She Stoops to Conquer (New Mermaids)

by OliverGoldsmith (Author), TomDavis (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1986

  $3.42

  This edition of a familiar and ever-delightful classic of the stage is intended to satisfy two current demands in the teaching of secondary English. It will make available for school use the most successful and the most important, historically, of Goldsmith's plays. It will thus afford to pupils and teachers a wider field of choice, to suit their various and varying tastes. It will also provide material for the more reasoned study of its period and its type. All who read Macaulay's Johnson, or the Selections from Boswell, or Burke's Speech on Con-ciliation, or Thackeray's English Humorists, as well as those who wish a text illustrative of Johnson's period in the history of English literature or English drama, will here find their needs supplied

• Used

  Paperback
  

  $3.28

• New

  Paperback
  2003

  $13.62

  The action of She Stoops to Conquer (1773) is largely confined to a night and a day in Squire Hardcastle's somewhat dilapidated country house: Young Marlow, on his way there to meet the bride his father has chosen for him, loses his way and arrives at the house assuming it is an inn. The prospect of meeting the genteel Miss Hardcastle terrifies the diffident youngster; but the serving-girl Kate - in fact, Miss Hardcastle, who chooses not to clarify the misunderstanding - immediately catches his fancy and cannot complain of a lack of ardour in her well-born suitor. After a series of trifling confusions and the inevitable eavesdropping-from-behind-a-screen, all is resolved so pleasingly that the comedy has been a favourite with amateur and professional companies and their audiences for over 230 years.