Sentimental Comedy

 

Sentimental Comedy 

1 Introduction Comedy;-

 is defined by Aristotle to be a picture of the frailties, of the lower part of mankind to distinguish it from tragedy, which is a an exhibition of the misfortunes of the great When Comedy, therefore, ascends to produce the characters of princes or generals upon the stage, it is out of its walk, since low life and middle life are entirely its object. Their rule is that a tragedy displays the calamities of the great, so comedy should excite our laughter by ridiculously exhibiting the follies of the lower part of mankind. Yet notwithstanding this weight of authority and the universal practice of former ages a new species of dramatic composition has been introduced under the name of sentimental comedy in which the virtues of private life are exhibited rather than the vices exposed and the distresses rather than the faults of mankind make our interest in the piece. These comedies have had of late great success, perhaps from their novelty and also from their flattering every man in his favorite foible. In these plays almost all the characters are good and exceedingly generous: they are lavish enough of their tin money on the stage and though they want humour, have abundance of sentiment and feeling. 

2 Characteristics of Sentimental Comedy :-

The sentimental comedy of the eighteenth century was actually a reaction against the Comedy of Manners of the Restoration period. The chief features of the Comedy of Manners were frivolity, obscenity and vulgarity, all of which found their expression in satirical dialogues, full of wit and humour but most biting wit and humour. The sentimental comedy being a reaction against the Comedy of Manners did away altogether with fun, humour and wit, and instead, introduced into the plays, incidents and situations of pathos so that it became a sort of a melodrama of pity, sympathy for the sufferers who possess no touch of vice or follies but all virtues although commonplace good qualities of human nature. In the Sentimental Comedy 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 aim of the writers of sentimental comedies was to condemn human vices and flatter or applaud human virtues, and that is why, should better be regarded as moral priests and as a matter of fact, all sentimental comedies are more or less nothing but moral comedies, because 16 throughout the play, we can feel the moral purpose and the aim and consequently, all such plays were intended to edify the moral sense of the readers and the audience. The dialogues in Sentimental Comedies are, therefore, comparatively dull, monotonous and even sometimes painful to the feelings of the onlookers. Oliver Goldsmith in his long poem ‘Retaliation’ brings out the main qualities of a sentimental comedy when he sketches the character of Richard Cumber-land the most well-known writer of sentimental comedies. The qualities which Goldsmith discovers in the works of Cumberland are in fact the very qualities of a sentimental comedy. Dr. D.Daiches has remarked about sentimental comedies, Writers of this kind of comedy never achieved a proper kind of stylization. Their plays were set in contemporary society, but the dialogue employed neither the stylized wit of the Restoration dramatists nor a language that was able to sustain any colloquial tone beyond a few intermittent sentences. As soon as the characters got under way they began expressing themselves in long sententious speeches which are not artificial enough for the illusion of realism. It is only after reading many plays of this kind that one can appreciate the comic iconoclasm of Goldsmith and Sheridan in comedies, which though they may appear sentimental enough to modern eyes, were in fact directed against the sentimental gentility in the drama of the time. Mark What William Says about the Drama of sentiment, The process of disintegration continued throughout the eighteenth century, and far into the nineteenth. The theatre gradually ceased to be the playing of the court, and the middle-class prejudices against it tended to grow rather than to diminish as the evangelistic movement and the various societies for the reformation of manners gained influence. 

