SOURCE: Taylor, George. Introduction to Plays By Samuel Foote and Arthur Murphy, pp. 1-33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

In the essay which follows, Taylor documents the “gradual evolution” of Foote's works in response to popular tastes, and he weighs their comic and dramatic elements.

It was long a common misconception that comic drama in the eighteenth century, and particularly in the forty years following the 1737 Licensing Act, lapsed into a state of lachrymose gentility known as Sentimentality. This myth originated in the criticism and controversy surrounding the plays of those most successful eighteenth-century comic writers, Goldsmith and Sheridan. It is undeniable that Sentimental Comedy was a theatrically fashionable genre in the 1760s and 70s and was prevalent enough to inspire Goldsmith's essay ‘On the Theatre’, which was published in the Westminster Magazine of January 1773, where he described the style as one ‘in which the virtues of Private Life...