[In the following excerpt, Durant surveys Sheridan's work as a poet.]

Whether penning a sweet love lyric to Eliza, or dashing off a song for performance at the theater, or acknowledging some special occasion, great or small, Sheridan always displayed a bright flair for versifying. Excluding the songs in his major plays, his poetic canon includes at least sixty titles; and these poems embrace an immense variety of forms and subjects and obviously constitute a substantial segment of Sheridan's literary achievement.

I POETIC SATIRE: “THE RIDOTTO OF BATH”

Quite possibly he broke into print as a poet on May 9, 1771, with the publication in The Bath Chronicle of “Hymen and Hirco: A Vision,” a rather bland “Juvenalian” satire attacking Walter Long, the aging Wiltshire squire who for a time was contracted to marry Elizabeth Linley, Sheridan's own future bride. But a poem quite definitely Sheridan's appeared in The Bath Chronicle on October 10, 1771: “The Ridotto of Bath, a Panegyrick, Being an Epistle from Timothy Screw, Under Server to Messrs. Kuhf and Fitzwater, to his brother Henry, Waiter at Almack's.” The little poem satirizes the opening ball at the New Assembly Rooms of Bath—an occasion gloriously celebrated just ten days earlier on September 30—and, in doing so, it cleverly imitates the eleventh and thirteenth letters of Christopher Anstey's roistering verse novel, the New Bath Guide (1766). Executed in the anapestic couplets popularized for satire by Anstey, it also features, as one critic notes, “the same chit-chat, the same mild, laughing satire upon modish follies, the same snobbishness about social risers, and even the same ‘character’ naming” typical of the Guide—e.g., Tom Handleflask, Miss Churchface, Madame Crib’em, Peg Runt.¹ Young Sheridan obviously hoped to use the credit of Anstey's popularity, but his imitation reflects an appropriate artistic tact; for by 1771 the Guide widely symbolized the reckless mood of Bath gaiety.

The chief merit of the “Ridotto of Bath” appears in its structure. After two brief preliminary sections, events proceed chronologically from seven in the evening, when the gala begins, to one in the morning, when everyone goes home; but, within the framework of this simple structure, the poet generates a system of delightful dramatic tensions and leads through them to a final, rowdy climax. Tensions take hold even at the outset where the narrator, a veteran waiter, declares this ridotto to be the grandest of his long experience. A mock ominousness compounds these tensions when in his second brief prefatory comment the narrator tells how the Mayor of Bath, on hearing that the new entertainment parlors will house a “Red Otter,” threatens to cancel the grand opening. And the sense of foreboding generated by this threat takes emphasis, in turn, from the earliest description of the guests attending the ridotto, many of whom have ignored the regulations for dress specified by the master of ceremonies. Thus tensions inherent in the grandness of the affair are immediately heightened by the threat of cancellation and by signs of social anarchy within the company.

The climax toward which these tensions build is the assault upon the sideboard, which takes place in the long penultimate section of the poem. It is a climax prepared by a descriptive passage confirming in close detail the reader's worst fears about the company assembled: an undisciplined mob, highlighted by the glitter of cheap paste jewelry, mixing low and polite society, dancing grotesquely to the lilting jigs of oboe and fiddle. To elevate his climax even above this chaos of merriment, Sheridan introduces a dramatic pause into the narrative: the din subsides; the music stops; order presides. But out of this disconcerting silence soon rumbles a crushing stampede. Dinner is served:

Our outworks they storm’d with prowess most
           manful,
And jellies and cakes carried off by the handful;
While some our lines enter’d, with courage undaunted,
Nor quitted the trench till they’d got what they
          wanted. (122)(2)

Although the closing section of the poem covers a sizable segment of time—from the dinner hour to one o’clock in the morning—it is itself quite brief, a foreshortened denouement to the little narrative. In it, the narrator mentions the continuing “folly, confusion, and pathos” of the ridotto; but he describes no action and generates no tension. He does nothing to dissipate the impact of the chaotic dining room scene. From beginning to end, Sheridan sustains the structural integrity of his poem, always supplying detail and controlling tensions in careful support of a single, riotous climax.

Unfortunately, very little within the poem supports its effective structure. The narrative persona, Timothy Screw, assumes no clear identity, though he postures after a studied comic diffidence. The young poet's ventures into dialect humor (“Red Otter” for “ridotto,” “Hogstyegon” for “octagon,” “purdigiously” for “prodigiously,” “suffocking” for “suffocating”) fare feebly at best; and his anapests stumble badly at times, e.g., “In sympathy beat the balcony above” (121). The mere thought of a grand Bath ball, says Anstey's Simkin Bernard, “Gives life to my numbers, and strength to my verse.” Sheridan's Timothy Screw professes a comparable enthusiasm, but his numbers and verse fail to reflect it.

