At a time when sentimentality was in vogue, playwright Oliver Goldsmith struggled to get his audaciously funny play on to the stage. Critics complained because they felt the play, out of all fashion, contained no moral, yet audiences for more that two hundred years have been delighted by this raucous tumbling of mistaken identity and good natured wit in which a shy young fellow is tripped up in an hilarious game by a woman who will stoop to be his conqueror.