She Stoops to Conquer is one of the few 18th century plays that has stood the test of time. First produced in 1773 in Covent Garden, it has been revived many times-once even running for 1,777 performances in the 1860s.
The events take place over the course of a single evening in a country house where two young ladies await potential suitors. The young squire of the household, a prankster and layabout (and intended for one of the young ladies by the family matriarch), sets off a comic chain of mistaken identities and farcical intrigues when he encounters the potential suitors in a nearby tavern, and sends them to the house with the belief that they're visiting an inn.
The impact of She Stoops to Conquer was such that it was heralded as restoring "laughing comedy" to the English stage after decades of sentimentality. It also stands as the origin of the phrase, "Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies."
A sparkling comedy of manners and mistaken identity that has kept audiences laughing for two and a half centuries.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)