Joseph Addison (1672-1719) Richard Steele (1672-1729) Drama of the 18th century continued traditions of Restoration play-wrights. Sentimental tragedies were popular with the growing audience. The interest in classical literature prompted many classical tragedies modeled on those of ancient Rome. The drama of the eighteenth century does not reach the same high level as the novel. One has to wait late in the century for Goldsmith and Sheridan, to find writers who make any permanent contribution to the English stage - . Of a number of reasons which might be invented in explanation it is at least certain that the Licensing Act of 1737 restricted the freedom of expression by dramatists and drove a number of good men out of the theatre. Further, it was clear also that the middle-class commercial classes were gaining sufficient ascendancy to impose their obtuse views on the themes that would be acceptable in the theatre.
- Outstanding in the early decades of the century is John Gay’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 element had entered into drama, even if the dramatist who introduced it was obviously not of the first 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 of the age of the Enlightenment in England were classicism, realism, sentimentalism and early romanticism, out of which, sentimentalism is a very English phenomenon. Sentiment may be defined as feeling, and in the eighteenth century, against the background of its many crudities and barbarities, there developed both in life and in literature movements such as Methodism, in social life in an increasing realization of the hardships, which the majority of mankind had to suffer.
- Its dangers are obvious, for it leads to emotionalism instead of mysticism, and to charity instead of genuine reform. It clouds the reason, substitutes pathos for tragedy, and obscures the harder issues of life in a mist of tenderness. In literature its effects were numerous, and, in comedies disastrous. An early exponent of sentimentalism was Richard Steele. The depths of sentimentalism were reached by some dramatists who showed how every human issue could be obscured in the welter of emotion. From such depths the drama was rescued by Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Sheridan. The XVIII century gave the world such brilliant English writers as Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollet and famous dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
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