[In the following essay, Taylor examines early critical reaction to Sheridan's satirical drama The Rivals.]

The withdrawal of The Rivals after a disastrous opening performance at Covent Garden on 17 January 1775 is a well-established part of theatrical lore: a combination of sloppy acting and miscasting doomed the initial staging, and eleven days and some quick rewriting and recasting later, the play was successfully remounted, and it held the stage for fifteen nights. Since then it has become a mainstay of theatrical repertories, one of a handful of works representing the sprawling and diverse field of eighteenth-century theatre.

The responses of London newspaper critics to the first production suggest another possible reason for the initial failure of The Rivals: Sheridan had written a self-consciously novel play, one that set tradition and contemporaneity in conflict and satirized both. This theme is delightfully expressed by Mrs Malaprop in her muddled announcement: ‘our retrospection will now be all to the future’ (IV. ii. 136-7). Theatrical and social convention run up against the romantic sentimentalism in vogue and the patriarchal challenges of the novel and its readers. To some extent, because of the novelty of the play in its setting, characterization, language and ideology, convention-bound critics and audience members essentially missed the point. Withdrawing it from production, ostensibly for revision, served another purpose: to let the novelty of the experience sink in, to allow a second reading by an audience not so stunned by its originality.

Mark Auburn argues that the play's ‘pleasure derives from individual effects and not from a sophisticated overall informing aesthetic design’.¹ Yet it is this purposefully confused double gaze, forward and backward, that unifies the play—that informs its language, its characterizations, its plot conflict—and also helps explain the difficulties it presented to its first audience and reviewers. Critics and producers who conflate The Rivals with The Man of Mode, or The Way of the World, or The Beaux’ Stratagem are also missing the point: Sheridan did not write Restoration comedies. The play itself inscribes a theatrical tradition for satiric purposes, but its newness is its raison d’être, its structure, its language, its thematic centre. It is a rivalry of a triumphant present over a ridiculous past. John Loftis argues that Sheridan ‘took promising dramatic materials’ from Restoration comedy, ‘reworking them in his own idiom’.² This new idiom—and not the well-rehearsed plot conventions that critics denounced—is the central dramatic vehicle, established in the opening dialogue between the Coachman and Fag:

Fag … none of the London whips of any degree of Ton wear wigs now.

Coach More's the pity! more's the pity, I say.—Odd's life! when I heard how the lawyers and doctors had took to their own hair, I thought how ’twould go next … believe me, Mr Fag: and look’ee, I’ll never gi’ up mine—the lawyers and doctors may do as they will. (I.i.71-8)

It is a new age to which all the characters respond: the enlightened have discarded their wigs; Bath, not London, is the centre of fashion and intrigue; young women pillage circulating libraries rather than plundering reputations at cabalistic card parties; the female protagonist conspires to lose her inheritance and marry a poor man—we are in a world turned upside down. Sheridan writes for an audience of novel readers, an audience familiar with Smollett and Mackenzie, the scandalous romances of mid-century, the idea of female quixotism. His audience must have been well aware, also, of the persistent Tory attacks against the novel as a threat to patriarchal control—attacks that are pilloried as mindless and dictatorial, just as the new ‘romanticism’ of the young is lampooned. The real rivalry is between those struggling awkwardly and pretentiously for novelty and those who would squelch it.

Two years later, audiences were ready to applaud, and critics to accept, Sheridan's novelty. The School for Scandal was ‘admirably suited to the present aera’ (Gazetteer, 10 May 1777). The reviewer for the London Evening Post announced: ‘Under this poetical St George, we may expect to see the Dragon of mere sentimental drama entirely subdued, and the standard of real comedy once more unfurled’ (8-10 May 1777). The propaganda war passed from Goldsmith to Sheridan had been won: while somehow becoming the new Congreve, as the Gazetteer proclaimed, Sheridan apparently captained the triumph of the new laughing comedy over sentimentalism. The reviewer for the Morning Chronicle suggests that with some revision the new play might have been titled The Man of Sentiment (24 May 1777). Sentiment, though, was not a dragon to be slain, but the conceptual embodiment of modernity. It was the vortex around which swirled ideological confusion, hypocrisy, and misjudgement—a rivalry of competing definitions and sensibilities. Sheridan's triumph, here, lies not in his savaging the reigning genres of sentimentalism, but in offering a clarifying corrective: dropping the screen of ambiguity that veiled contemporary treatments of the sentimental ideal and offering his own comic vision.

