[In the following essay, Hogan views the plotting and characterization of Sheridan's dramas as in some ways lacking, but acknowledges the brilliance of his comic language in The Rivals, The School for Scandal, and The Critic.]

Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—these two Irishmen are inevitably considered the preeminent comic talents of the English-speaking theater in the eighteenth century. Indeed, many literary historians have said that from the retirement of Congreve and the death of Farquhar early in the eighteenth century, until the appearance of Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and W. B. Yeats late in the nineteenth century, there were no dramatists who even approached the quality of Goldsmith and Sheridan.

Like all generalizations, this one is a bit too general. This long period hardly saw the profusion of masterpieces that appeared during the reign of Elizabeth I or of Charles II, and an overwhelming number of the plays produced between 1700 and 1890 now strike us as too full of high fustian and low theatrics, and too evocative of easy tears and brainless belly laughs. Still, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera has outlasted Sheridan's The Duenna, and Henry Fielding's Tom Thumb stands up nicely to Sheridan's The Critic, while some of the straight comic work of Macklin, Murphy, Garrick, Colman the Elder, and Sheridan's own mother Frances did not in the eighteenth century fall that far short of the best of Goldsmith and Sheridan themselves. And even from the more arid nineteenth century, Dion Boucicault's Old Heads and Young Hearts and T. W. Robertson's Caste might be revived with pleasure, while the airy operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan have never been out of favor.

Still, when all of the qualifications have been made, Goldsmith and Sheridan remain unlikely to be challenged in their historical preeminence, just as their best works remain unlikely to lose their popularity on the stage.

When Sheridan's first play, The Rivals, was initially produced at Covent Garden in 1775, it failed. It was too long, insufficiently rehearsed, and in one instance badly cast. Sheridan quickly cut the play and replaced the offending actor with a better, and in less than two weeks, The Rivals had become a solid success. The play has never lost its popularity. It is one of those plays that takes a perverse genius to do badly. It is almost actor-proof and director-proof, and mediocre or even distinctly bad productions can still arouse delight. It has, nonetheless, been generally considered a lesser work than The School for Scandal. Yet, if there is to be any revision in the critical opinion about Sheridan, it can only be in the upgrading of The Rivals, and a convincing case can be made that The Rivals in many ways equals and in some surpasses the worth of The School for Scandal.

Neither play is what one would call well made, and, indeed, construction was never Sheridan's strong point.¹ However, a tidy plot construction is probably an overrated quality in comedy, and even in tragedy the English-speaking theater has preferred Elizabethan sprawl to neoclassical trimness. Sheridan's faults in plotting The Rivals have been no better isolated than by the perceptive Tom Moore, who noted that

For our insight into [the] characters, we are indebted rather to their confessions than their actions. Lydia Languish, in proclaiming the extravagance of her own romantic notions, prepares us for events much more ludicrous and eccentric, than those in which the plot allows her to be concerned; and the young lady herself is scarcely more disappointed than we are, at the tameness with which her amour concludes … and the wayward, captious jealousy of Faulkland, though so highly coloured in his own representation of it, is productive of no incident answerable to such an announcement.²

This point can be applied to the relations of other characters in the play. Bob Acres and Lydia are never brought together for a confrontation; little is made of the “love affair” of Mrs. Malaprop and Sir Lucius. Despite his usefulness to the “real” plot, Acres might just as well be cut out of the play. It would have been dramaturgically tidier for the Jack-Lydia-Mrs. Malaprop-Sir Lucius imbroglio if Jack confronted Sir Lucius without the distraction of Acres. Acres's cowardice is, however, so delicious that one would no more sacrifice it than one would the windmill episode in Don Quixote. Such academic strictures are sometimes just theatrically beside the point. Despite, then, the omission of several “obligatory scenes,” an audience does not miss or even note what Sheridan might or should have done, because what he has done is totally absorbing and increasingly delightful: he has written a series of irresistible scenes, based either on ludicrous situations or characterizations. As each droll scene is succeeded by another of equal or greater interest, the audience remains so caught by the pleasure of the moment that the static or erratic quality of the plot is simply not noticed. Nevertheless, the plot must at least seem to move, and in The Rivals Sheridan's plot does lurch on toward the aborted duel. A difficulty of The School for Scandal is that for the first two acts the plot seems static.

