It is true that 'comedy of manners' is a sweeping category, which can embrace Wycherley and Wilde with equal fervor.
But the quality of Restoration Comedy (and Drama) is totally at odds with the drama of 60 and 70 years later.
If one saw productions of The Way of the World and The Country Wife in the same week as She Stoops to Conquer and The Rivals - one could never make a leap that they were of the same genre and world.
Other than having character names that relate to a character's - well - character - they have not much in common.
Shakespeare wrote 12 plays during the Jacobean Period (post James 1/James VI in 1603).
They are not Jacobean plays as he was still a deeply 'Elizabethan' playwright.
Within the 8 years of James' rule, Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Antony & Cleopatra, Alls Well, Pericles, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, The Tempest, Henry VII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Stylistically one would never mistake Shakespeare's late plays with the work of the Jacobean masters Jonson, Webster, Ford, Middleton, or Marston.
Just as Richard Strauss continued to write in a florid neo-Romantic style long after Berg and Webern and Stravinsky were changing the face of Western Music, so Shakespeare continued as an Elizabethan well into the Jacobean era.
Goldsmith's SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER was written to bring back a bit of the world of the Restoration 'laughing comedies' in reaction to the overly 'sentimental' comedies of his day.
SHE STOOPS was a 'shout out' to the spirit of the Restoration - with the overt sexuality removed. But at heart, like the Rivals, its a sentimental comedy with more laughs, a la Restoration, thrown in.
Calling Ben Jonson and Elizabethan playwright would be as incorrect as calling Shakespeare Jacobean.
Calling Goldsmith a Restoration playwright is sloppy scholarship, and inaccurate, as what it tells us is simply wrong.
Goldsmith's straightforward prose bears no relationship to the verbose and complex language games of Congreve and Wycherley.
Just as La Bete is a shout out to Moliere. But its not a classic French comedy because of that.
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