Is The School for Scandal somehow a better play than The Rivals? Did Sheridan's dramatic abilities mature to such an extent that in less than two years he could develop from a clumsy hack to the greatest dramatist of his generation—as his reviewers would seem to have it? Attempts to explain the difference between the two plays have, by and large, followed a critical line established by Thomas Moore in his Memoirs of Sheridan: ‘With much less wit, it [The Rivals] exhibits perhaps more humour than The School for Scandal.’³ Such impressionistic analysis is almost completely unhelpful in revealing why one play succeeded and one failed upon their initial appearances. Perhaps the two plays are much more of a piece than critics have been willing to accept: both topical and colloquial, both structured around ideological rivalries, both offering linguistic inventiveness and new character types, rather than original ‘fables’, for comic effect.

The Rivals was the only new comic mainpiece mounted at Covent Garden in the 1774-5 season. Four days before its opening, the company revived She Stoops to Conquer, which had begun its initial run on 15 March 1773.⁴ The revival might have been an attempt to prepare audiences for the new comedy—with the implicit message: The Rivals is the same sort of comedy as Goldsmith's hit. The character of Acres was easily recognizable as ‘a second Tony Lumpkin’ (Public Ledger, 18 January 1775). Jane Green, who had played Mrs Hardcastle, was cast as Mrs Malaprop. As a veteran performer of ‘conspiratorial chambermaids, eccentric maiden ladies, and silly hostesses’, Green appeared to be the perfect choice to create Mrs Malaprop.⁵ Edward Shuter, a veteran of three decades on the stage and Goldsmith's first Hardcastle, seemed an equally apt choice for Sir Anthony Absolute.⁶ Both casting choices reinforced the idea of The Rivals as the new She Stoops, a new ‘laughing comedy’ antidote for the ills of sentimental comedy.

Critics of the opening performance enumerated a series of damning flaws. ‘This Comedy was acted so imperfectly, either from the Timidity of the Actors on a first Night's Performance, or from an improper Distribution of Parts, that it was generally disapproved’ (St James Chronicle, 17-19 January 1775); ‘Shuter was … shamefully imperfect’ (Morning Chronicle, 18 January 1775). Reviewers barely noticed Jane Green's Mrs Malaprop until the play was returned. How is it that veteran cast members, many of whom had appeared in apparently similar roles, by all accounts botched the opening performance? In her study of experimental language in Sheridan's plays, Christine Wiesenthal provides a partial answer: ‘in the inexperienced hands of an exuberant, young comic playwright, two essentially antagonistic discourses begin to compete against one another’.⁷ What critics have identified as a structural ambivalence, reflected in the play's awkward diction, further reinforces the central conflict in the play: both the romantic excesses of novelty and the eccentricities and irrationality of the old order are exposed and placed in conflict—a confusion embodied in Mrs Malaprop's infectious verbal chaos. Incredibly, critics seemed to miss the Malaprop game so central to the play's comic inventiveness: ‘The diction is an odd mixture of the elegant and the absurd. Some of the scenes are written in a very masterly stile; others in a low, farcical kind of dialogue’ (St James Chronicle, 17-19 January 1775); ‘in language it is defective to an extreme’ (Public Ledger, 18 January 1775). Such is the result of the clashing cultural assumptions that Sheridan is recording, but for reviewers characters such as Malaprop were not ‘copied from nature’ and her language was a ‘defect’ in the playwright's skill (Morning Chronicle, 18 January 1775). The Public Ledger condemned the ‘shameful absurdities in language’ apparently without recognizing the source and satiric intention of these ‘absurdities’ (18 January 1775). While it is possible that the acting difficulties were a product of laziness on the part of Shuter and others, it is equally plausible that the performers were unprepared for the complex play of language and the demands of creating new character types.

For at least one observer, the language of the play was strikingly realistic, ‘more natural, as coming nearer the current coin of ordinary conversation’ than The School for Scandal.⁸ The younger characters employ a contemporary jargon replete with allusions to the social milieu of the mid-1770s. Such a commitment to contemporaneity was another breach of decorum.