Tom Moore sets up a persuasive but wrong-headed comparison between the language and characterization of the two plays:

With much less wit, it [The Rivals] exhibits perhaps more humour than The School for Scandal, and the dialogue, though by no means so pointed or sparkling, is, in this respect more natural, as coming nearer the current coin of ordinary conversation; whereas, the circulating medium of The School for Scandal is diamonds. The characters of The Rivals, on the contrary, are not such as occur very commonly in the world; and, instead of producing striking effects with natural and obvious materials, which is the great art and difficulty of a painter of human life, he has here overcharged most of his persons with whims and absurdities.³

This view—that the dialogue is natural but the characters are exaggerated—strikes me as only half true. Sheridan was dealing with “humours,” types, exaggerations, but the characters were not extravagant exaggerations, and so, for instance, the stage-Irishness of Sir Lucius was played down when Sheridan revised the play. The excellence of Sheridan's comic characterizations is that his types are handled with such a verve, freshness, and panache that they reinvigorate their stockness. Sir Anthony is basically the tyrannical father; Mrs. Malaprop, the superannuated dame; Sir Lucius, the Stage Irishman; and Bob Acres is a combination of rustic booby, false beau, and braggart soldier. Among the comic characters (as opposed to the straight characters of Jack and Julia), Lydia and Faulkland are the most touched with originality. Both possess the dull youth and handsomeness of innumerable young heroes and ingenues, but in Sheridan's treatment they become comic rather than straight characters because their admirable qualities are exaggerated until they become faults. In Lydia, romance becomes exaggerated to absurdity; in Faulkland, love becomes exaggerated to neurosis. Even the stock servant—a figure that has a centuries-old provenance and is little different in Wodehouse, Wilde, Vanbrugh, Machiavelli, or Terence—is made original in Sheridan. What he adds to the character of the pert servant is a charming falsity of language that the audience finds both refreshing and novel, and this addition revivifies most of Sheridan's otherwise stock characterization.

The individuality of Lydia, Faulkland, and all the less original characters, then, is established largely by their language. Rather than the natural dialogue that Tom Moore saw, the play contains a dazzling degree of unnatural and absurd dialogue. Sheridan took great pains with the writing of The Rivals, and it has throughout a graceful fluency that gives the impression of naturalness. It is, however, the unimportant parts of the play that are the most easy, natural, and realistic. The strongest parts, with the biggest laughs, are those in which a character uses language in a finely foolish fashion.

To take the most obvious example: the great comic lines of Mrs. Malaprop spring from an inspired misuse of words that is far too outlandish to be thought realistic or natural. Set in a surrounding dialogue of fluent naturalness, her marvelous mistakes of diction appear in bold relief. Mrs. Malaprop is funny because she is doubly pretentious: she is an aging woman who regards herself as still young and beautiful enough to be the object of a romantic love affair, and she is a stupid and vain woman who regards herself as a bluestocking. Her first pretension is deflated by the plot and by how the other characters regard her; her second pretension is deflated by her own language and by how the audience regards it. A character using the wrong word has long been a source of theatrical and fictional comedy.⁴ The laughter has traditionally come from the character using a wrong word that sounds like the right one. Mrs. Malaprop's best mistakes improve on this device, for the word that she chooses not only sounds like the word she meant, but it also contains a meaning that either reduces her thought to inspired nonsense or makes her say the opposite of what she intended. In her great speech about the education of young women (act 1, scene 2), she desires Lydia to know “something of the contagious countries,” and her choice of “contagious” for “contiguous” contains a brilliant bit of nonsense that, of course, indicates her own ignorance and delights the audience.

