The Rivals | Absolute Sense in Sheridan’s The Rivals
In the following essay, Parker examines Sheridan’s
practice of ‘‘‘absolute sense,’ common sense
tempered by mirth and softened by good nature,’’
and it’s place within eighteenth-century theater.
Sheridan has frequently been accused of trying to revive a moribund dramatic tradition, namely Restoration comedy. In these terms, he becomes a kind of second-hand Congreve, and not a very good one at that. Other critics, pointing to the sentiment in his plays, accuse him of being the very thing he supposedly ridicules, a sentimentalist. Neither of these accusations, which in effect try to put Sheridan’s comedies snugly into one of two camps, takes into account what is now starting to become a critical commonplace: the Georgian period had its own view of comedy and, in its own way,...
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