Write a brief essay on the sentimental comedy.
Sentimental comedy, a dramatic genre of the 18th century, denoting plays in which middle-class protagonists triumphantly overcome a series of moral trials. The sentimental comedy is a kind of drama that appeared in the early ears of the eighteenth. In the sentimental comedy, dramatic reality was sacrificed in an attempt to instruct through an appeal to the audience’s or the readers’ emotions. The characters were so good or so bad that they became caricatures. Virtues always triumphed in the sentimental comedy. The sentimental comedy paid greater attention to sentiment which may be regarded as emotion refined and regulated by a self-conscious moral sense.
The sentimental comedy is almost devoid of wit and humour and deals with domestic situation, the problems and suffering of the middle class people, who is above the pity and sympathy of the audience. It also deals with thwarted romance, which is, of course, set right in the long run. Writers of sentimental comedy included Colley Cibber and George Farquhar, with their respective plays ‘Love’s Last Shift' (1696) and ‘The Constant Couple' (1699). The best-known sentimental comedy is Sir Richard’s ‘The Conscious Lovers' (1722), which deals with the trials and tribulations of its penniless heroine Indiana.
The characters in sentimental comedy are either strictly good or bad. Heroes have no faults or bad habits, villains are thoroughly evil or morally degraded. The authors' purpose was to show the audience the innate goodness of people and that through morality people who have been led astray can find the path of righteousness.
The sentimental comedy is a reaction to the witty bawdiness and immorality of the comedy of manners in the Restoration age. Its aim is to vindicate the triumph of goodness. It has certain essential features which are enunciated below: The end of the sentimental comedy should be touched with virtue, though it may have the licentious staff. The values of the domestic loyalty were set up again. The chaotic element of love was tamed by the writers of the sentimental comedy. It should have a sobering influence on the spectators. In such plays emotions find larger space than a philosophic attempt to achieve truth. It veered from the reality of life. The mushrooming vices of the age were exposed by the writers of the sentimental comedy. The world of the sentimental comedy was peopled with the rogues and gallants, witty damsels, pathetic heroines, serious lovers and honest servants. The sentimental comedy is devoid of fun, humour and wit; and introduces into the play incidents and situations of pathos so that it becomes a sort of melodrama of pity, sympathy for the sufferers who possess no touch vice or folly but all virtues altogether common place good qualities of human nature. In it we find characters belonging to the middle class and possessing all sorts of human virtues, who are made to suffer in their life and consequently pitied or sympathized by others who do not possess such virtues.
The aims of the writers of the sentimental comedies are to condemn human vices and flatter or applaud human virtues. This leads to sentimental comedy to become the moral comedy. We can feel moral purpose and the aim; and consequently, all such plays are intended to edify the moral sense of the readers and the audience. The sentimental comedy remained popular nearly fifty years. It offered no real entertainment to the audience because it was completely devoid of humour. It was only a series of moral lectures and sentimental outburst. It, of course, inspired tears instead of laughter because it appealed more to the emotion of the audience rather than to their intellect. It excited emotion of pity and sympathy of the audience for those characters in the play that suffered in life because of their virtues. The sentimental comedy is a serious drama from the beginning to the end. Besides, it is full of improbable and unnatural situations: the characters in it are not at all real men and women of life and society that is farthest away from the realities in which we daily live. The presentation of social manners and the propagation of moral pre-conceptions are rather crudely combined in the sentimental comedy. In the sentimental comedy the virtues of private life are exhibited rather than the faults of mankind make the audience’s or the readers’ interest in it. This type of comedy has a role of falsehood. Jeremy Collier recorded his vehement protest against the grossness of the Restoration comedy in his ‘A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage’. He lambasted the immorality of the Restoration comedy and vindicated the sentimental comedy and sought to purify the tone of the Restoration comedy. This recurring theme is sentimentalism. His ‘Love’s Last Shift’ launched the sentimental movement. The licentious comic characters with a “would-be moral ending” appeared in this genre of writing. The gentle comedy got fused with the sentimental type.
Cibber’s ‘The Funeral’ or ‘Grief a-la-Mode’ is a land mark in the history of sentimental comedy. It is a satire aimed at lawyers and undertakers. Steele’s sense of humour is unmistakable. His virtuous purpose is uppermost. ‘The Tender Husband’ is a sentimental comedy and in it the question of domestic virtue occupies his mind. In this comedy Steele extolled the virtues. George Lillo’s ‘The History of George Barnwell’, with its moral emphasis and its melodramatic theme, made a wide and immediate appeal. The depths of sentimentalism are reached by dramatists such as Hugh Kelly and Richard Cumberland. The curious can turn such a play as Cumberland’s ‘The West Indian’ to find how every human issue can be obscured in the welter of emotion. In the sentimental comedy sentimentalism predominates over the wit or intellect of comedy. Laughter is replaced by tears, mirth by serious moral sermons. The sentimental comedy lacks the episodes and contains serious philosophical and moral aims of the playwright. Goldsmith and Sheridan make an attempt to restore humour and wit to comedy. Goldsmith launches a cursed against the sentimental comedy in his book ‘The Present State of Polite Learning’. Sheridan gave it a heavy blow in his comedy ‘The Rivals’. Here the playwright parodies the sentimentalists in the character of Lydia Languish, and in ‘The Critics’, he holds up to ridicule, the affectation of the stage in general including the excess of sentimentality. Goldsmith introduces in his ‘Good-Natured Man’ and ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ such scenes and characters as are ignored by the writers of the sentimental comedy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Detiseh, Robert,(ed.) “The Synthesis of Laughing and Sentimental comedy”, Vol. 22, No. 3, Oct, 1970, pp. 291-300, www.jstor.org
• Rodriguez, Emily,(ed.) “The Sentimental comedy: Additional information”, July, 2018, www.britanica.com
• Moody, Jane (ed.), “ The social life of eighteenth century comedy”, University of York, Cambridge University press, pp. 73- 86, 2009, https://doi.org
• Neill, Allardyce, (ed.) “A History of Restoration Drama”, Cambridge University press, 1922.
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