If Mrs. Malaprop's language deflates her claims to learning, Sir Anthony's deflates his own false reasoning. In his attempts to persuade Jack to be married, Sir Anthony is thwarted, and, instead of becoming more cogent and reasonable, he becomes more incoherent and emotional. So far Sheridan follows tradition: a stock father who would be the repository of wisdom, reason, and tolerance is shown to be dense, irrational, and splenetic. Sheridan again goes beyond tradition, however, for Sir Anthony's language does not merely become incoherent with anger; at its climactic and funniest it actually becomes a parody of reasoning. His brilliant exit speech of act 2, scene 1, uses the trappings of reason but winds up in the depths of infantilism.

The success of these scenes requires two characters: the faulty speaker and the clear-eyed critic. The critic is a straight character who helps the audience see what is wrong with the comic character's language and, therefore, with his character. Thus, after Sir Anthony's great outburst, Jack acts the role of critic with his ironic remark:

Mild, gentle, considerate father—I kiss your hands—What a tender method of giving his opinion in these matters Sir Anthony has!⁵

Or, in Mrs. Malaprop's great scene in act 1, it is Sir Anthony, elsewhere himself a faulty speaker, who acts the role of critic and says:

I must confess, that you are a truly moderate and politic arguer, for almost every third word you say is on my side of the question.⁶

In the Faulkland-Julia scenes, Julia acts as the critic, and so her language needs to contrast sharply with Faulkland's. In contrast to his circuitous, emotional floridness, she must be direct, simple, and reasonable. To emphasize what is wrong with his language and character, her language and character must set the rhetorical and the moral norm. Early in their first meeting (act 3, scene 2), Sheridan controls her language well, and she makes direct and terse remarks: “I had not hoped to see you again so soon,” for example, or, “Nay then, I see you have taken something ill. You must not conceal from me what it is.” Such sentences contrast effectively with Faulkland's purple effusions:

For such is my temper, Julia, that I should regard every mirthful moment in your absence as a treason to constancy:—The mutual tear that steals down the cheek of parting lovers. …⁷

Although the young Sheridan was already a master of comic language and here effectively mocks the language of sentiment, he was far from a master of serious language used to convey emotional intensity.⁸ Consequently, Julia's later, more intense speeches become as stiff, florid, and false as Faulkland's, and we find her saying in act 5, scene 1:

Then on the bosom of your wedded Julia, you may lull your keen regret to slumbering; while virtuous love, with a Cherub's hand, shall smooth the brow of upbraiding thought and pluck the thorn from compunction.⁹

Aside from the failure of serious language, the play is the performance of a virtuoso of dialogue fit to be ranked with Wilde and Shaw. The play may have a rather untidy plot, but the plot does provide a multitude of effective comic situations. The play may use stock types, but it also works original variations on these types. Finally, the play does provide a variety of false language hardly seen in English drama since the comedies of Congreve and Ben Jonson. The language of The Rivals has secured the play its high position in the English theater. It is a language that civilizes by involving its audience. It is a language that makes its audience become active critics of false language and, therefore, of false behavior.

The two main kinds of comic language are the language of humor and the language of wit. The language of humor predominates in The Rivals, and the language of wit in The School for Scandal. The language of humor misuses grammar and sentence structure and rhetorical devices to produce speech that amusingly and ignorantly diverges from a norm of commonly accepted good speech and writing. The language of wit uses grammar and sentence structure and rhetorical devices with such uncommon fluency that its speech diverges from a norm of good speech and writing by its more considerable excellence. In other words, the language of humor is purposely bad writing, and the nature of its badness is a symptom of what is wrong with the speaker. The language of wit, on the other hand, is purposely superb writing, and the nature of its excellence is a symptom of what is right with the speaker. Using the language of humor, the speaker may fail to attain a civilized norm by innate stupidity such as Dogberry's, or by lack of education such as Sam Weller's, or by provincial ignorance such as the quaint dialect flaws of the stage Irishman and Scotsman or Frenchman. Using the language of wit, as Shakespeare's Benedick and Beatrice do poorly, or as Congreve's Millamant and Mirabell do well, or as Shaw's Don Juan and Devil do consummately, the speaker exceeds the civilized norm and makes us admire his urbanity, insight, and wisdom. In the language of humor, the audience perceives a misuse of words that stems from a character fault, and the resultant laughter is critical. In the language of wit, the audience perceives a consummate use of words that stems from excellences of character, and the resultant laughter is admiring. More simply, the language of humor occasions critical laughter at stupidity, and the language of wit occasions admiring smiles at brilliance.