Despite its failings, however, “The Ridotto of Bath” earned popularity sufficient to enshrine it in the New Foundling Hospital for Wit (1771), a widely circulated anthology of current verse; and, by virtue of Sheridan's fine sense of drama and form, the little poem clearly elevates itself above mere “trifle” and “commonplace.”³ In being satire, of course, it ranks low on Sheridan's own scale of theoretical values—the values he suggests in his later poems “Clio's Protest” (1771) and “A Familiar Epistle” (1774). But, even while warning in these poems against the dangers of satire, he demonstrates in them as lively a satiric turn of mind as he demonstrates in “The Ridotto of Bath.” Certainly “Clio's Protest” shows a mastery of Hudibrastic techniques—the driving pace, the extravagant rhymes, the casual tone, the sporadic asides, the studied digressions—and “A Familiar Epistle” sees these same techniques sharpened and intensified after the manner of Charles Churchill: the feminine endings dramatically reduced, the tone perceptibly darkened, the sense of order more systematically asserted. In these two poems, as in “The Ridotto,” the young poet has major problems with the syntax, which is loose and sometimes contrived, and in the phrasal excesses which drain many lines of their rhetorical energy and graphic interest. At the same time, however, all three poems reflect his metrical and dictional versatility and his keen ear for parody and imitation. Despite his theoretical distaste for satire, Sheridan was an effective verse satirist from the start.

II FUGITIVE VERSE

Long ago Ernest Rhys concluded that “no song or lyric can hope to reach the ear of the common people which cannot draw, as the old folksongs did, on the congenial living rhythms of its own day.”⁴ Sheridan's essential poetic embraces this concept, and his sharp ear for the congenial living rhythms of his day gave rise to many an easy occasional poem. Shaping his taste for lyric verse, according to Sichel, was Sheridan's schoolboy experience with Horace, Theocritus, and Anacreon; but chiefly he immersed himself in the seventeenth-century love songs of Jonson and his school. “He stood on a lower plane than most of the Cavalier lyrists,” writes Sichel, “but none the less on a plane distinguished of its kind. And he moved there with rambling footsteps.”⁵

These footsteps ranged widely among lyric metrical reaches, traversing puckish anacreontics, lambent dactyls, lilting anapests, close-cropped iambs, a splendid variety of song-book measures, often used in intricate combinations, always fashioned to “read themselves into harmony,” after Sheridan's characteristic manner. Taken all-in-all (Rhodes collects thirty-seven in his edition), they meet virtually every specification prescribed for good occasional poetry by Frederick Locker-Lampson, the acknowledged master of vers de société. For the most part, they are “graceful, refined, and fanciful, not seldom distinguished by chastened sentiment, and often playful.” Their rhyme is “frequent and never forced.” They are marked by “tasteful moderation, high finish and completeness”; and they project a wide spectrum of attitudes and tones: “whimsically sad,” “gay and gallant,” “playfully malicious,” “tenderly ironical,” “satirically facetious.” They are rarely “flat, or ponderous, or commonplace”; and they are often graced with important “qualities of brevity and buoyancy.”⁶

Sheridan's love lyrics, most of them products of his courtship with Elizabeth Linley, not only represent the largest corpus of his occasional verse but also exemplify his best lyric craftsmanship. Although many of them spring from autobiographical roots, they carefully employ the conventional generic idiom, masking personal identities behind such pastoral names as Delia, Sylvio, Eliza, and Damon. And, while Sheridan certainly lived his personal love intensely, he remains artist enough to perceive the nicest dramatic potential of a love experience and to exercise over his poems a controlled emotional detachment. The psychological ironies of love obviously fascinate him: that in the blush of youth lovers should contemplate death, that the most intense affection is liable to transiency, that the most innocent and well-intentioned love-counsel can provoke rebuff, and that a “dear delight” companions love-depair. Sheridan seeks no logical resolution to such ironies; instead, he contrives a miniature play, a sensitive little melodrama, in which the speaker tells someone (or something) about the curious awareness love has sparked in him. The distance separating the speaker from his audience varies from poem to poem, for sometimes, as in “We Two, Each Other's Only Pride” (240), the auditor seems close at hand, ready to reply. At other times, as in “To the Recording Angel” (231), he seems far removed but spiritually accessible. At yet other times, as in “On the Death of Elizabeth Linley” (251), the tiny drama unfolds in solemn soliloquy, not self-indulgent but affecting, the pastoral names tactfully put aside.

Just as the love poems are more often experiential than argumentative, they are often more declarative than pictorial. In “The Grotto,” for example, where the despairing speaker addresses first the “grotto of moss cover’d stone” then the “willow with leaves dripping dew” (232), the physical details function less as images than as agents of dialogue. Much the same concept governs the physical detail in “To Elizabeth Linley” in which the earnest Sylvio threatens to “hate flowers, elms, sweet bird, and grove” unless Eliza now sings to him the songs she has sung earlier to the woods and trees. The charming lyric “To Laura”—which vacillates irregularly between four- and five-line ballad stanzas, concluding in a stanzaic couplet—again finds a pensive speaker addressing the Nature he sees and feels; yet here the dramatic setting assumes a clarity unusual for Sheridan, picturing “a willow of no vulgar size,” with shady boughs and roots providing a “moss-grown seat,” the tree's bark “shatter’d” (as the poet puts it) by the inscription of Laura's name. Fretted further with emphatic images of an “azure” sky, “rosy-ting’d” sunbeams, and the “roseate wings” of May, the poem offers the most highly particularized imagery in Sheridan's love verse (possibly excepting “On the Death of Elizabeth Linley”); and it suggests at the same time how small a role pictorial details play in the total effect of his lyricism. With comparable generality he celebrates in other love lyrics his lady's “eye of heav’nly blue” and her “cheek of roseate hue.” Obviously embarrassed by such formulaic descriptions, he succeeds best at lampooning them, as he does in an anacreontic beginning “I ne’er could any lustre see / In eyes that would not look on me” (225), a poem rivaling convention in the spirit of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130.

