Goldsmith uses foreshadowing in the opening scene of She Stoops to Conquer to hint that outcomes are determined from the start, with Goldsmith firmly in control of the action. Near the beginning of Act 1, for example, Mrs Hardcastle grumbles about how they “live in an old rumbling mansion, that looks for all the world like an inn,” in a throwaway sentence that foreshadows what will come to be an essential part of Tony’s great prank, with him fooling Marlow that he has arrived at an inn and not the Hardcastles’ home. Similarly, the references to Mrs Hardcastle’s age in the couple’s bickering (in which there is emphasis placed on when Tony was born) hints that Mrs Hardcastle is not always honest about her real age. This foreshadows the play’s final revelation, in which it turns out she has been lying to Tony about his real age, too.
In conjunction with the play’s heavy use of dramatic irony, such clear foreshadowing creates intimacy between Goldsmith and the audience, who believe they are being let in on the secret. In doing so, however, Goldsmith also reminds readers that the events of the play are predetermined by Goldsmith himself. In this way, Goldsmith proves the play’s ultimate trickster, with him the one pulling the strings behind the scene, engineering events to ridicule his cast of characters.
However, it is not only the characters who prove the subjects of Goldsmith’s trickery, but the audience as well. The foreshadowing in the opening scene, with its many hints of how the play will end, gives the play a sense of some circularity. The traditional double marriage resolution is also set up, making it very clear to the reader who the happy-ending couples will be. In this way, one can argue that little progress actually takes place in the play, with the resolution highly guessable from the start. Hastings’ remark after Tony tricks Mrs Hardcastle into thinking she has been on a long journey away from home, when really he has just taken them round and round the house, may sum up the nature of Goldsmith’s trick on his audience, too:
HASTINGS. Ha! ha! ha! I understand: you took them in a round, while they supposed themselves going forward, and so you have at last brought them home again.
Like Mrs Hardcastle, the audience is also taken on "a round" when they suppose themselves going forward, with the play largely ending up in the same place it began.