As the appreciation of wit is of higher worth than the perception of stupidity, so the language of wit is thought of greater worth than the language of humor. Thus a play like The School for Scandal is more highly regarded than a play like The Rivals. Yet this attitude may be suspect, for both comic languages actively engage the judgment of their auditors, and both comic languages use quite complex techniques. If there is an innate difference of value between the two comic languages, it must lie in the content. The language of wit has occasionally been used, notably in some plays by Shaw, to discuss more complex themes than the drama usually handles.

The School for Scandal, largely because of its witty language, has been Sheridan's most admired play. The play was first produced at Drury Lane on 8 May 1777 and has held the boards ever since. The scandal scenes in particular have been considered a triumph of witty language, and they will only work, indeed, because they are witty. The danger of these scenes, particularly in a poor production, is that they are static. Nothing happens in them. The plot does not advance, and one of the viewers at the play's brilliant premiere was even heard to grumble that he wondered when the author was going to get on with the story.

But, of course, the stories themselves are not well structured. To take only one example, the heroine, Maria, has quite a small part. She is off the stage through most of the crucial acts and, amazingly, is not even confronted with the hero until the very denouement in act 5. As with The Rivals, one could pile up a dozen instances of what Sheridan had to do with his plot and did not do. But, also as with The Rivals, one must admit that what he did do instead is so delightful and absorbing that his audience is thoroughly satisfied.

Sheridan makes some use of more individualized characterization in this play. There are well-defined stock types such as Mrs. Candour and Sir Benjamin Backbite, but Sir Peter and Lady Teazle are rather fuller than types, and in Charles and particularly in Joseph, Sheridan cuts beneath the surface and finds contradictions and something approaching complexity. Joseph, the apparently good but actually hypocritical brother, was regarded by Sheridan's sisters as a sketch of their own older brother, Charles. In any event, Joseph is a meaty acting role, even if not quite a fully fleshed-out one. He is, however, closer to reality than the great comic monsters of a Volpone or a Tartuffe. In Charles, it may not be stretching a point to see some of Richard Sheridan's own carelessness and casual mismanagement. But, like everyone, Sheridan had a good deal of tolerance for his own foibles, and so does his audience have a good deal of tolerance for the erring but basically good-hearted Charles. From this crucial attitude, much of the sunniness of the play can be traced.

The rhetorical showpieces of the play are the great scandal-mongering scenes of acts 1 and 2, in which the chorus of gossips, with bubbling spirits and brilliant technique, rends and shreds reputations. It is curious that the strength of these scenes arises from exquisitely phrased malice. Lady Sneerwell says in explanation that “there’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill nature: the malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it stick.”

Certainly it is true that Maria and Sir Peter, the unmalicious characters in the scandal scenes, are able to counter the witty malice with no more than direct statement, which is ineffective, and with honest dignity, which appears stuffy. Yet, while neither Maria nor Sir Peter is a match for witty malice, that does not mean that a match could not be found. A well-equipped Shavian wit, such as Sidney Trefusis or Don Juan, could have more than upheld the side of sense and worth with equal rhetorical cleverness and by substituting gaiety for malice.

It seems generally taken for granted that Sheridan's scandalmongers are deplorable, but it has not been much noticed that their critiques are correct. An audience would not laugh at their jokes unless their victims deserved laughter. Mrs. Evergreen, discussed in act 2, is mutton trying to pass as lamb; Miss Simper and Miss Prim are foolishly vain; Mrs. Pursy, although too fat, attempts to appear slim; Lady Stucco, although too old, attempts to appear beautiful. All of these victims deserve the lash of satire, and the audience laughs at popular pretensions deservedly deflated. The scandalmongers, then, are joke makers and, like all joke makers, are necessarily moralists. Why, then, are they themselves funny?

The reason, of course, is that they live in glass houses. The delight they take in other people's failings is wedded to their perfect ignorance of their own. Once again Sheridan worked a new twist upon old material and conveyed his truths by the vehicles of folly.

