Buchara state university m. Bakoeva, E. Muratova, M. Ochilova english literature

that would be acceptable in the theatre.
Outstanding in the early decades o f the century is John G ay’s 
“Beggar’s Opera”, a play with ballads (1728); Oliver Goldsmith’s 
“She Stoops to Conquer”, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s “Rivals” 
and “School for Scandal”. The play, with its moral emphasis and 
its melodramatic theme, made a wide and immediate appeal. It 
was recognized that a new elem ent had entered into drama, even 
i f the dramatist who int roduced it was obviously not o f the first

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rank. The innovation is far more important than the play, for this 
way leads, however indirectly, to the modern social and realistic 
drama.
The main literary trends o f the age o f the Enlightenment in 
England were classicism , realism, sentim entalism and early 
romanticism, out o f which, sentimentalism was a very English 
phenomenon. Sentiment might be defined as feeling, and in the 
eighteenth century, agajnst the background o f its many crudities 
and barbarities, there developed both in life and in literature 
movements such as Methodism, in social life in an increasing 
realization o f the hardships, which the majority o f mankind had to 
suffer. Its dangers are obvious, for it leads to emotionalism instead 
o f mysticism, and to charity instead o f genuine reform. It clouds 
the reason, substitutes pathos for tragedy, and obscures the harder 
issues o f iife in a rnist o f tenderness. In literature its effects were 
numerous, and, in com edies disastrous. An early exponent o f 
sentimentalism was Richard Steele. The depths o f sentimentalism 
were reached by som e dramatists who showed how every human