Book Description

Sentimental comedy became a distinctive dramatic form on the London stage in the eighteenth century, featuring a complex blend of humour and pathos. Frank Ellis's authoritative study of the genre expounds a theory of sentimental comedy derived from detailed knowledge of a comprehensive range of plays in this period. Women, the lower classes, money and the past are shown to be typical objects of sentimental attitudes, which are not always merely comic, but also potentially indicative of social revolutions such as the growing sympathy towards negro slaves. The practice of sentimental comedy is illustrated by detailed analysis of sentimental attitudes in ten popular plays from 1696 to 1793. An appendix comprises the texts of The School for Lovers by William Whitehead (1762) and Elizabeth Inchbald's Every One Has His Fault (1793). This major study, providing a wealth of fascinating detail about eighteenth-century performance and stage production, will also appeal to scholars interested in revising the current understanding of sentimentalism.