Most of the best qualities of Sheridan's love-lyricism appear in a sensitive three-stanza lyric “Dry Be That Tear,” probably dating to the courtship period 1770-72. According to Moore, this poem smacks of a French madrigal by Gibert de Montreuil, who probably had it from an Italian song by Gilles de Ménage; but Sheridan likely took the sentiment from David Hume's essay “The Epicurean,” Hume having got it from Continental sources.⁷ The first stanza runs as follows:

Dry be that tear, my gentlest love,
                    Be hush’d that struggling sigh,
Nor seasons, day, nor fate shall prove
                    More fix’d, more true than I.
Hush’d be that sigh, be dry that tear,
Cease boding doubt, cease anxious fear.—
                    Dry be that tear.

These lines suggest again that Sheridan's lyric imagination is aural, not visual; that it is declarative, not argumentative. As Sichel suggests, the poem “sets itself to music by the rise and fall of its melody.”⁸ Through patterns of repetition, it seems to savor its own sounds; its medial pauses and parallel phrases govern the tempo and sustain soft overtones even to the final muted echo: “Dry be that tear.” The remaining two stanzas evince the same closely disciplined rhetoric, the same balanced phrasal patterns (modulated as here by varying accentual meters), the same six-line ballad scheme (ababcc) with the bobbed tail-rhyme redolent of Sir Thomas Wyatt's “My Lute Awake!” Perhaps it bears saying here that the opening lines of this lyric were borrowed from a “Dwarf Elegy on a Lady of Middle Age” by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed.⁹ They so struck Sheridan's fancy that he repeated them in 1795 at the outset of an “Elegy on the Death of a British Officer,” a poem printed with “Clio's Protest” in 1819 under the title “Verses Addressed to Laura” and beginning “Scarce hush’d the sigh, scarce dried the [lingering] tear.”

Fugitive poems not treating of love turn like the love lyrics upon subtly ironic situations, but they do so quite whimsically and often quite satirically. Again the concepts are largely declarative, not closely analyzed, not logically resolved nor imaged forth. And again many a light irony tickles the poet's fancy: an urbane lady complains that the birds in Hyde Park trouble her with country sounds (241); the founder of Brooks's Club, a great moneylender, pays at last his own moral mortgage in heaven (248); Lady Anne Hamilton, indulged in every luxury, laments her “sad” human lot (253); two eminent speakers of the House of Commons lie together dead as they had “lied” living. By technical devices Sheridan touches such ironies as these with just the right twinkling of an eye, just the right hint of a smile. Thus he lets the super-urbanized Hyde Park lady speak for herself, ingenuously, in sweeping anapests (his second use of Anstey's measure), gaily effusing the innocent vacuity of bon ton taste. In the “Epitaph on Brooks,” he mixes lugubrious tones with irreverent jingle measures. He uses separated anapestic couplets to catalogue the bright good fortunes of Lady Anne Hamilton, ending each second line with the playful phrase “——poor Anne.” And, in mock incantation, as though a hymn were parodied, he eulogizes the two dead speakers of the House of Commons: “Mourn, mourn, St. Stephen's Choirs with ceaseless grieving / Two kindred spirits from the senate fled” (249).

The nice perception enabling Sheridan to define subtle social ironies also sharpens his delight in trivia—a delight inspiring, for example, a gentle mock elegy on the death of his wife's avadavat. “Each bird that is born of an egg has its date,” the little poem soulfully admits. But so special a bird as this one, schooled to its song by Elizabeth's own sweet voice, will surely outsing every Muse in heaven (249). Other poems celebrating great conflicts born of trivial things include “Lines By a Lady on the Loss of Her Trunk,” an Anstey's measure in which each terminal word rhymes with “trunk” until the poem exhausts itself for want of available rhymes (254), and “The Walse,” which coolly attributes the waltz step, introduced into England in 1812, to the craftiness of the devil who had contrived that a gentleman's hand should rest upon a lady's hip, even in public (257).

In other fugitive poems, Sheridan displays a fine flair for patriotic verse and a gift for lively political caricature. As a patriotic versifier, for example, he composed on a moment's notice two rousing songs for an interlude to Harlequin Fortunatus, a pantomime produced at Drury Lane on January 3, 1780. Both these songs develop the dulce et decorum theme: one heartens the lonely midnight watch to thoughts of glory; the other braces the soldiers at the ramparts and rings the resolute chorus “Britons, strike home revenge your country's wrong” (239). This instinct for patriotic bravura also gives rise to a much-celebrated stanza written impromptu and appended to the National Anthem to be sung at Drury Lane in special tribute to the King, who that very evening (in 1800) had narrowly escaped assassination at the theater.

As political caricaturist, Sheridan dabbled “at various dates” in a few pasquinades, impaling on the point of a rusty doggerel those political figures whose names fell naturally into swinging anapests or amphibracs: “Johnny W—-lks, Johnny W—-lks;” “Jack Ch—-ch—-ll, Jack Ch—-ch—-ll;” “Captain K—-th, Captain K—-th,” etc. (259-60). According to Crompton Rhodes, the rough-hewn, eight-line stanzas, a discrete scattering of them found among Sheridan's papers, fit the melody of a popular air beginning “Mistress Arne, Mistress Arne / It gives me concarn.”¹⁰ And while, as Moore long ago remarked, time has “removed their venom, and with it, in a great degree, their wit,”¹¹ the faded caricatures still suggest the writer's true eye for his subjects' foibles and his true aim in striking them down. Sheridan's real merit as a character poet, however, endures in “A Portrait for Amoret,” a splendid panegyric upon Mrs. Frances Crewe.

