She Stoops to Conquer Themes

An improbable series of deceptions and misunderstandings about characters’ identities propels the plot of She Stoops to Conquer, and at the center of these deceptions is the protagonist Marlow’s mistaken belief that the Hardcastle family—an elite family he hopes to impress—are lowly innkeepers. As a comedy of manners, the play uses its deceptions to bring its most pretentious and uppity characters down to earth by stripping them of their pompous self-assurance. More than…

She Stoops to Conquer takes place in England in the 18th century, a time when British society was still rigidly divided along traditional class lines, but was in the midst of a geographic shift that complicated class distinctions, as both poor and rich were leaving rural areas in droves and moving to the cities. Although the upper class in the city was not technically superior to the upper class living in the countryside, urban aristocrats…

She Stoops to Conquer shows the effect of parenting on a child’s character, even once that child becomes an adult. The play suggests that parents who smother their children, as well as parents who do not participate much in their children’s upbringing, tend to raise children who are not fully prepared for adulthood, or who reject their parents’ values. By allowing a child some freedom, but also remaining involved in the child’s life, a parent…

As is typical of a comedy of manners, She Stoops to Conquer satirizes its characters’ rigid adherence to contemporary fashions by showing characters who exaggeratedly embody a number of different cultural trends. In the same way that people poke fun at the hipster subculture today, Goldsmith takes aim at the hipster of the 1770s through the character of Marlow the “macaroni”—a fashion-obsessed, travel-obsessed, manneristic type of young man often caricatured at the time. The play…