Also singled out for critical condemnation was John Lee's Sir Lucius O’Trigger. Irish stereotypes and social prejudice against the Irish generally were so commonplace that the sanctimonious objections to Lee's O’Trigger are somewhat surprising. Lee was another well-established performer who had acted in Ireland in the early 1770s and who had also managed at Bath, ideal credentials, one might assume, for the role.⁹ And yet response to his character was universally hostile: ‘What the Devil Business can he have with the Part of a mere Irishman?’ (St James Chronicle, 17-19 January 1775); ‘This representation of Sir Lucius is indeed an affront to the common sense of an audience, and is so far from giving the manners of our brave and worthy neighbours, that it scarce equals the picture of a respectable Hotentot’ (Morning Chronicle, 18 January 1775); ‘the casting Mr Lee for the part of Lucius O’Trigger, is a blunder of the first brogue’ (Morning Chronicle, 20 January 1775). This latter review pointed to inconsistencies in dialect and the fact that Lee was not ‘Irish enough’ to pull off the role. A correspondent to the Morning Post claimed never to have seen ‘a portrait of an Irish Gentleman, permitted so openly to insult the country upon the boards of an English theatre’ (Morning Post, 21 January 1775). The revised and recast O’Trigger is largely stripped of ethnic identity: he is an old fool, whose function is to articulate antiquated ideas about honour and courtship—most notably realized in his promoting the ludicrous duel between Acres and Absolute. His interference, like that of the other old fools in the play, invites the possibility of a murderous outcome to the various romantic intrigues.

The objections to the original O’Trigger anticipate a serious problem in producing Sheridan: the racist and anti-Semitic epithets mouthed by fools and heroes alike. ‘I hated your poor dear uncle before marriage as if he’d been a black-a-moor,’ proclaims Mrs Malaprop (I.ii.174-5); ‘the lady shall be as ugly as I choose … she shall have a skin like a mummy, and the beard of a Jew’ (II.i.361-4); ‘though I were an æthiop, you’d think none so fair’ (III.ii.65-6). The anti-Semitism that runs throughout The School for Scandal produces palpable discomfort in contemporary audiences, and no amount of directorial cutting easily eliminates it. Ironically, London audiences now seem less sensitive—or perhaps more accustomed—to Irish stereotypes than to these other forms of bigotry.

Another moral objection to the play was to its ‘numberless oaths’ (Morning Chronicle, 27 January 1775). For Sheridan, though, cursing is more than an isolated technique for character development or a means of achieving shock value; it is a means of underscoring his theme: new-fangled cursing versus ludicrously outdated cursing, both of which add to a delightful bewilderment that interferes with communication and causes further generational separation. For reviewers, though, cursing was a violation of decorum and delicacy, and ‘One of the Pit’, writing to the Morning Chronicle, threatens the author on this subject: ‘the English are not sudden, but strong in their resentments, and if he persists in such scandalous negligence of his duty, he may one day experience it’ (27 January 1775). Absolute remarks that Acres' ‘Odds whips and wheels’ and ‘Odd's Blushes and Blooms’ and ‘Odds Crickets’ represent ‘an odd kind of a new method of swearing’ (II.i.258-9). Acres blunders, as do his cohorts in foolishness, in trying to modernize himself. His efforts are foiled by a comic duality: he opposes the modern system of ‘Sentimental swearing’ (II.i.268) and is tradition-bound. Of oaths he declares that ‘nothing but their antiquity makes them respectable … the “oath should be an echo to the sense”’ (II.i.263-7). He is a perverse upholder of the ‘old learning’, of the Augustan aesthetic, and so his own attempts at novelty are hopelessly outmoded, another instance of ‘future retrospection’.

Reviewers also complained about the excessive length of the play: ‘insufferably tedious’ (Morning Chronicle, 18 January 1775); ‘lulled several of the middle gallery spectators into a profound Sleep’ (Public Ledger, 18 January 1775); ‘a full hour longer in the representation than any piece on the stage’ (Morning Chronicle, 20 January 1775). This response is most puzzling given the almost invariable sprightliness of Sheridan's plays in performance. Was his first audience asleep? Some of those attending the first revival apparently hissed when they noticed that a comic scene involving Lydia had been cut (Morning Post, 30 January 1775). Audiences had, indeed, been accustomed to shorter pieces designed to accommodate the double-billing that was typical at both Drury Lane and Covent Garden.