III VERSE PORTRAITURE: “A PORTRAIT FOR AMORET”

“A Portrait for Amoret” was written as a prefatory compliment to be bound with a handsome manuscript copy of The School for Scandal presented by Sheridan to Mrs. Crewe soon after the play was introduced on May 8, 1777. Correspondence between Lord Camden and David Garrick indicates that the poem was in circulation within four months after the first performance of the play,¹² but it did not appear in print until much later, and then surreptitiously, causing Sheridan, when he saw it, to remark in a letter to his second wife that Nature had made him in his youth “an ardent romantic Blockhead.”¹³

By all contemporary accounts, the incomparable Frances Crewe, only daughter of Fulke Greville, readily fired the ardor of many a fawning macaroni; but Sheridan's poem is really quite restrained and is perhaps the more ardent for its restraint. It develops in four parts: (1) an invocation to the Daughters of Calumny, promising to portray for them a lady unassailable by slander; (2) invocations to Mrs. Crewe herself (“Amoret”) and to the Muse who must portray her; (3) the portrait of Amoret, which treats in turn of her splendid bearing, her captivating manner, her arresting modesty, her intriguing lips, her tactfully “irresolute” eyes, her killing smile, her ready wit, her diffident manner (“female doubt”), her spritely heart, her taste for mirth, her refined raillery, her “scorn of folly,” and her high respect for talent; and (4) a grudging concession by the Daughters of Calumny that the lady portrayed, finally identified as Mrs. Crewe, does indeed defy all slander and envy.

Certainly Crompton Rhodes is right in complaining that the practice of printing Mrs. Crewe's name immediately beneath the title of the poem, a practice apparently customary in editions earlier than his own,¹⁴ destroys the rhetorical conceit intended by Sheridan. Rhodes is right, too, in maintaining that the poem does not, as Sichel and others have held,¹⁵ credit Mrs. Crewe with inspiring The School for Scandal, although the “adepts at Scandal's School” in the poem suggest the Scandal College of the play, especially as to types and varieties of scandalmongering. Quite irrespective of the play, it is Mrs. Crewe alone who has “cast a fatal gloom o’er Scandal's reign” (205). Sheridan specifies this emphasis not only by omitting from the poem all direct reference to The School for Scandal but also, and most importantly, by building the poem around an extended suspense conceit. Throughout all four structural segments, he withholds the true identity of his celebrated subject, heightening interest through the cumulative details of the picture. Only with the last word of the poem, spoken after an emphatic pause, does he cast aside her fictive name: “Thee my inspirer; and my model—Crewe!” And thus emphatically does he complete the portrait.

It is important to bear in mind, of course, that his device is for suspense, not for surprise. The terminal word satisfies expectation; it does not shock or outrage it. Once “A Portrait for Amoret” is completed, the reader delights that he has played the game of rhetorical suspense, and he then returns to the poem—as to any completed portrait—to delight further in its textures and lineaments. In view of Sheridan's liberal theories of prosody, “A Portrait” is the more interesting for its closely disciplined meter. It is written in heroic couplets of a highly restrictive sort. Caesuras fall customarily after the fourth, fifth, or sixth syllables. Most of the rhyming terms are “action words,” either verbs or verbals, long in pronunciation. Although many shades of verbal coloring suggest themselves, Sheridan does not allow music to smother sense. Each narrow cell of sense takes interest from its own distinctive rhetoric, contributing to a rich variety of balanced constructions—sometimes with antithesis, sometimes by echo, sometimes between equal parts, showing two stressed accents on each side a medial pause, sometimes between unequal parts, showing two stressed accents on one side the pause and three on the other. Variety derives, too, from phrasal sequences, from intricate systems of repetition, from the echo of initial terms. But, amidst all this variety, the formal identity of the heroic couplet remains strong: there is virtually no enjambment between couplets.

If Sheridan still felt in 1777, as he had felt in 1771, that versification should closely complement the subject versified, it perhaps seems curious that so formal a meter should serve the subject of this poem. But since, as Wallace Cable Brown remarks, the heroic couplet is the most rigid poetic form, it is also the form in which “the greatest variations are possible without destroying the basic pattern.”¹⁶ As Sheridan pictures Mrs. Crewe, then, the strict heroic couplet is an ideal metrical form. Within the tight framework of its basic pattern—both stanzaically and structurally—the exciting variety of Mrs. Crewe's character scintillates in the rhetorical variety of the verse.

The closing couplets of the poem mention color and outline: “And lo! each pallid hag, with blister’d tongue … Owns all the colours just; the outline true” (11. 121, 123), but apart from rhetorical and verbal effects, few colors or outlines really appear. What does appear is a careful modulation of tones, starting with the brusque and irritable apostrophe to the Daughters of Calumny (with the sharp imperative “Attend!” repeated at the outset of four couplets). Following, then, is tonal modulation to the quiet invocation of Amoret “Come, gentle Amoret … Come” (11. 25, 27). Afterward the portrait itself takes form, not in sensory detail, but in verbal tones and rhetorical schemes, helping to delineate the personal qualities of the lady portrayed. Here is a representative passage:

Adorning Fashion, unadorn’d by dress,
Simple from taste, and not from carelessness;
Discreet in gesture, in deportment mild
Not stiff with prudence, nor uncouthly wild;
No state has Amoret! no studied mien;
She frowns no goddess, and she moves no
          queen. (202)

It is the simplex munditiis convention again, managed here much more successfully than in the translations. In the first two of the couplets, the balanced four-stress lines, joined in each case by an unaccented syllable or by a monosyllabic “low” word (as Tillotson labels the device),¹⁷ point in their rhetoric a simple elegance complimenting Amoret's bearing. The third couplet, which shifts to a negative emphasis, properly accents the negative terms in its scansion, most strongly stressing in each line the single iterative term “no,” and thus really accenting only two syllables a line.

