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He is normally `one of the most bashful and reserved young fellows in the world'; but confronted with a pretty barmaid he is suddenly seized with amorous confidence. He sets out into the country to meet the girl who has been chosen for him to marry, Miss Hardcastle, but is misled into mistaking her family's house for an inn. The whole visit thus becomes, in a sense, like a `descent into an inferior realm', with the respectable house itself in effect in inferior disguise. And when the heroine herself enters into the spirit of the misunderstanding, by adopting the guise and manner of a serving girl, the hero is able to make ardent protestations of love to her. It is only at the moments when she reassumes her respectable `upper world' identity that he again becomes tongue-tied. But finally `recognition' takes place; all misunderstandings are cleared up; and the hero has won such confidence in the heroine's presence during the episodes when she is disguised, that he can at last happily approach her in her true `upper world' identity.

In Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) we see almost the mirror image of this. Here it is the young heroine who romantically cannot imagine herself loving a man unless he is of lowly rank. When the hero, Captain Absolute, falls in love with her, he realises that his income and status are too high for her to reciprocate, so he woos her in the disguise of a poor ensign, with considerable success. But then the hero's father appears, representing the `upper world', and proposes to the heroine's guardianaunt a match between his son and her niece: so that Absolute in his proper identity has to becorne a rival for her affections to himself in his inferior disguise. Eventually, as in She Stoops to Conquer, `recognition' takes place, and the heroine finds that she is now able to love the hero in his true `upper world' identity.

In Sheridan's The School for Scandal (1777), the road to the happy ending via an inferior level is presented in a different way. We meet two young brothers who are both courting the same girl: one of them, Joseph Surface, apparently the more eligible, in that he is pious and respectable, while the other, Charles, is a reckless spendthrift. Nevertheless it is the outwardly `inferior' of the two, Charles, that the heroine loves: and the brothers are then put to the test. Their rich uncle arrives incognito from abroad and approaches each of them in a different, lowly disguise, as a moneylender and as a poor and needy relative. As so often, the concealment beneath disguise of one character proves an admirable way to catch out and expose the true nature of others. Joseph is revealed as a treacherous hypocrite, while Charles emerges as honest and good-natured. The uncle finally returns to the `upper world' by revealing his true identity, to reward Charles and pave the way to his union with the heroine; while the dastardly Joseph is bundled off-stage as an `unreconciled' dark figure.

But it was in a play written at the same time in France that the theme of the redemption of an `upper world' with the aid of socially inferior characters found perhaps its most celebrated expression: which is how we return to the story with which this chapter began, Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro, mostly written by 1778 (though not staged until 1784), and translated into its better known form, with music by Mozart, in 1786.

The Marriage of Figaro

If one had to choose one story to illustrate almost every point about Comedy which has emerged in this chapter, it might be The Marriage of Figaro. Indeed it is a story almost impossible to summarise briefly, precisely because it weaves so many familiar elements in the plot together. Yet what often passes on the stage as an almost impenetrable thicket of concealments, misunderstandings, stratagems, impersonations and disguises, succeeding each other in bewildering array, and only made acceptable by the continuous flow of some of Mozart's finest music, turns out to be one of the most perfectly constructed of all comedies, each character and episode interacting