In the language of humor, which Sheridan basically used in The Rivals, the audience laughs at language faultily used and so becomes, en masse, a literary critic. In the language of wit, which Sheridan frequently used in The School for Scandal, the audience laughs at language cleverly used and becomes a literary appreciator. The point might be proved by taking any of The School for Scandal's well-turned jokes and rephrasing them. Almost invariably the rephrasing lessens—if not, indeed, destroys—the strength of the joke. For instance, in act 1, the poetaster Sir Benjamin Backbite unknowingly makes a joke against his own vapid verses when he describes the appearance of his forthcoming slim volume: “a beautiful quarto page, where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin.” The delight of the joke comes from two sources, one obvious and one rather subliminal. The obvious point is the originality of the metaphor; the subtler point is the reinforcement of sound, first in the t's of “neat Rivulet of text,” and next in the m's of “meander through a meadow of margin.” To rephrase the remark in unmetaphorical and unalliterative statement is to arrive at something like: “a beautiful quarto page, where a few lines are set off by a wide margin.”

We catch Sheridan's neatly conceived and deftly turned statement on the wing, and our appreciative laughter is instantaneous. It is, therefore, unnecessary as well as uncivilized to spend more space in reducing clearly successful jokes to baldly tedious statements. However, it might be noted that Sheridan pushes his audience to appreciate wit in another way, and he does so by smoothly inserting some literary criteria. Several times he actually ensures that his audience will laugh by telling them what and even how to appreciate.

For instance, in the play's opening dialogue, Snake and Lady Sneerwell almost immediately launch into a rhetorical consideration of Lady Clackitt's gossip:

Lady Sneerwell: She certainly has Talents, but her manner is gross.

Snake: Tis very true—she generally designs well—has a free tongue and a bold invention—but her colouring is too dark and her outline often extravagant. She wants that delicacy of Hint—and mellowness of sneer which distinguish your ladyship's Scandal.¹⁰

In a similar manner, Sheridan sets up the rhetorical techniques of Crabtree and Mrs. Candour.

But perhaps to say more about the high quality and the manifold techniques of Sheridan's comic language would be tedious. A good joke does not need to be explained. It startlingly explodes into perfect and unexpected obviousness, and our instantaneous laughter results from our perfect but unexpected perception. Let it merely be asserted, then, that Sheridan's command of the widest variety of rhetorical techniques is consummate. When one thinks of the flabby badinage that passes for wit between Shakespeare's Beatrice and Benedick, one can only turn with relief and delight to a Congreve, a Wilde, a Shaw—or a Sheridan.

But perhaps the greatest quality of Sheridan's comic writing is one that he shares with Goldsmith—a sunny good nature deriving from a benevolent tolerance. Neither Sheridan nor Goldsmith says much in his plays, but in their one shared, pervasive quality they imply an attitude that imparts to their work something often lacking in the work of even their greatest colleagues. That attitude is charm. Charm is usually an underrated quality, assigned to minor writers such as Charles Lamb or Kenneth Grahame. Perhaps it is easier to allow them a trivial excellence than to analyze their excellence seriously. But is charm so trivial? In Sheridan, are we not charmed because we are reminded of the vital fact that it is awfully nice to be alive? This humanity as Virginia Woolf noted, “was part of his charm” and “still warms his writing.”¹¹

It is too arbitrary to limit comic language to two kinds only, the language of humor and the language of wit. There is at least one other, albeit minor, kind. What of the language of imitation, the language of parody that satirizes presumptive excellence by exaggerating its faults? This is a rarer use of comic language, limited mainly to the criticism of literary forms, but it certainly does appear in plays.

The three great examples of parody or burlesque in English drama are Buckingham's The Rehearsal (1671), Fielding's Tom Thumb (1731), and Sheridan's The Critic (1779).¹²The Critic pushed The Rehearsal off the stage, and Fielding's delightful play presents such problems of staging that it has always been more popular in the study than on the boards. Only The Critic is still occasionally performed today, even though the stage style it lampooned is two centuries out of date.

