Himself irascible and passionate, Macklin had been the most admired Shylock of his century.  His specialty was the performance of character parts, often dialect roles, either broadly comic or cruel and ironic.  The central figure of this, his best comedy, is such a part.  It combines those features that the author could portray so effectively, the broad dialect, the callous selfishness, the hypocrisy, the passionate resistance to all appeals to sentiment and the imperviousness to affection.  One can detect in the creation strong resemblances to Macklin’s interpretation of Shylock, something of Sir Giles Overreach, who was also known to eighteenth-century play-goers, and possibly of Tartuffe.  In his resolute defiance of the conventions of comedy of sensibility, Macklin resisted the pressure to allow Sir Pertinax to soften in the end and terminate the play on a note of happy reconciliation and family harmony.

In thus preserving the toughness of Sir Pertinax consistently to the end, Macklin remained true to the tradition of critical, satiric comedy that he had been bred in but that by this time had almost disappeared.  Protesting against the refusal of a license for his play, in 1779, Macklin composed a defense of satiric comedy.  He insists upon the reformatory function of comedy and upon the satiric method of performing this task.  “The business of the Stage,” he says, “is to correct vice, and laugh at folly ...  This piece is in support of virtue, morality, decency, and the Laws of the Land:  it satirizes both public and private venality, and reprobates inordinate passions and tyrannical conduct in a parent ...  Now, with regard to my comedy is it not just and salutary that the subtilty [sic], pride, insolence, cunning, and the thorough-paced villany [sic] of a backbiting Scotchman should be ridiculed?  What a wretched state the Comic Muse and the Stage would be reduced to, were the prohibition of laughing at the corruption and other vices of the age to prevail!"[3] True the Comic Muse, long sick, as Garrick said in his prologue to She Stoops to Conquer, had almost died, though farces had done something to sustain her.  Fielding’s and Garrick’s little satires had largely avoided sentiment; and the personal, often gross farces of Foote had continued to use ridicule.  But even these lack the forceful pertinacity of Macklin’s denunciation of hypocrisy and vice.  It is perhaps too bad that he fell so far into caricature in the portraits of Lord Lumbercourt and his daughter, that the main love stories do smack of sensibility, and that he turned his hero into a mouthpiece for the opposition to the Tory ministries of the early years of George III.  And it is perhaps true that all the characters, including Sir Pertinax, are more true to the theatre than to the actual life of the last quarter of the eighteenth century.  Still, Sir Pertinax is vigorous, and the author’s position is unmistakable.

The earliest portion of The Man of the World in the Larpent Collection is a passage in the fourth act of The School for Husbands, performed at Covent Garden as The Married Libertine on 28 January 1761, twenty years before The Man of the World was finally presented in London.  Elsewhere I have compared the three complete versions submitted to the Examiner and have shown why the Lord Chamberlain could not permit it to be licensed.[4]