SOURCE: Wharton, Robert V. “The Divided Sensibility of Samuel Foote.” Educational Theatre Journal 17 (1965): 31-7.

In the essay below, Wharton investigates “the bizarre blend of satire and sentimentalism which abounds” in Foote's plays.

Samuel Foote, although little known today, was, during the Age of Garrick, one of the most popular personalities in the theatre. Manager of the Haymarket Theatre, writer of some thirty comedies, and star actor of his own company, he was dubbed “the English Aristophanes” by his contemporaries because of his reckless satirical thrusts at living individuals. In the twentieth century he has been of sufficient interest to inspire one biography, by Percy Fitzgerald, and a scholarly dissertation, by Professor M. M. Belden, as well as the brief notices in the standard histories of the eighteenth-century theatre.

Students of Foote have projected several images of their subject, all of them accurate as far as they go but...