Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The Impresario in Political and Cultural Context ed. by Jack E. DeRochi and Daniel J. Ennis (review)

In literary studies there exists a tension between theory, history, and biography. Historical and biographical criticism grounds itself in a material archive of correspondence, literary texts, contextual materials, and the mundane ephemera of personal memorabilia, bills, and wills. The theoretical task of locating and reading volatile textual and historical uncertainties contrasts with the historian’s and the biographer’s fundamental insistence on the immutability of empirical knowledge and narrative stability. A writer’s legacy and continued popularity require the interweaving of these two disparate narratives. The critical history that surrounds Richard Brinsley Sheridan has been weighted towards biography and, as editors Jack DeRochi and Daniel Ennis acknowledge, has been beset with critical ambivalence, “backhanded compliments,” and equivocal praise (2). The contributors to Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The Impresario in Political and Cultural Context attempt “to break this pattern of advance and retreat” and to stabilize Sheridan’s fluctuating and sometimes troubled legacy by bridging the “gap between stage and page” that delineates quite strictly between the “literary Sheridan, the managerial Sheridan, and the political Sheridan” (3). To a great extent they accomplish their purpose. This collection gathers some of the most exciting work on Sheridan to date. The essays by Mita Choudhury, Daniel J. Ennis, Daniel O’Quinn, Glynis Ridley, and David Francis Taylor add substantially to the body of criticism that has been dominated by John Loftis’s Sheridan and the Drama of Georgian England (1976), Julie Carlson’s articles, “Trying Sheridan’s Pizarro (1996) and “Race and Profit in English Theatre” (2007), Heather McPherson’s “Caricature, Cultural Politics, and the Stage: The Case of Pizarro” (2007), Sara Suleri’s chapter in The Rhetoric of English India (1992), and most recently David Francis Taylor’s book-length study of Sheridan, Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (2012).

Sheridan’s life and his biographies loom large in this collection of essays. As DeRochi points out, there “have been no fewer than eighteen full-length biographies” (20) since 1900, with each creating a distinct portrait that rhetorically frames Sheridan’s dramatic, charismatic, and sometimes scandalous character. Steven Gores’s “The Lees and the Sheridans: An Unexamined Connection” and Marianna D’Ezio’s “Sheridan and Women” are the two essays most focused on Sheridan’s biography: both add to our knowledge of Sheridan’s life. Emily C. Friedman’s “Schools beyond Scandal, 1776–1800” and John Vance’s “The Rule of Scandal: Sheridan in the Age of Wilde and Shaw” reflect on the significant role played by The School for Scandal (1777) in establishing Sheridan’s reputation and his cultural influence. DeRochi’s opening essay of this collection, “The Many Lives of Richard Brinsley Sheridan,” provides readers with a more reflexive investigation of what has made Sheridan such an enigmatic figure. DeRochi’s contribution sets the tone for this volume insofar as many of the contributors begin with a “biographical flashpoint” (22) and subsequently flesh out a “competing hermeneutics” (22) that affirms Sheridan’s proverbial perplexity. One question this approach raises is why Sheridan and his works are considered so enigmatic, and why such complexity is problematic. Although DeRochi acknowledges and questions the influence of “these competing biographical hermeneutics [and] the perils of reconciling the perplexing relationship of the works to the man” (38), he does not question why Sheridan’s life should be considered more fraught than the lives of Edmund Burke, Lord Byron, and Mary Robinson.

Robert Jones in “Sheridan’s Early Style” eschews the “crude label of ‘juvenilia’” (43) in an attempt to understand Sheridan’s political and literary ambitions. Jones reads Sheridan’s early poetry through the lens of his two duels with Thomas Matthews and argues that Sheridan’s early writing style epitomizes his “vaunting manner” (42) towards Matthews. As a duellist and a writer, Sheridan aspires “to intransigence and rebellion,” but these ambitions are undermined by “a...