The shift in rhetoric, then, accompanies the shift in descriptive emphasis. In other words, rhetorical and verbal coloring help to delineate personal quality. And it is worth reiterating that Sheridan favors throughout the poem qualities of character over physical detail. The blush in Amoret's cheek betokens her modesty; her lips and eyelids move at the bidding of love; her taste for mirth bespeaks a contemplative mind. These and other high qualities receive form and vitality through apt tonal and rhetorical variations; and, in this tonal and rhetorical sense, the reader, like the Daughters of Calumny, must “Own the colours just; the outline true.”

IV THEATRICAL MONODY: “VERSES TO THE MEMORY OF GARRICK”

A second of Sheridan's major poems—his “Verses to the Memory of Garrick” (1779)—also features tight heroic couplets; and again the poem achieves remarkable variety within the limitations of its medium. This time, however, Sheridan calls more deliberately upon a subtle principle of metrical tensions—one serving to heighten the dramatic effects of oral presentation. In his study of English prosody in the eighteenth century, Paul Fussell sees this principle as originating in 1745 with Samuel Say's Poems on Several Occasions. It recognizes two levels of scansion in the poetic line—one based on actual sense stress, the other on theoretical or artificial stress—and holds that prosodic pleasures derive from a continuing conflict between the two levels. Where they coincide, no prosodic tensions develop; but, where they pull apart, tensions, and the consequent prosodic pleasures, result.¹⁸ Sheridan seems to suggest this concept in his unfinished treatise on prosody, in which he insists that “A verse should read itself into harmony,” asserting its own “actual rithm,” but adds that “we may vary the accent as we please and the propriety is in doing so melodiously.”¹⁹ Writing in 1775, Thomas Sheridan states the concept in yet another way by declaring that “to render numbers for any time pleasing to the ear, variety is as essential as uniformity”; and he adds that “the highest ornament of versification arises from disparity in the members, equality in the whole.”²⁰ Both the Sheridans echo Say's call for “a proper Mixture of Uniformity and Variety” to effect prosodic tension.²¹

Although written in eleven stanzas of varying lengths, the monody on Garrick falls into four distinct organizational segments; and their content suggests the discrete portions of a Classical oration. In the first, an exordium (11.1-20), the speaker points the aptness of this tribute to Garrick, a tribute properly paid here in the great actor's own theater. The second, a kind of narratio (11. 21-62), considers acting in relation to painting, sculpture, and poetry; and it concludes that of all these arts only acting stands vulnerable to time. The third, a confirmatio (11. 63-78), defines in sequence the qualities of the actor's art and proves the ephemerality of these qualities. The fourth, a peroratio (11. 79-112), urges Garrick's admirers to immortalize his artistry in their memories, since of itself it lacks enduring substance. Contemporary periodical sources indicate that “airs of a solemn nature” twice interrupt the theatrical reading of the poem.²² The first, a setting of lines nine and ten, embellishes the exordium; the second, following line seventy-eight, introduces the peroratio (perhaps covering lines 79 through 83 as set off stanzaically in the text). The elder Thomas Linley scored these interludes, introducing into them a variety of choruses, airs, and vocal ensembles. He also composed special instrumental pieces to precede and follow the recitation. Printed in four quarto pages, the music was probably sold at the theater; but it had not the distribution, certainly, that the text of the monody had.

As published by T. Evans and others late in March, 1779, the text of the monody provides several clear signals to metrical emphasis—reduced capitals, contractions, marked caesuras, exclamation points, expletives—devices showing where the poem's theoretical scansion must be observed and where it must not. The exordium, for example, features a close marriage of spoken and theoretical scansions, contractions often cementing the marriage, as in line four: “For fabled Suffe’rers, and delusive Woe.”²³ Those portions of the narratio treating of painting and sculpture also cling to prosodic wedlock, though a capitalized “His Works” in line twenty-eight offers to shatter the bond: “With undiminish’d Awe His Works are view’d.” In the third part of the narratio (the discourse on poetry), however, a prosodic tension takes hold, signaled by pronounced caesuras and trochaic substitutions as well as by reduced capitals: “The Pride of Glory—Pity's Sigh sincere—” (1. 53); “Such is Their Meed, Their Honors thus secure” (1.55). And this tension heralds the emotive climax of the piece: the confirmatio and the early portions of the peroratio (11. 63-78; 83-92).

Since the poem seeks throughout to be logically persuasive, it is nowhere passionate or irrational. In the confirmatio, however, it engages a pathos commensurate with the irony of the actor's lot. It defines in turn the qualities of his art—grace of action, adopted mien, expressive glance, gesture, harmonious speech—at last bringing the catalogue to this effective conclusion (11. 73-78).

Passion's wild break,—and Frown that awes the
          Sense,
And every Charm of gentler Eloquence—
All perishable!—like the ’Electric Fire
But strike the Frame—and as they strike expire;
Incense too pure a bodied Flame to bear,
It’s Fragrance charms the Sense, and blends with Air.

