SOURCE: "Entrapment in Eighteenth-Century Drama from Congreve to Goldsmith," in Reader Entrapment in Eighteenth-Century Literature, edited by Carl R. Kropf, AMS Press, 1992, pp. 177-200.

In the excerpt below, Burling argues that the Charles Marlowe-Kate Hardcastle romance is meant to be comic. "From the entire basis of the play's action itself to every detail of the relationship between Charles and Kate, " he asserts, "the play is mocking and satirizing dramatic (and probably social) conventions of courtship and cross-class marriage. "

Critical consensus avers that [She Stoops to Conquer] is one of the century's greatest comic achievements, but the few critics who choose to discuss the play's content (rather than, as many have done, the sources) are surprisingly casual, starkly limited, or even silent as to the play's specific merits. John Butt, in the widely read Oxford History of English Literature volume, finds the play's main interest in the reversal of...