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The sentimental comedy that outsold Goldsmith ? Hugh Kelly?s False Delicacy, first edition, 1768 KELLY, Hugh (1739?1777) False Delicacy: A Comedy. London: R. Baldwin; W. Johnston, 1768. Details KELLY, Hugh. False Delicacy: A Comedy; as it is Performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane By His Majesty?s Servants. London: R. Baldwin, W. Johnston & G. Kearsly, 1768. First edition. Octavo, [vi], 87, [1] pp. (202 × 130 mm); disbound. Dedicated to David Garrick, who wrote both the prologue and the epilogue. The Play One of the great theatrical successes of Georgian London ? and the flash-point of a famous rivalry. Produced by David Garrick at Drury Lane on 23 January 1768, with Garrick?s own assistance, False Delicacy was staged in deliberate competition with Oliver Goldsmith?s The Good-Natur?d Man, which opened six days later, on 29 January, at Covent Garden. Kelly?s sentimental comedy won the contest: it was performed more than twenty times in its first season, and the printed play reportedly sold some ten thousand copies within the year ? briefly setting the young Irishman up as a rival to Goldsmith himself. Samuel Johnson had written the prologue for Goldsmith?s rival play, and Kelly?s triumph did nothing to endear him to that circle. False Delicacy stands as a landmark of the sentimental comedy that Goldsmith and, soon, Sheridan would set out to overthrow. The comedy turns on Miss Marchmont, whose ?delicacy? leads her to refuse the man she loves, Lord Winworth, out of an exaggerated scruple, while the commonsensical Mrs. Harley punctures such affectation; the tangle is resolved only when good sense pairs the lovers correctly. Modern criticism has stressed that the play is not merely sentimental but partly satiric of its own subject: as C. J. Rawson observes, Kelly ?satirises delicacy, in the sense of exaggerated consideration,? and Garrick?s own Epilogue pointedly couples ?False Modesty? and ?False Delicacy.? References ESTC T230322; CBEL II, 845. C. J. Rawson, ?Some Remarks on Eighteenth-Century ?Delicacy,? with a Note on Hugh Kelly?s False Delicacy (1768),? Journal of English and Germanic Philology 61 (1962). On the rivalry with Goldsmith, cf. Ricardo Quintana, ?Oliver Goldsmith as a Critic of the Drama? (1965), and Denis Donoghue, ??He Never Gives us Nothing That?s Low?: Goldsmith?s Plays and the Reviewers? (1988). Condition Disbound, as issued for binding, and forthrightly described: leaves loose, with scattered staining and light smudging; the final leaf of the epilogue torn and lightly chipped, touching a few letters. An honest, unsophisticated copy of a landmark comedy of the Georgian stage ? an uncommon survival, ready for the binder. First edition of the sentimental comedy that outsold Goldsmith in the great theatre war of 1768 ? scarce, and seldom found on the market. Disbound, as issued for binding, and forthrightly described: leaves loose, with scattered staining.
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