Goldsmith’s Achievement as Dramatist

GOLDSMITH'S ACHIEVEMENT AS DRAMATIST RICARDO QUINTANA I Despite the fact that Goldsmith occupies a secure place among eighteenth-century dramatists, the precise nature of his achievement as a playwright has yet to be explored with the care which the subject deserves. Since this is a matter which concerns Georgian comedy in a broad sense as well as Goldsmith's own comic artistry, it is one of no little importance. Goldsmith came to the drama fairly late in his career, being thirty-seven-if we accept 1730 as the year of his birth-when his first play was produced. He had already established himself as one of the notable literary men of the period. He had behind him the Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning, a multitude of essays, including the highly successful series of "Chinese Letters" (published by themselves as The Citizen of the World), the poem The Traveller, and The Vicar of Wakefield. Is it possible to make out any sort of relationship between his earlier writings and his plays? How did he accommodate himself to the established tradition of Georgian comedy, and if he contributed anything of his own, what was it? Did his shift to dramatic composition bring with it any Significant change in comic insight? And, since he would almost certainly have continued to write for the theatre had he lived a few more years, what might have been the direction which such work would have taken? Much has, of course, been written about Goldsmith as a dramatist, both by his standard biographers (Prior, Forster, Dobson, Wardle) and by historians and critics of eighteenth-century English drama. Perhaps the best general statement is the one given by Austin Dobson in his admirable "Introduction" (1905) to the G. P. Baker edition of the dramatic writings. Yet despite the interest which has been shown, there has been surprisingly little in the way of really close examination of the plays themselves, the place they occupy in Goldsmith's artistic life, and their relations to the comic theatre of the time. II The history of Goldsmith's connection with dramatic a!fairs has only Voh.me XXXIV, Number 2, January, 1965 160 RICARDO QUINTANA indirect bearing On the kind of critical analysis and appraisal which the present discussion has in view. The facts, however, are as follows. His writings attest his long and keen interest in the drama. During his early years in London he commented on current plays in both the Monthly Review and Critical Review. He included in his Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning a chapter on the stage, and in the Bee several essays on subjects in the field of drama. From this time on, in further essays, in the Citizen of the World, the Vicar of Wakefield, and the History of England, in prologues and epilogues composed for his own and other people's plays, and, on the eve of his death, in passages in the unfinished Retaliation, he was constantly bringing up subjects having to do with drama and the theatre. The interest which we know he had in French drama is evidenced by the presence in his library of the plays of Brueys, La Chausee, Dancourt, and Destouches. Whether he himself ever appeared on the stage must remain in the realm of conjecture. Prior mentions a rumour circulating in 1766 that he had "once attempted the stage in the line of low comedy, in a country town, when pressed for the means of subsistance." It seems likely that any such rumour arose out of reading an autobiographical element into the account given in The Vicar of Wakefield-published that year-of George Primrose's brief experiences as a provincial actor; and the similar experiences described in an earlier essay, Adventures of a Strolling Player, could also have been cited. At least we know the play Goldsmith would have liked to act in and the part he would have chosen for himself. This we have from James Craddock , who in his Memoirs tells how it was once proposed that the members of the Club adjourn to Lichfield and there, in honour of Johnson and Garrick, turn actors and put...