Another possible solution concerns the novelty of the plot. Novel-readers in the audience might have recognized a structural looseness and digressiveness typical in the fiction of the period. In the plot and language of The Rivals and in its patterns of allusion, Sheridan inscribes a rivalry between the drama and the novel. The relationship between late-eighteenth-century theatre and the novel was roughly analogous to the current one between the novel and television: one medium overtaken in popularity and influence by another; a form of entertainment struggling for currency and relevance while acutely aware of the cultural ascendancy of another form. Much like the self-reflexive concern with novel-reading and readers in the novels themselves, Sheridan's play, in another act of ‘future retrospection’, lampoons the theatrical tradition while pillorying the influence of the novel on custom and language.

If the opening conversation about wiglessness signifies a struggle between the old and new in fashion, the dialogue that opens Scene ii between Lucy and Lydia establishes the female protagonist as a woman of the moment, a devourer of novels and a denizen of circulating libraries. The items on her latest novelistic menu were all recent publications, two, The Fatal Connection (1773) and The Tears of Sensibility (1773), published only a year before the play was written. Like Charlotte Lennox's Arabella, Sheridan's Lydia had been nursed on the romance; but unlike Arabella, who had educated herself on bad translations of old French romances, Lydia's preferences were strictly modern. She is the embodiment of a Tory nightmare: a young woman scorning paternal authority, hell-bent on an improper alliance, devoid of common sense. Arcane and serious tomes such as The Whole Duty of Man (1659) are useful only for hair-pressing—a moribund ideology impressed into the service of modishness.

At the same time, Lydia functions to mock the outmoded manner of courtship preferred by her aunt, Mrs Malaprop, who assumes the hackneyed pastoral pseudonym ‘Delia’, and who has chosen as her object of affection a ‘tall Irish baronet’—presumably an equal affront to fashion (I.ii.49). When her aunt and Sir Anthony Absolute approach, the trappings of modernity must be hidden and the furnishings of propriety displayed: James Fordyce's sermons and Lord Chesterfield's Letters conceal Smollett and Mackenzie and Lydia's volumes of scandalous memoirs (I.ii.137-46). Sir Anthony then harangues against ‘teaching girls to read’ (I.ii.186), while his rhetorical partner Mrs Malaprop insists that Lydia ‘illiterate’ her lover from her memory (I.ii.154). By the time Mrs Malaprop speaks out against serious education for women, Sheridan's audience should have learned to read her ironically. Clearly, Mrs Malaprop's charm-school view is as empty a system as Lydia's education-by-novel.

Another obvious influence of the novel in The Rivals is its ‘sentimentalism’, evidenced by its characterizations, by overt textual treatment of the idea, and by the critical reaction to the play. The principals are novelistic protagonists to the extent that they conceive of romance and of themselves as lovers. Even the relatively pragmatic Julia describes her lover Faulkland as a typical romantic hero: ‘being unhackney’d in the passion, his affection is ardent and sincere; and as it engrosses his whole soul, he expects every thought and emotion of his mistress to move in unison with his’ (I.ii.103-6). Captain Absolute, too, is a self-described sentimentalist. Like Malaprop's diction, Lydia's romanticism is contagious, and her lover admits: ‘Am not I a lover; aye, and a romantic one, too? Yet do I carry every where with me such a confounded farago of doubts, fears, hopes, wishes, and all the flimsy furniture of a country Miss's brain!’ (II.i.74-6). Like Lydia, the Captain sees duty and obedience as a dusty veneer concealing passion and independence. The idea of arranged marriage is an anachronistic fraud—his father, after all, ‘married himself for love’ (II.i.397)—to be defeated by ingenuity. Yet when his scheming goes awry, he blames his lover's sentimental inclinations: ‘Lydia is romantic—dev’lish romantic, and very absurd of course’ (V.ii.49-50). Sentimentalism, as a code-word for modishness, is a satiric target—‘sentimental swearing’ or the ‘sentimental elopement’ Lydia had planned—and the antithesis of a ‘Smithfield bargain’ view of courtship that is equally ridiculous.

