Richard Brinsley Sheridan

This new collection of essays on Richard Brinsley Sheridan brings the most important British playwright of the eighteenth century back to the forefront of literary and cultural studies of the era. While his pyrotechnic life as a romantic hero, playwright, Member of Parliament, and theatre manager has generated a number of recent biographies, it is Sheridan's works-not just plays but also poetry and orations-that endure. These essays reclaim the legacy of the man of letters and partisan bon vivant who burst from obscurity to become a powerful cultural force in Georgian London. This collection covers the many lives of Sheridan, taking into account both his variegated career and the competing accounts of the man, as well as his early verse, which lays the foundation for his success as a playwright. Chapters are devoted to Sheridan's theatre, and provide innovative readings of his most famous dramatic pieces: The Rivals, The Duenna, The School for Scandal, The Critic, and Pizarro. The volume also includes extensive discussion of the dramatic highs of Sheridan's long political career, thus placing the playwright-politician firmly in the world in which performance and politics were inextricably entwined.
Contributors: Mita Choudhury, Jack E. DeRochi, Marianna D'Ezio, Daniel J. Ennis, Emily Friedman, Steven Gores, David Haley, Robert W. Jones, Daniel O'Quinn, Glynis Ridley, John Vance, David Francis Taylor

Jack E. DeRochi is associate professor of English at Winthrop University. He has published several articles on late eighteenth-century drama and satire in such publications as Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Research and Studies in American Humor. His essay on the emergence of the masculine gothic was included in Prologues, Epilogues, Curtain-Raisers and Afterpieces: The Rest of the Eighteenth-Century London Stage (2007).
Daniel J. Ennis is professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. He is the author of Enter the Press-Gang: Representations of Naval Impressment in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (2002) and edited, with Judith B. Slagle, a collection of essays entitled Prologues, Epilogues, Curtain-Raisers and Afterpieces: The Rest of the Eighteenth-Century London Stage (2007). He has published essays on John Dryden, Christopher Smart and Lord Byron among others.

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Jack E. DeRochi and Daniel J. Ennis
One: The Many Lives of Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Jack E. DeRochi
Two: Sheridan's Early Style
Robert Jones
Three: The Literary Origins of Sir Lucius O'Trigger
David Haley
Four: Reflections upon Maintaining a Competitive Edge: The Duenna and her Peers at Drury Lane
Mita Choudhury
Five: Schools Beyond Scandal, 1776-1800
Emily Friedman
Six: The Rule of Scandal: Sheridan in the Age of Wilde and Shaw
John Vance
Seven: Naumachia and the Structure of The Critic
Daniel J. Ennis
Eight: The Lees and Sheridan: An Unexamined Connection
Steven Gores
Nine: Sheridan's Courtroom Dramas: The Impeachment of Warren Hastings and the Trial of the Bounty Mutineers
Glynis Ridley
Ten: Pizarro's Spectacular Dialectics: Sheridan's Bridge to the Cosmopolitical Future
Daniel O'Quinn
Eleven: Sheridan and Women
Marianna D'Ezio
Twelve: Caricaturing Sheridan
David Francis Taylor
Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors