SOURCE: Lamb, Susan. “The Popular Theater of Samuel Foote and British National Identity.” Comparative Drama 30, no. 2 (1996): 245-65.

In the essay below, Lamb discusses the works of Foote as they relate to Britain's emergence as a world power.

For some time now it has been generally recognized that the relative neglect and conventional aesthetic and moral disapproval of the eighteenth-century London theater's most notorious figure, Samuel Foote, must give way to both formal and contextual re-evaluations. Much of the impetus behind this general call for re-evaluation lies in an appreciation of Foote's extraordinary success and popularity, for in his day he was as well-known and widely-discussed as David Garrick. Foote was the author of some thirty comedies and was a highly successful wit, actor, and theater manager.¹ To dismiss him for reasons moral (he should not have made fun of people) or aesthetic (he wrote farce; his farce is...