Sheridan's second and third acts in The Critic have some brilliantly bad writing, although not nearly the profusion found in Fielding. Sheridan compensates, however, by satirizing the complete theatrical experience. Thus, he has many more visual and aural gags than does Fielding. Indeed, if we are to consider the play solely as literature, it tails off disappointingly because Sheridan does not rely on words at the conclusion but, rather, on a parody of excessive stage spectacle. In the original staging at Drury Lane, the spectacular visual conclusion satisfyingly topped everything that had gone before. On paper, little of this effect can be apparent; on the modern stage, all of this effect can be a problem.

The purely literary content, however, is so fine that the play has always been admired as the third of Sheridan's masterpieces. Indeed, he himself regarded the first act as the most finished piece of dramatic writing he had done. The act is a brilliant piece of work, and a chief excellence is that it gets its laughs while actually establishing the rules for laughing. Some of the generalizations established in act 1 are also aids for judging the ineptitudes of the play-within-the-play of acts 2 and 3.

Act 1 falls into three major scenes: the dialogue between Mr. Dangle and Sneer, the baiting of Sir Fretful Plagiary, and the rhetorical exhibition of Mr. Puff. In the Dangle-Sneer dialogue, some criticisms are made about the incompatibility of comedy and overt moralizing, which had been joined in popular sentimental comedies of Richard Steele and others. There is briefly even some criticism of the bad writing of sentimental comedy. It has too much nicety: “No double entendre, no smart innuendo admitted; even Vanburgh [sic] and Congreve obliged to undergo a bungling reformation!”¹³ The Sir Fretful scene is a humorous criticism of a poor but egotistical playwright, à la Buckingham's Bayes, and the character is something of a cartoon of Richard Cumberland.¹⁴ But even in this scene a number of axioms about false and inflated language are insinuated. For example:

In your more serious efforts … your bombast would be less intolerable, if the thoughts were ever suited to the expression; but the homeliness of the sentiment stares thro’ the fantastic encumbrance of its fine language, like a clown in one of the new uniforms!¹⁵

Later, in the play-within-the-play, this fault is illustrated abundantly and with delightful inanity. Then, after the broad interlude of non-English and broken English in the little scene of the Italian singers and the French interpreter, comes the great scene in which Mr. Puff analyzes the varieties of false language that composed contemporary advertising. The passage is too long to quote in full, but in it Sheridan bombards his audience with false fluency and, in effect, forces each member to see that it is false and to become a literary critic. For instance, part of Mr. Puff's illustration of the Puff Direct reads:

Characters strongly drawn—highly coloured—hand of a master—fund of genuine humour—mine of invention—neat dialogue—attic salt! Then for the performance—Mr. Dodd was astonishingly great in the character of Sir Harry! That universal and judicious actor Mr. Palmer, perhaps never appeared to more advantage than in the Colonel;—but it is not in the power of language to do justice to Mr. King!—Indeed he more than merited those repeated bursts of applause which he drew from a most brilliant and judicious audience! As to the scenery—The miraculous power of Mr. De Loutherbourg's pencil are universally acknowledged!—In short, we are at a loss which to admire most,—the unrivalled genius of the author, the great attention and liberality of the managers—the wonderful abilities of the painter, or the incredible exertions of all the performers!¹⁶

Sheridan has set up Mr. Puff's lecture on Puffing so that the audience is primed to look closely at language that Puff asserts will be effective and seem sincere in any instance. Hence, all of the descriptive phrases and all of the admiring epithets stand out in bold relief as indications of insincerity and gush. This is a considerable achievement and a healthy one.

