The Rivals
My latest Riverside Literature Series reading is #196, the play The Rivals, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The experience reminded me that I am woefully unfamiliar with the theater of the 1700s, though I've always meant to "get around" to reading it. Since I have copies of She Stoops to Conquer and School for Scandal on my shelves, among others, I should get to work.
Reading Sheridan's bio in the Introduction was amusing all by itself. A child of the theater, he wrote hit plays in his 20s, took over as director of one of the two major London theatres while still in his 20s, and then put that life on the back burner to be a politician (soon rising to the Cabinet), retiring to a second successful stint in the theater, only to end in debt and penury.
This play opened in Covent Garden Theatre on January 17th, 1775, and closed the next day. The reviews were unfavorable, though they admitted that parts of the play worked. The play was at least an hour too long, a key actor was terrible, the dialogue grated, the jokes were lame...
Sheridan immediately withdrew it, but spent the next several days cutting and sharpening and rewriting. And hiring a new actor for that key role. The public seemed to admire this effort, because when it reopened ten days later, it became an instant monster hit. That's encouraging for those of us who labor at revision of our troublesome texts.
This is the play that introduced Mrs. Malaprop, of the fractured English. She seems to have derived fromUncle a Mrs. Tryfort in one of the unpublished manuscripts of Sheridan's famous mother, Frances Sheridan. We also get the deliciously named Sir Anthony Absolute and Lydia Languish.
I'll be the first to admit that all comedies that derived from the Roman model seem to be contrived and silly, when it comes to plot. I cannot really love them. But this one has some delicious lines, and has been the inspiration for many later comic artists, including my beloved Dickens. (And yes, I do own a Charles Dickens action figure.)
CBsIP: Many Genres, One Craft, Michael A. Arnzen & Heidi Ruby Miller, eds.
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
Ambrose Bierce's Civil War, Ambrose Bierce