Moore writes that certain of Sheridan's friends urged him to alter line seventy-five, causing the emphatic phrase “All perishable!” to read “All doomed to perish.”²⁴ And, in refusing to make the change, Sheridan suggests the deliberate care with which he blends uniformity and variety not only here but at apt places throughout the poem. A wealth of metrical variety suggests itself even in these few lines quoted.

The trochaic patterns enforced by the initial terms “Passion's” and “Incense,” for example, precisely recall the fundamental technique of “variety in uniformity” as urged in Thomas Sheridan's lectures on reading. So do the hovering medial pauses, marked typographically by the dash, and the “demicaesuras” synchronized with them to introduce “a diversity of proportion in the measurement of the pauses” (cf. 11. 73. and 76).²⁵ The celebrated seventy-fifth line, moreover, demonstrates in the opening phrase (“All perishable!”) the intermixture of spondees and pyrrhics, a device for variety much admired by the elder Sheridan; and, in its closing phrase (“—like the ’Electric Fire”), the line engages a medial trochee calculated, as Thomas Sheridan would interpret it, to shatter melody while heightening expression.²⁶

In short, appropriate variety characterizes the entire poem. The more coolly rational passages show least prosodic tension; the more emotionally excited ones place proper oral scansion at odds with regular iambic cadence. Verbal coloring everywhere supports prosodic effects—cf, “the Meed of mournful Verse” (1. 11); “Pity's sigh sincere” (1. 53) “with Force and Feeling fraught” (1. 67)—but here, as in the “Portrait for Amoret,” the figurism remains much more rhetorical than sensuous. The poem always asserts its own integrity, its “actual rithm.” At appropriate times, however, it signals the reader to “vary the accent,” to violate the prosodic surface, to cooperate with the poetry—but not to overwhelm it—in evoking apt dramatic response.

In staging the monody as introduced at Drury Lane on March 11, 1779, Sheridan probably imitated the production ten years earlier of Garrick's own Ode Upon Dedicating a Building and Erecting a Statue to Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, for just as the ode featured choristers banked behind a statue of Shakespeare, with the reader (Garrick) and several soloists stationed in the foreground, so the monody featured a choir arranged “as at oratorios,”²⁷ with the tragic actress Mary Ann Yates standing center-forward to read the poem beside a portrait of Garrick. Except for these superficial details of production, however, the two poems are vastly unlike; for while Garrick constantly shifted the metrical pace of his poem, following the tradition of the cantata ode, Sheridan patiently plied his heroic couplets, finding metrical variety and dramatic tension in the prosodic resources of the verse.

The monody held the boards for ten performances²⁸—certainly a creditable record for a funeral oration, especially in that Garrick's jubilee ode could manage only eight. And when in 1816 Lord Byron's monody on Sheridan was read at Drury Lane, its close metrical imitation of Sheridan's poem clearly attested to Byron's view that the monody on Garrick was the best “address” in the language.²⁹

V THE PROLOGUES AND EPILOGUES AS POETRY

Considering Sheridan's prologues and epilogues among thousands of others, Mary Etta Knapp leaves no question that he closely embraced presiding convention in them. According with convention, he generally thought of prologues and epilogues as being dramatic presentations separate and distinct from the plays they preceded or followed. In composing them, he shamelessly pilfered weary conventional conceits. He warmed over many a stale and moldy theme, apparently always ready (despite the merit of the case he pleaded) to curry favor from an audience usually innocent of clear judgment and often jaded of taste. In short, Sheridan nowhere belies Miss Knapp's comfortable generalization that “the prologues and epilogues of the eighteenth century are characteristic of their own time, reflecting the minutiae of daily life, presenting the difficulties and triumphs of the theatre, obeying changes in taste, recording in a lively manner social and dramatic history.”³⁰

At the same time, however, Sheridan's pieces engage the Classic paradox of prologue writing. As Miss Knapp herself notes, and as she quotes Henry Fielding as noting in his day, the work of individual prologue-epilogue writers often asserts a striking distinctiveness, even though the general conceptual detail of their work may be largely conventional.³¹ Such, certainly, is Sheridan's case. His prologues and epilogues—only twelve in sum—add little leaven to the lump; but they clearly outline his assessment of the genre itself, suggesting his views (1) that prologues and epilogues must acknowledge the privileged position of the audience; (2) that their rhetoric is usually persuasive; (3) that their office is usually instructive; and (4) that they thrive upon formal and thematic convention.

In acknowledging the privileged position of the audience, Sheridan's prologues and epilogues see the playgoers as critics in spite of themselves. They have come to the theater to be entertained; but they seem, from the poet's point of view, to have no clear idea what constitutes good entertainment. The amorphous, corporate judgment they assert needs definition; so the prologues and epilogues define the judgment. In effect, they tell the audience what it likes and why it likes what it likes, thus to contrive a union of interests (more or less specific) between the playgoers and the play they are about to see or have just seen. Actually, then, the poet maintains authority over his audience, even as he acknowledges the audience's privileged position as critic malgré lui. Sheridan naturally delights in this sort of psychological situation; and (at least after the success of his first play) he exploits it delightfully by quite coolly manipulating the distance between his audience and the speaker of his piece.