Reviewers of The Rivals did not know what to make of this theme: ‘the characters of Faulkland and Julia are even beyond the pitch of sentimental comedy, and may be not improperly stiled metaphysical’ (Morning Chronicle, 18 January 1775). Clearly, if the play had indeed been marketed as a successor to She Stoops to Conquer, Sheridan had been positioning his work in opposition to sentimental comedy. In ‘An Essay on the Theatre’ for Westminster Magazine (January 1773), Goldsmith advocated ‘laughing comedy’, in which category theatre historians have subsequently placed Sheridan's works, as a sort of antidote to sentimentalism. However, Sheridan's reviewers almost unanimously accused him of outré sentimentalism, without recognizing his satiric aim.

Among critics, however, the word sentimental was not entirely pejorative. Responding to the revised production, the Morning Chronicle extols ‘some of the most affecting sentimental scenes I ever remember to have met with’ (Morning Chronicle, 27 January 1775). On the other hand, the tenor of the Morning Post reviewer's comments of 31 January 1775 more or less reflects the play's subsequent reputation: ‘sentimental blockheads, so much admired by the gaping multitude of our century, were not a little disappointed at the success of Mr Sheridan’. The play, then, lives as a triumph over sentimentalism. Sheridan's comedy survives, and rival offerings such as Isaac Bickerstaff's Love in a Village, Ambrose Phillips' The Distress’d Mother and Thomas Francklin's Matilda are forgotten.

John Loftis casts Sheridan as a social conservative: ‘His authorial judgments … reveal a reverence for English social institutions as marked as that of Henry Fielding.’¹⁰ Yet The Rivals was in many ways a risky undertaking, an attack levelled on both the ancients and moderns. There is no Alworthy among Sheridan's aristocrats: they have hollow notions of honour, their authority is suspect, their language gibberish, their education vapid. If, as reviewers complained, the plot conflicts and resolution of The Rivals are wildly implausible, and its structure loose and digressive, Sheridan is responding satirically to the influence of a fashionable sentimentalism inscribed in the novel. The important rivalry, here, is not between suitors but between the foolishness of the old and the absurdities of the young. The result is miscommunication, malapropism, a purposeful clash of styles which critics, bound by absolute notions of decorum, could only describe as the flaws of an inexperienced playwright. Loftis describes the world of The Rivals as one ‘of social and financial practicality familiar in Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy, in which a rich and repulsive suitor such as Bob Acres might be rejected in favour of a rich and attractive suitor such as Jack Absolute, but in which misalliances do not occur except as a form of punishment, outside the absurd fantasies of a girl whose head has been turned by reading novels’.¹¹ What separates the play from its comic predecessors and situates it in mid-1770s London is its novelty, its idiomatic contemporaneity, its confusion of language and cultural identity. Mackenzie has met Lord Chesterfield; Smollett is duelling with ‘the learned and pious author of The Whole Duty of Man’; the ‘deep play’ has moved from London to Bath and—more ominously—from the theatre to the novel.

By 1777, when Drury Lane introduced The School for Scandal, critics were prepared to overlook the playwright's derivative plotting and linguistic ‘awkwardness’. They recognized the topicality of Sheridan's moral concern and that Sheridan was targeting hypocrisy, one of the ‘prevailing vices of the times’ through which many ‘assume the appearance of men of virtue and sentiment’ (Morning Chronicle, 9 May 1777). Beyond its titular concern with gossip and its archaic Wycherley-like plot, the play is an arena for competing visions of modernity—specifically, for defining a moral ideal, the idea of sentiment that dominated late-eighteenth-century discourse. Hypocrites and debauchees, young and old—all appropriate and misappropriate the term in their efforts to make moral judgements. The rivalry in this play is not so much a generational one, but a semantic one between competing visions of the sentimental ideal.

Sheridan's first scene establishes the social problem or challenge that unifies the play: distinguishing the ‘man of Sentiment’ from the ‘Sentimental Knave’. The audience must recognize that the scandal school has corrupted the virtues of ‘sensibility’ and ‘sentiment’: Surface speaks of Mr Snake's ‘sensibility and discernment’; and Surface is ‘moral’ because he is ‘a man of Sentiment’; he mistrusts Snake because he ‘hasn’t Virtue enough to be faithful even to his own Villainy’ (I.i.73-122). Scandal is the machinery that has circulated this ethical perversion.

