The prologue of “She Stoops to Conquer” takes the form of a soliloquy, with Mr Woodward, a celebrated actor, entering and directly addressing the audience as he delivers a speech alone on the stage. By starting the play in this way, Goldsmith immediately fosters an intimacy with the audience while also separating the prologue from the rest of the play, with this and the play's epilogues being the only instances of soliloquy. This is fitting, as these are also the only instances where the audience is directly invoked in a breaking of the fourth wall that gives the play a meta-textual (referring to itself) element.
By doing so, Goldsmith both starts and ends the play with an appeal to the audience to champion the laughing comedy, which he feared was going out of fashion. Likewise, the prologue and epilogues are the only sections of the play written in verse, a decision which reflects the elevated feel Goldsmith wanted these sections to hold, as he seeks to prove laughing comedies are just as legitimate as sentimental plays.
In the prologue, Goldsmith also uses the extended metaphor of the dying Comic Muse to invoke this appeal. Mr Woodward describes how a doctor is trying to rescue the Comic Muse, who is dying because nobody wants to watch traditional laughing comedies anymore. Addressing the audience, Mr Woodward outlines how the Muse may be saved:
"A Doctor comes this night to show his skill.
To cheer her heart, and give your muscles motion,
He, in Five Draughts prepar’d, presents a potion:
A kind of magic charm—for be assur’d,
If you will swallow it, the maid is cur’d:
But desperate the Doctor, and her case is
If you reject the dose, and make wry faces!"
Continuing the extended metaphor, Mr Woodward explains how the Muse (and the comedic genre) may be saved by the audience’s laughter. The doctor in this instance is therefore the playwright, Goldsmith himself, who prepares a potion in “five draughts”—or perhaps five acts—and whose success depends on the audience swallowing it. Or, in other words, if Goldsmith can make the audience laugh, the genre may not be dead after all. In elaborate terms, Goldsmith thus invokes the age-old idiom: laughter is the best medicine.
Here, Goldsmith’s use of this extended metaphor forms a playful way to appeal to the audience to enjoy the play. He is simply asking the audience, albeit in rather grand terms, to please laugh and ensure the play is a success. Indeed, Mr Woodward’s earlier reference to his dependence on the genre—with him at risk of “losing his bread” if the Muse should die—forms a tongue-in-cheek reference to Goldsmith’s own position, with his career also in peril if the laughing comedy falls out of fashion. His previous play, after all, had proven a flop, so Goldsmith needed a revival of the genre for both artistic and pragmatic reasons.
