Goldsmith’s first play, A Good-Natur’d Man, received negative reviews from critics, who found his depiction of rude, lower-class characters vulgar. Marlow’s condescension toward Hardcastle, for example-even though it is the result of his mistaken belief that Hardcastle is an innkeeper-draws laughs because it plays on Hardcastle’s sensitivity to this newly emergent hierarchy between the cultured city-dweller and the country bumpkin. This social dynamic sets the stage for many of the interactions in She Stoops, as Marlow and Hastings (two young “city slickers”) have journeyed to the countryside to visit the Hardcastles. Simultaneously, as a new sense of cosmopolitanism began to develop among these cities’ wealthy urban elite, they began to see themselves as superior-more cultured and worldly-than people of the same class who lived in the countryside (the landed gentry). Class divisions were slowly but surely becoming more pronounced as the Industrial Revolution, in its very early years, was creating a new class of working poor in the increasingly populous cities. The Agricultural Revolution had and led to an unprecedented increase in agricultural production and a massive consolidation of farmland, which in turn sent many of Britain’s rural-dwellers into the city looking for work. The play takes place during the long and relatively peaceful reign of King George III, a time of social metamorphosis for Britain. Goldsmith died in 1774 after failing to seek medical care for a treatable kidney infection. His friends often remarked on the contrast between his disorderly personal life and his clear, well-organized, and stylistically beautiful writing. Despite his acceptance into these high circles, Goldsmith was known to be deeply envious of his friends, awkward, ashamed of his physical appearance, a drunk, a gambler, and an extremely bad manager of his own money. His lively, readable style earned him the respect of more prominent writers, including the philosopher Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, the essayist who composed the English language’s first high-quality dictionary. He wrote poems, plays, short stories, and novels. There he first worked as an apothecary’s assistant before turning to work as a writer for the daily papers. After graduating from college in Dublin, he dropped out of medical school and travelled around Europe on foot with little money before settling in London in 1756. Born in Ireland to Anglo-Irish parents, Oliver Goldsmith rose from obscurity to join the ranks of the most prominent literary figures of his time in London.
0 kommentar(er)
