, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

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