Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751–1816)

SHERIDAN, RICHARD BRINSLEY (1751–1816)

SHERIDAN, RICHARD BRINSLEY (1751–1816), Irish playwright, theater manager, and politician. Sheridan was born in Dublin shortly before 4 November 1751, the day when he was baptized. His father was Thomas Sheridan, an Irish Protestant actor and theater manager; his mother was Frances Sheridan, who became well known as a writer of novels, including The Memoirs of Miss Sydney Biddulph (1761) and the Oriental tale The History of Nourjahad (1767).

The family moved to England, where Sheridan attended, and disliked, Harrow School, until 1770 when he left and moved, again with his family, to Bath. Early efforts at writing included Jupiter, a farce that prefigures The Critic and that was rejected for production by Sheridan's future colleague David Garrick; verse for the Bath Chronicle; and fragments of political essays. In Bath he met and eloped with the singer Eliza Linley (1754–1795), but the validity of their marriage was contested by both families and by another admirer of Linley's with whom Sheridan fought two duels. Although the families eventually dropped their opposition to the marriage, Sheridan remained very short of money, having moved to London to study law in 1773.

His first play was the comedy The Rivals, staged at Covent Garden in January 1775. It is a polished and urbane "comedy of manners" whose satirical targets include the corruption of language by Mrs. Malaprop (who famously describes another character as "as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile"), and the corruption of morals in the contemporary cult of "sentimentality." After a near failure on the first night, it went on to achieve spectacular success and to bring Sheridan both money and aristocratic contacts. Sheridan went on to write a string of brilliant and successful comedies: The farce St. Patrick's Day was produced in May 1775 and The Duenna, an operatic play, followed in November 1775. In 1776 Sheridan became manager and part-owner of the Drury Lane Theatre. A Trip to Scarborough, a loose adaptation of John Vanbrugh's comedy The Relapse, was staged there in 1777, followed in May of that year by the classic comedy The School for Scandal in which a hypocritical "man of feeling" is contrasted with his rakish but good-hearted younger brother in a comedy set in the world of newspaper columns and society gossip. In 1779 Sheridan became the sole owner of the Drury Lane Theatre, where he produced The Critic, or A Tragedy Rehearsed in the same year.

1780 marked a turning point in Sheridan's career: he spent over £1000 securing election as a member of Parliament for Stafford and ceased to write for the theater. A political ally of Charles James Fox and the Whigs, he joined the government in 1782 as the undersecretary of foreign affairs, and in 1783 became secretary of the treasury. His most famous parliamentary interventions, however, related to the impeachment of Warren Hastings, governor of India. A particular facet of the case related to the Begums of Oude, whom Hastings was alleged to have unlawfully deprived of their property: Sheridan discussed the case in a five-hour speech on 7 February 1787 that even his opponents acknowledged as "the most splendid display of eloquence and talent which has been exhibited in the House of Commons during the present reign" (Bingham, p. 237). Politically, Sheridan also argued against the Act of Union, and against press censorship.

However, Sheridan himself was sinking into debt. The Drury Lane Theatre was declared unsafe in 1792 and had to be demolished; Sheridan himself borrowed the money for the building of a new theater on the site. After the death of his first wife, Sheridan married in 1795 the nineteen-year-old Esther Ogle, daughter of the dean of Winchester. In 1799 Sheridan even returned to dramatic writing, and his tragedy Pizarro, an adaptation from August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue's The Spaniards in Peru, earned enough money to gain him a brief financial reprieve; but in 1802, with debts on all sides, the Drury Lane Theatre went into receivership. At the same time, his political career was stalling.

In the 1806 "ministry of all the talents," Sheridan was made treasurer of the navy, but this relatively minor post did not carry cabinet rank. In 1809 the new Drury Lane Theatre burned down. Although, characteristically, he was able to joke about it—he is said to have watched from a nearby coffeehouse, remarking, "a man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside"—the fire made his financial ruin unavoidable and marked the end of his ownership of the theater. Sheridan had been a friend of Prince George (later King George IV) and should have benefited from George's elevation to Prince Regent in 1811, but the prince's favor proved short-lived. The following year Sheridan lost his seat in Parliament, and although the prince supplied him with £3000 to buy his way back in, Sheridan spent the money clearing personal debts. In 1813 Sheridan was again imprisoned for debt. He lived in poverty and alcoholism until his death on 7 July 1816.

See also Drama: English ; English Literature and Language ; Hastings, Warren .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Edited by Cecil Price. 2 vols. Oxford, 1973.

——. The Letters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Edited by Cecil Price. 3 vols. Oxford, 1966.

Secondary Sources

Bingham, Madeleine. Sheridan: The Track of a Comet. London, 1972.

Morwood, James, and David Crane, eds. Sheridan Studies. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.

O'Toole, Fintan. A Traitor's Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1751–1816. London, 1997.

Matthew Steggle