3 Sentimental Comedy Writing 

 There was a strong flavour of sentimentality in the tragedy of Otway, The Orphan (1681), and in the three comedies of Steele, Written in the opening years of the eighteenth century. The Funeral, The Lying Lover, and The Tender Husband. In writing these, Steele avowed a moral purpose, and tried to prove that morality was not synonymous with dullness. His best play, was The Conscious Lovers. The comedy of sentiment was continued by Colley Gibber (Poet Laureate and the hero of Pope’s Dunciad), Mrs. Centlivre and many others, and even in plays which cannot be said to fall into this class, moral sentiments are frequently interjected, 17 Sheridan in The Rivals parodied the sentimentalists in the Character of Lydia Languish, and in The Critic, he held up to ridicule, the affectations of the stage in general, including the excesses of sentimentality. An early exponent of sentimentalism was Richard Steele, who had been Addison’s collaborator in The Spectator. In plays such as The Tender Husband (1705) he extolled the domestic to which he appeals from that of Wycherly or Congreve. The genuine instruction of middle-class virtues into the drama comes with George Lillo (1693-1739) whose The London Merchant or The History of George Barnwell depicts the life of an apprentice with all the seriousness which in earlier drama had been restricted to those of rank. The depths of sentimentalism were reached by dramatists such as Hugh Kelly and Richard Cumberland. The curious can turn to such a play as Cumberland’s. The West Indian (1771) to find how every human issue can be obscured in the welter or emotion. In the sphere of tragedy, the age’s chief weakness lay in the lack of clear orientation. The Comedy of Manners, which had produced Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve, was rapidly degenerating when Farquahar and Vanbrugh took it over. A few other dramatists such as Charles Barnaby and Mrs. Centivre tried to keep its spirit alive, but it had lost its original force, and could never again assume quite the same delicately careless and polished tone which it had exhibited during the earlier years. In place of wit and the pointed conversational sallies, the expression of moral sentiment was becoming the chief object of many playwrights. Sometimes, they were not prepared, to go beyond the enunciation of well-intentioned platitudes, sometimes, they proceeded further towards the expounding of social concepts and the diverting of messages, sometimes, during later years, they indulged in the presentation of humanitarian views and in encouraging pity for the distressed. This sentimental trend may be traced back as far as the early eighties of the seventeenth century, and it seems probable that the political interest which was aroused during the last days of Charles II, the reign of James II, and the Rebellion had something to do with the shifting of focus from gray intrigues to more serious scenes. The sentimental comedy of the eighteenth century was a reaction against the comedy of Manners of the restoration period. In the same way. The comedy of Humour was a reaction against the sentimental comedy. The Chief protagonists of the sentimental comedy, as we have seen, were Cibber, Steele, Kelley and Cumberland, while the chief inventors of originators of the Comedy of Humour. were Goldsmith and Sheridan. The first attack on the sentimental comedy was made by Goldsmith in Essay on the I heater or A Comparison between Laughing and sentimental comedy. According to Goldsmith a tragedy represents the misfortunes of the great people while a comedy represents the frailties of the common people. Goldsmith’s theory was, of course , base on classical rules or principles, and hence, according to Goldsmith, sentimental comedy is neither a comedy nor a tragedy. It might have been expected that after the thirties of the eighteenth century, sentimentalism, thus possessed of inspiration and a definite purpose, would have produced some masterpieces of serious comedy. The actual results, on the contrary, were poor. If sentimentalism brought something new to the theatre, it at the same time proved fatally easy of execution. Playwrights found that the calling forth of emotional scenes required no great exertions, and coining of reflective sentence for their characters was simple enough. The style too led men away from realism. In order to paint, as they thought, more truly the humane qualities of mankind, they had recourse to the ideal. They pointed not the men and women they saw round them, but abstractions conceived in their own minds. The keen observations and realistic touches, which had always brightened earlier comedy, began therefore, to disappear, and rapid, colourless, uninteresting productions were the result. sentimentalism, too, allied to the general comedy, brought about a peculiar convention. In the end it cut out of the theatre all kind of low characters. A noble savage once or twice might be permitted entrance into the drawing-room, but artisans and the world of labour were studiously shunned. The sentimental drama became pre-eminently the drama of middle and upper class society, with conversations and scenes to match. As the result of this reaction led by Goldsmith and Sheridan, all scenes of pathos and morality, all expressions of sentimentalism, all preaching or sermons on the misfortunes of life, all pity and sympathy for human virtues that suffer in the human world or human society completely disappeared from the field of comedy and in their place, appeared humour and laughter, pleasant dialogues and wit. The writer who actually made the sentimental comedy disappear from the stage of the eighteenth century were Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard B. Sheridan.