Section B: NON - AFRICAN DRAMA OLIVER GOLDSMITH - SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER What makes Mr. Hardcastle a humorous character?

Mr. Hardcastle is one of the chief sources of laughter in Oliver Goldsmith's comedy She Stoops to Conquer. His humour springs partly from his own eccentric character and partly from the ridiculous situations into which the play's mistakes plunge him.

His old-fashioned tastes. Hardcastle is comic in his stubborn love of everything old. As he says himself, he loves "everything that's old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine." His rambling fondness for the past, and his long-winded anecdotes about the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene, which no one wants to hear, make him a figure of gentle ridicule.

The great misunderstanding. The richest source of his humour is the central mistake of the play. Young Marlow, misdirected by the mischievous Tony Lumpkin, believes that Hardcastle's country house is an inn and that Hardcastle himself is the landlord. This one error turns every meeting between host and guest into comedy: Hardcastle offers warm hospitality as a gentleman to his intended son-in-law, while Marlow treats him with the careless rudeness a traveller shows an innkeeper, ordering him about and criticising the "house."

His mounting exasperation. Much of the fun lies in watching the courteous, self-important Hardcastle grow more and more baffled and indignant at Marlow's insolence, unable to understand why the son of his old friend should behave so outrageously. His attempts to keep his temper, and his failure to do so, are highly amusing.

His domestic comedy. Hardcastle is also comic at home. He drills his clumsy servants in table manners before the guests arrive, only to see them bungle everything, and he must endure his wife's vanity and her indulgence of the loutish Tony Lumpkin. His plain good sense set against her folly produces steady humour.

Conclusion. Mr. Hardcastle is humorous, then, both by nature (his antiquated tastes, his tedious stories, his fussy dignity) and by circumstance (the mistaking of his home for an inn). Goldsmith uses him to generate warm, good-natured laughter while remaining a likeable, sensible man at heart.