His earliest fully extant prologue, for example (that for the second night of The Rivals, January 28, 1775), is an acting piece spoken between a sergeant-at-law and an attorney.³² Its scenic point of view and its rather formal concluding set speech, in which the sergeant pleads the young poet's brief, hold the audience at a respectful distance and seek favor through cautious and tentative flattery, as befits the precarious position of a beginner whose first play owes its second performance wholly to the extraordinary indulgence of a sympathetic first-night jury. Even in this tentativeness, however, the poet (through his solicitor) declares the audience (jury) his friend, promises that he seeks only to please, insists that he values good criticism, and utterly disarms hostility by placing the playgoers in a constructive critical position. In effect, he invites the playgoers to co-authorship with him in the play, thus subtly sharing with them responsibility for its success and its failure. They are therefore much inclined to admire its merits and to minimize its weaknesses, especially since this second performance (given eleven days after the first and revised in response to first-night criticism) reflects the young poet's sincerity in seeking their friendly aid.

His case at last favorably decided, he greets his tenth-night audience with a new and warmly intimate prologue³³ spoken by Mrs. Bulkley, who plays Julia Melville in the production; and in it she directly solicits the playgoer's indulgences not for the playwright but for the Muse. Again, however, he acknowledges the privileged position of the audience by having his speaker encourage between playgoers and playwrights a cooperative effort against the usurping bastard, sentimental comedy. He does not dictate taste; he rather defines among friends a cogent detail of good judgment. Such a covert but persistent tact characterizes even the most insolent of his prologues and epilogues.

Thus if the epilogue to Edward and Eleanora (1775) assails at the outset the marital indifference of every wife in the audience, it finally rights matters by identifying them all with the martyred heroine of the play and thereby cleverly translates insult into compliment. If the epilogue to Semiramis (1776) attacks the demands of taste by offering a serious epilogue after tragedy, rather than the conventional comic one,³⁴ it disarms criticism by applauding at last the expansive “feeling heart” of the audience. If the epilogue to The Fatal Falsehood (1779) fiercely offers to damn the mediocrity of bluestocking scribblers, it finally yields to a proper chivalry and ends with compliments “vastly civil to Female Talent,” as Sheridan puts it in a letter to Garrick.³⁵ Although psychic distance may vary from piece to piece, the controlling decorum is always the same: while honoring the audience's privilege as critic and customer, the poet asserts his own professional authority, subtly shaping the playgoer's judgment after his own.

The rhetoric of such a decorum is perforce persuasive, and the thematic aim is an instructive one. Topics for instruction in Sheridan's prologues and epilogues include not only esthetic matters but also moral and theatrical ones. For example, his prologue to The Miniature Picture (1780) points out the difficulties of meeting anticipated production schedules and then deplores the persisting popular taste for imported entertainments.³⁶ His managerial disgust for foreign art (especially the ballet and the opera) again erupts in the epilogue to The Fair Circassian (1781), where he openly laments the high salaries paid foreign performers. Quite conventional in theme, both these pieces instruct the audience to an awareness that imported art poisons the lifeblood of the English theater. On grounds both patriotic and artistic, they champion allegiance to the native stage.

Another theatrical topic, this one treated in an epilogue for a benefit play (undated), teaches the audience that an actor's lot is not a happy one—that for him the verdant springtime, which keeps playgoers out-of-doors and away from benefit performances, is often a bitter winter of the soul. Since each item of instruction implies a consequent obligation, all the prologues and epilogues treating of theatrical matters assert a moral emphasis, a clearly defined implication of oughtness. In effect, they say that playgoers ought to support the native stage, that they ought to sympathize with the manager's scheduling problems, that they ought to attend benefit performances, despite the inviting freshness of the spring. Similarly, the esthetic pieces tell the playgoers what they ought to admire and how they ought to let art—at least some forms of it—enrich their lives.

Sheridan's understanding of the prologue-epilogue genre, his sense of its integrity, apparently presupposes extensive use of formal conventions—the acting piece,³⁷ the plaintiff-jury metaphor,³⁸ the practice of having the speaker address each level of the house in turn³⁹—but, if convention dominates his work, he personalizes it, as Garrick had done, by topical involvement in it. His own political interests, for example, add substance and vitality to his several uses of the parliamentary metaphor, a structural figure used much like the plaintiff-jury convention in pointing out the judicial and legislative privilege of the audience. Similarly, his career as theater manager enlivens each topical reference to actor and stage; and his career as playwright adds natural vigor to his acting prologues and epilogues.

The persistent liveliness of his work suggests, furthermore, that he embraced convention not for want of imagination but for support of the genre itself. Since he apparently saw thematic and formal convention as nourishing the prologue and epilogue as a poetic type, he sometimes emphasized convention by deliberately departing from it. On the tenth night of The Rivals, therefore, he deliberately violates the settled practice of awarding the prologue to a man, underscoring his deliberateness by causing Mrs. Bulkley to declare herself “A female counsel in a female's cause.”⁴⁰ Consequently, he appeals to convention—the very convention he violates—to emphasize the significance of his theme. He achieves thematic emphasis through a similarly inverse process in the epilogue to Semiramis where his self-conscious and openly confessed departure from the conventional comic epilogue (after tragedy) strengthens the high seriousness of his discourse on tragic pathos.

