The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Sentimental comedy (drama of sensibility)

Sentimental comedy (drama of sensibility): One of the literary manifestations of sentimentalism and the literature of sensibility in the eighteenth century, a type of drama featuring virtuous but beleaguered middle-class characters who ultimately triumph over evil, immorality, or injustice. Sentimental comedies arose in reaction to what was viewed as the excess, impropriety, and debauchery of Restoration Age drama, which English bishop Jeremy Collier attacked in his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). Irish writer Richard Steele is generally credited with inaugurating the genre, which was geared toward a growing middle class that prided itself on respectability and which tended to flatly represent characters as either completely good or completely bad.

While termed comedies, sentimental comedies were intended to engage the audience’s sympathy, to evoke tears rather than laughter. (Indeed, the French counterpart was called the comédie larmoyante, or “tearful comedy.”) The genre began to decline in the latter half of the eighteenth century, although sentimental dramas continued to be written — and to be popular in some quarters — well into the nineteenth century. Due to the caricatures and jarring plot twists that tend to accompany works designed to teach moral lessons, sentimental comedies almost invariably strike modern audiences as unconvincing and unrealistic.

EXAMPLES: Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722), Hugh Kelly’s False Delicacy (1768), Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian (1771).