To test Sheridan's feat, I took down from my shelves the first four volumes of contemporary dramatic criticism I put my hands on; books by Kenneth Tynan, Robert Brustein, Stanley Kauffmann, and Martin Gottfried. Still seeing with a Brinsleyan clarity, I opened each volume at random and was astonished to see that certain phrases now leapt off the page. From Mr. Tynan: “admirable, transfigured, one of the noblest performances I have ever seen, marvelously characterized, I shall never forget the skill with which. …”¹⁷ From Mr. Brustein: “a spirited performance, the season's triumph, and a triumph for the American theatre. Though superlatives have a habit of sticking in my throat, I must not temporize here: this was the finest production of a Shakespeare comedy I have ever seen.”¹⁸ From Mr. Kauffmann: “production is outstandingly happy, setting is almost miraculous, vitality of the born actor and the fine control of the skillful one, we will be allowed to watch an extraordinary career develop.”¹⁹ From Mr. Gottfried: “wonderfully fluid use of stage possibilities, genuinely poetic, apt and funny, hilarious, brilliant. He is part of our theater's great tomorrow.”²⁰

We have seemingly wandered far afield here, but the difference between the muddy fustian of the critics and the piercing clarity of the dramatist may indicate not only how pertinent Sheridan's strictures still are but also how valid his excellence still is. It may also suggest that the clearest, shortest way to truth is not through criticism but through the work of art itself.

The language of the remaining two acts of The Critic illustrates, by broad parody, various kinds of bad dramatic writing. Particularly droll is the flat and intentional inadequacy of the blank verse in the “butler-maid” scene of exposition between Raleigh and Hatton. Here, of course, Sneer's axiom about homely sentiment and fine language is illustrated. Such a prosaic lameness of thought couched in words of pseudo-Shakespearian grandeur is not far-fetched. Many worthless tragedies with scarcely less awful language have succeeded for the moment on the stage: see much, if not quite all, of the work of Sheridan's young kinsman, James Sheridan Knowles.

An equally fine parody is Tilburnia's lyric purple passage that begins with the superbly stale

Now has the whispering breath of gentle morn,
Bad Nature's voice, and Nature's beauty rise;
While orient Phoebus, with unborrow’d hues,
Cloaths the wak’d loveliness which all night slept
In heav’nly drapery! Darkness is fled.(21)

The speech ends with a lengthy catalogue of birds and flowers. Ophelia has a lot to answer for.

A chief symptom of Sheridan's parodic success is that quoting it is so irresistible. Here, then, is one final, fine, brief parody, this time of the language of rant and fustian:

Whiskerandos: Thou liest—base
Beefeater!
Beefeater: Ha! Hell! the lie!
By heav’n thou’st rous’d the lion in
my heart!
Off, yeoman's habit!—base disguise!—off! off!(22)

By precept and example, Sheridan has established what bad theatrical language is. One does not need to be a scholar to appreciate his fun, but he has joked and punned so well that he has momentarily created an audience of laughing pundits. The Critic is not about life or human nature. It is about good and bad literary form; it is about taste. That fact must make it a work of lesser import than The Rivals or The School for Scandal, but it is not a work of lesser pleasure.

Three conclusions and a concluding generalization sum up Sheridan's accomplishments in his three great plays.

The plotting, although academically slovenly, is so continuously absorbing in its successive incidents that it is theatrically irresistible.

The characterization contains no original elements and scarcely ever diverges from the stereotypes worked over by Congreve, Molière, Shakespeare and Jonson, Goldoni and Plautus; upon these stock figures, however, Sheridan has mixed such new combinations and insinuated such fresh fancies of detail that they have not lost the illusion of bloom for the last two hundred years.

The comic writing, similarly, contains no original elements; and indeed, I suspect that no writer in the last two thousand years—with the dubious exception of Beckett—has discovered a new way of making a joke. What Sheridan's comic writing does is to utilize each of the comic modes—humor, wit, and parody—and to invest these traditional manners with such fresh inventiveness of detail as to make the three great plays a perennial source of linguistic delight and even of civilized apprehension.

