ABSTRACT
Thomas Holcroft's most famous dramatic work, The Road to Ruin, which premiered in February 1792, is a sentimental comedy of manners in which the hero, the dissolute Harry Dornton, carelessly brings his father's bank to the brink of ruin by charging his libertine expenses against the firm's credit. The play's primary villain, Mr. Silky, seeks to take economic advantage of the Dorntons' ruin by selling the loans he holds with them at face value before other brokers can hear of the Dorntons' inability to pay them. Granville's Shylock "is more a petty dealer who has overreached himself, a comic villain to be scorned and ridiculed by the audience, than a fiendish agent nurturing murderous instincts akin to those of the medieval theological stereotype of the Jew". Holcroft's play with the Shylock stereotype is also a key element in his last comedy, The Vindictive Man, which premiered in 1806 but quickly faded from the stage.
