Section B: NON - AFRICAN DRAMA SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER - OLIVER GOLDSMITH Discuss the significance of night to the play.

Answer Details

Night is more than a mere setting in Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer; it is a driving force of the comedy. Almost all the confusions, deceptions and mistakes that generate the play's humour depend on the darkness and the disorientation it produces. The very subtitle, The Mistakes of a Night, announces its importance.

Night enables the central mistake. The plot is set in motion when Tony Lumpkin, at the Three Pigeons alehouse, deceives the travellers Marlow and Hastings into believing that Mr Hardcastle's house is an inn. Because they arrive in the dark and are strangers to the area, they cannot see through the trick. This single mistake of the night produces Marlow's insolent treatment of his prospective father-in-law, whom he takes to be a mere innkeeper, and the whole comic situation flows from it.

Night and the stooping of Kate Hardcastle. The darkness also makes possible Kate's stratagem. Marlow is painfully shy with ladies of his own class but bold with barmaids and servants. Exploiting his confusion, Kate disguises herself as a barmaid so that Marlow, unable to recognise her true identity in the changed circumstances, courts her freely. Night and disguise thus allow Kate to win the man who could not otherwise speak to her, giving the play its title.

Night and the garden confusion. Later, the cover of night is used in the episode of the supposed journey to Aunt Pedigree's. Tony drives Mrs Hardcastle round in circles in the dark and convinces her she is far from home and threatened by highwaymen, when in fact she is in her own garden. The darkness sustains this elaborate practical joke and adds to the farce.

Night as a source of comic reversal and moral point. The mistakes of the night eventually clear up into truth: identities are revealed, misunderstandings resolved, and the right couples united. The confusion of night gives way to the clarity of day, and the play suggests good-humouredly that appearances deceive and that pride and pretension are easily overturned.

Conclusion. Night is the engine of the plot and the chief source of humour in She Stoops to Conquer. It makes the inn mistake, Kate's disguise and Mrs Hardcastle's ordeal possible, and its confusions, dispelled by daylight, produce the happy resolution. Goldsmith turns a single night of mistakes into a complete comedy of errors.