Sheridan wrote in one of the most constricting, simplistic, and naive forms of art, the drama. Unlike Ibsen or Strindberg or Chekhov or Granville-Barker, he did not attempt to expand the form either in technique or in content. He was a traditionalist, albeit a consummate one. A greater comic artist who did attempt to expand the form but who also thoroughly understood its traditionalism, was Bernard Shaw who remarked—not with entire truth—that dramaturgically he himself merely appropriated the characterization of Dickens and the plotting of Molière. But what Shaw further said of himself is an appropriate final generalization about Brinsley Sheridan: “He touches nothing that he does not dust and polish and put back in its place much more carefully than the last man who handled it.”²³

Notes

1. In comedy, tidy construction has given us the mechanical plots of a Feydeau or a Labiche farce, as intricate and insanely logical as clockwork and just about as inhuman. And in our own day, tidy construction in comedy has given us the rigid formula of television's half-hour “sit-com.” If we recollect the glories of comic writing in the English theater, however, we might well conclude that the greatest comedy is that which diverges from or even destroys the form. Shakespeare's comedies are more often than not hopelessly slapdash in construction. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the plot is concluded by the end of act 4, and nothing remains to do in act 5 except get on with the funniest part of the play, the amateur dramatic company of Bully Bottom, which really has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. Aside from Volpone, the great comedies of Ben Jonson are little more than illustrative incidents effectively jumbled together; yet the warmth, vigor, and vitality of Bartholomew Fair, The Alchemist, and Epicoene are inordinately more comfortable than the cold logic of Volpone. The plot of Congreve's The Way of the World is so convoluted that no one pays much attention to it; the joy is in the glittering wit. Even the consummate comic artist Molière hastily winds up Tartuffe by the limpest deus ex machina. And in our own time the masterpieces of Chaplin are composed of little more than a succession of unrelated comic situations. It might almost be thought that the best made comic plots have little room for the other major elements of character and language, while the best comedies have little room for plot.

2. Thomas Moore, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), p. 104.

3. Ibid., pp. 103-4.

4. In her character as in some of her funniest lines, Mrs. Malaprop owes much to Mrs. Tryfort in Sheridan's mother's play, A Journey to Bath. See The Plays of Frances Sheridan (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984). As Sheridan's sister, when she was also borrowing some of Mrs. Tryfort's language and character in her novel Strathallan, remarked, however, “I am of the opinion of Charles, in The School for Scandal, that it is very hard if one may not make free with one's relations.”

5. Cecil Price, ed., The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 99.

6. Ibid., p. 86.

7. Ibid., p. 106.

8. This is not an unusual fault in masters of comic language. Thus, we find Dickens's handling of Sam Weller brilliant and of Little Nell mawkish. Or we find the language of Captain Boyle and Joxer Daly consummately comic in Juno and the Paycock; and yet in the same play we find a serious but maudlin line like, “Ah God, Mary, have you fallen as low as that?”

9. Price, ed., Dramatic Works, p. 132.

10. Ibid., p. 360.

11. Virginia Woolf, Books and Portraits (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 49.

12. One modern play might possibly be added—the first (not the revised) version of Elmer Rice's forgotten but delightful Not for Children.

13. Price, ed., Dramatic Works, p. 501. In part, Sheridan is here poking fun at his own bad practice, for in 1777 he himself had made a bungling reformation of Vanbrugh's The Relapse, which he staged as A Trip to Scarborough.

14. In this edition of Sheridan's Works (1874; reprint, London: Chatto & Windus, 1913), p. 630, F. Stainforth relates the following story:

    Cumberland's children induced their father to take them to see The School for Scandal. Every time the delighted youngsters laughed at what was going on on the stage, he pinched them, and said, “What are you laughing at, my dear little folks? you should not laugh, my angels; there is nothing to laugh at”; and then, in an undertone, “Keep still, you little dunces.”—Sheridan, having been told this, said, “It was very ungrateful in Cumberland to have been displeased with his poor children for laughing at my comedy, for I went the other night to see his tragedy, and laughed at it from beginning to end.”

15. Price, ed., Dramatic Works, p. 507.

16. Ibid., pp. 514-15.

17. Kenneth Tynan, Curtains (New York: Atheneum, 1961), pp. 272-73.

18. Robert Brustein, Seasons of Discontent (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), p. 276.

19. Stanley Kauffmann, Persons of the Drama (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 175.

20. Martin Gottfried, Opening Nights (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1969), pp. 203-4.

21. Price, ed., Dramatic Works, p. 529.

22. Ibid., pp. 545-46.

23. Bernard Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1949), p. 183.