Sheridan moved comfortably, then, within the framework of convention, sometimes personalizing it by involving himself topically in it, sometimes enlarging upon its effects by deliberately departing from it. In at least one detail, moreover, he increased the body of convention itself, adapting to the genre, through his epilogue to Hannah More's The Fatal Falsehood (1779), the tradition of the Theophrastian character.⁴¹ This same epilogue, incidentally, offers insight into Sheridan's poetic craftsmanship. His papers yield up a draft of the poem described by Sichel as “no less than one hundred and forty-five unrhymed, unrhythmical lines,” a “disjointed farrago” (I, 543). Most of these hobbled measures Sheridan discarded; others he hammered into a Theophrastian portrait cryptically typifying the domestic and artistic ambivalence of the dedicated bluestocking. It is a portrait properly said by Rhodes to be “as consummate in its finish as the neatest raillery of Pope”;⁴² and, while the poet's conceptual process might well be thought an “uncouth and bewildering way of shaping verse,” it is for him an incontestably successful process, as a few representative lines from the poem indicate. They are lines spoken by an indignant male poetaster who is urgently intent on driving “female scribblers” from the stage:

Unfinish’d here an epigram is laid,
And there, a mantua-maker's bill unpaid;
Here new-born plays fore-taste the town's applause,
There, dormant patterns pine for future gauze;
A moral essay now is all her care,
A satire next, and then a bill of fare:
A scene she now projects, and now a dish
Here's Act the First—and here—Remove with
          Fish. (276)

Unlike other playwright-prologuists, Sheridan made no gesture to abolish the prologue-epilogue tradition. That the poems bear little relevance to the plays sandwiched between them nowhere distressed his sense of theater. If the genre took roots in the audience's desire for a brief moment of intimacy with the stage, the clearly cooperated in that interest, finding its idiom all but natural to him. Apparently, he honored the tradition as a respectable mode of entertainment, one asserting its own integrity through distinctive and settled conventions and one meriting, by testimony of his achievement in it, a creative effort by no means casual and cheap but everywhere tightly imagined and artistically honest.

Notes

1. Martin S. Day, “Anstey and Anapestic Satire in the Late Eighteenth Century,” English Literary History, XV (1948), 128. Cecil Price attributes “Hymen and Hirco” to Sheridan in the Times Literary Supplement for July 11, 1958, p. 396.

2. Except where otherwise noted, page references to Sheridan's poetry cite Volume III of Plays and Poems.

3. These are Sichel's judgments (I, 314).

4. Ernest Rhys, Lyric Poetry (London, 1913), p. 370.

5. Sichel, I, 272.

6. As quoted in A Vers de Société Anthology, ed. Carolyn Wells (New York, 1907), p. xxiii.

7. Moore, I, 40-41.

8. Sichel, I, 273.

9. Ibid., 274; Plays and Poems, III, 229.

10. Plays and Poems, III, 259.

11. Moore, II, 90.

12. Plays and Poems, III, 197.

13. [15 Oct., 1814?], Letters, III, 202.

14. Plays and Poems, III, 198.

15. Sichel, I, 551.

16. Wallace Cable Brown, The Triumph of Form (Chapel Hill, 1948), p. 5.

17. Geoffrey Tillotson, On the Poetry of Pope (Oxford, 1950), p. 150.

18. Paul Fussell, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England, (New London, Conn., 1954), pp. 113-15.

19. See the beginning of Chapter 2 above. For a much fuller discussion of Sheridan's prosody in relation to the theory of tensions see Jack D. Durant, “R. B. Sheridan's ‘Verses to the Memory of Garrick’: Poetic Reading as Formal Theatre,” Southern Speech Journal, XXXV (1969), 120-31.

20. Thomas Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading (London, 1775), II, 75.

21. As quoted by Fussell, p. 113.

22. MS W. b. 479 (p. 133) in the Folger Shakespeare Library, a newspaper clipping not identified as to source (but bearing the handwritten date May 12, 1779), specifies the points at which musical interludes occur.

23. Quoting the second issue of the poem (one of several copies in the Folger collection), identical to the first except for a correction in the dedicatory epistle. A definitive text is now readily available in The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ed. Cecil Price (Oxford, 1973), II, 457-62.

24. Moore, I, 176.

25. Thomas Sheridan, Art of Reading, II, 145.

26. Ibid., 84.

27. Town and Country Magazine, XI (1779), 117.

28. The London Stage, Pt. 5, Vol. 1, records performances at Drury Lane as follows: March 11, 13, 18, 20, 25; April 10, 21, 26; May 24; June 3.

29. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero (London, 1898), II, 377. For an expanded version of this discussion of the monody, see Jack D. Durant, “R. B. Sheridan's ‘Verses to the Memory of Garrick’: Poetic Reading as Formal Theatre,” Southern Speech Journal, xxxv (1969), 120-31.

30. Knapp, p. 8.

31. Ibid., p. 28.

32. Cecil Price, in “The First Prologue to The Rivals,” Review of English Studies, new series, XX (1969), 192-95, prints the fragmentary first-night prologue as recently found at Somerville College, Oxford.

33. Such changes were not unusual. See Knapp, p. 2.

34. See Knapp, pp. 278-79.

35. January 10 [1778], Letters, I, 122.

36. For comment on this persistent theme see Knapp, pp. 178; 185.

37. Second-night prologue to The Rivals (Plays and Poems, I, 25, 26); epilogue to The Fatal Falsehood (Plays and Poems, III, 275-77). See Knapp, p. 25; 96-97.

38. Second-night prologue to The Rivals; cf. Knapp, p. 108 for precedents.

39. Epilogue to Edward and Eleanora; cf. Knapp, p. 136 for precedents.

40. Plays and Poems, I, 27.

41. See Knapp, pp. 307-308.

42. Plays and Poems, III, 277.