In the National Theatre's 1990 production at the Olivier, Peter Wood's visual metaphor for this process was newsprint, which covered the flat surfaces of the set; even the furniture was papered over by scandal. If the ‘country wife’ plot has recognizable seventeenth-century roots, the implicit attack on the ascendant print culture is distinctly late Georgian, when the threat, as Sir Peter puts it, of being ‘paragraph’d—in the news-Papers' is a prevailing trope for loss of reputation (I.ii.13-14).

Like The Rivals, The School for Scandal has its ‘old fools’: Mrs Candour, a variation of the Mrs Malaprop character, asks Lady Sneerwell, ‘how have you been this Century’ (I.i.165-6); Sir Peter is essentially a ‘Pinchwife’. Their principal fault, though, is in either distorting or failing to comprehend the modern idea of sentiment. Sir Peter mistakes Joseph Surface as ‘a man of Sentiment’ (I.ii.51). For Lady Sneerwell, sentiment is merely an affectation to ‘study’ (I.i.351-2). For Joseph, ‘sentimental’ is little more than the characteristic of his favourite French plate (V.ii.106-7). The young lovers Maria and Charles represent true sentiment, Maria for her discernment, Charles for his generosity and honesty. The importance of this theme lies not only in Sheridan's verbal insistence upon it throughout the play but also in the climactic comic moment. When Charles throws down the screen—arguably one of the most sublimely funny moments in all of comedy—hypocrisy is unveiled, and virtue revealed. The punchline, here, is Charles's mocking echo of Sir Peter: ‘there’s nothing in the world so noble as a man of Sentiment!’ (IV.iii.385-6). The stage directions then suggest a long silence: the point has been made; nothing further remains to be said.

If Goldsmith had established a self-serving critical rivalry between laughing comedy and sentimental comedy, Sheridan weaves this rivalry into the fabric of his two best-known plays. Sentimentalism becomes a comic theme, a pivotal issue that separates generations and divides the virtuous and the fraudulent. Further confusing the rivalry between an antiquated and paternalistic older generation and an absurdly ‘romantic’ younger one is the obscuring medium of gossip—private conflict made public. Newsprint becomes the metaphor for ‘future retrospection’: language used to distort and deceive, past values and current fashions jumbled. Clarity of vision and expression become heroic acts.

While bad acting probably contributed to sabotaging the initial performance of The Rivals, the evidence of critical response suggests that audiences and reviewers were unprepared for a new play about newness. Strategically linking the production to Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer failed because, quite obviously, Sheridan is not Goldsmith. Unlike Goldsmith's comedy, Sheridan's plays attempt to inscribe a historical present: where clear communication has become nearly impossible, where equally absurd new and old systems of thought compete, where deception is fashionable. Given the thematic and linguistic complexity of his plays, it is hardly surprising that Sheridan's work needed to ‘sink in’. Even the critical reception of The School for Scandal involved a sort of ‘future retrospection’: Sheridan captures the modern era because he is a new Congreve—The Way of the World in 1777. Needless to say, Sheridan is not Congreve either.

Notes

1. M. S. Auburn, Sheridan's Comedies: Their Contexts and Achievements (Lincoln, NB, 1977), p. 36.

2. J. Loftis, Sheridan and the Drama of Georgian England (Oxford, 1976), p. 43.

3. T. Moore, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London, 1815), i, p. 141.

4. C. B. Hogan, ed., The London Stage, 1660-1800, Part Five, 1776-1800 (Carbondale, IL, 1968).

5. P. H. Highfill, Jr, K. A. Burnim, and E. A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800, vi (Carbondale, IL, 1978), pp. 328-35.

6. A Biographical Dictionary, xiii (1991), pp. 370-84.

7. C. S. Wiesenthal, ‘Representation and Experimentation in the Major Comedies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxv(3) (Spring 1992), 311.

8. Moore, Life, i, p. 141.

9. A Biographical Dictionary, ix (1984), pp. 201-9.

10. Loftis, Sheridan and the Drama of Georgian England, p. 46.

11. Ibid., pp. 46-7.