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George Lillo's domestic tragedy The London Merchant: or, The History of George Barnwell (1 73 1 ) has few equals in the eighteenth century, both with regard to its own success on the stage,1 and its influence on major developments in European drama.2 One of its most intriguing aspects is to see what a variety of analytical approaches it has attracted and how many different readings they produced. Nevertheless, the fact that it is centred in a clear didactic purpose is a widely accepted premise. As Lillo's choice of an eighteen-year-old merchant's apprentice for his protagonist suggests and the play's reception history confirm,3 the primary target of this instruction were the City's youths, and particularly those bound in trade. When Lillo wrote his tragedy, this particular group was already the object of a voluminous and prospering body of instructive literature. The most conspicuous literary genres traditionally employed to this purpose were a specialized form of the conduct book and, on the stage, the Prodigal Son plays. Among the considerable number of influences on The London Merchant under discussion4, they have so far received surprisingly little attention. Due to their close proximity to Lillo's tragedy in terms of their professed purpose, but also in a number of structural and conceptual respects, their study can help to highlight Lillo's specific focus and establish a wider context to our understanding of the play. The analysis of their integration by Lillo, together with his use of elements derived from biblical allegory, will in fact lead to a qualification of its common specification as "sentimental drama" or "drama of sensibility.5
As has been repeatedly shown,6 the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke xv. 1 1-32) was first put to dramatic use in remodeling the New Comedy pattern of Plautus and Terence along explicitly didactic lines for the purposes of school drama The fundamental changes wrought in the process are put in a nutshell by E.Beck: "New Comedy is adulescens triumphans; prodigal-son comedy is senex triumphans." The tricked father or guardian and the triumphant youth of the New Comedy is replaced in the Prodigal Son plays by the repentant return of the youth from his evil ways and his gracious reception by the father figure. Merging with the traditional...