Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan by David Francis Taylor (review)

Richard Brinsley Sheridan was one of the most successful comic dramatists of the late eighteenth century. The Rivals and The School for Scandal remain in the repertoire of theatres in Britain and across North America. Sheridan’s theatrical career encompassed more than just writing for the stage, as he managed the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, for over thirty years. Nor did theatre confine him. As the Foxite Member of Parliament for Stafford, he was a leading and forthright member of the Opposition. At key moments in the 1790s Sheridan was often the lone voice on the Opposition benches, valiantly, if unavailingly, resisting the onset of William Pitt’s tyranny. With such enticing connections between politics and theatre, literature and the beau monde (Sheridan was a keen member of many fashionable circles, including Devonshire House), it is striking how little critical attention he has received. The last book-length consideration, Sheridan Studies, edited by David Crane and James Morwood in 1995, was a something of a disappointment. The collection did little to reflect recent developments in literary or theatrical scholarship, though some good essays in political history were included. Beyond Sheridan Studies Sheridan has been commemorated only in literary biographies, most notably Fintan O’Toole’s A Traitor’s Kiss. This relative dearth of studies, given his prominence in his culture, makes the appearance of David Taylor’s book all the more welcome and all the more appealing. Taylor offers a fresh examination of Sheridan’s whole career, though he seems most interested in the 1790s. Taylor, following slightly in O’Toole’s wake, wants to write a political and cultural history of Sheridan as politician and manager, charting the connections between these two different but closely connected professions. This emphasis has considerable merits and offers many rich insights into a complex career, but it does mean that Taylor has much less to say about The Rivals and The School for Scandal than most readers would have hoped. The Critic and Pizarro, plays very much the product of Sheridan the Manager are more clearly Taylor’s concern. He writes well on both. Both plays suit his contention that dramaturgy works as an instrument of ideological interpellation, a way of reading that underpins his claim that under Sheridan Drury Lane became a “theatre of opposition.”

Taylor does not confine his notion of the theatre, or that of opposition, to a single scene or set of practices. The Hastings Trial, which dragged on with increasing ignominy from 1788 until 1795, is taken by Taylor as a particularly vivid form of theatre. If Taylor is not quite original in making this claim, then he is more rigorous in exploring how Sheridan succeeded in that endeavour. No longer sidelined by Edmund Burke, Taylor’s Sheridan is central to the proceedings, cannily recasting India as an object of care for an anxious imperial polity. But Sheridan failed too, his rhetoric about India often failing to connect with or persuade an audience. Sheridan was most convincing, Taylor explains, when his own sickness made his delicate form a surrogate for the ills he was describing. The creation of parallel structures, a sick body and a broken polity, is emblematic of the ways in which Taylor views what became Sheridan’s twin worlds of Drury Lane and Westminster. In what is a key turn of phrase, and a central claim of the book, Taylor suggests that Drury Lane was a “supplementary site” to Sheridan’s political career. The claim is initially offered with nuance and caveats. The repertoire is not, after all, easily read, and its claims to opposition are perhaps best founded on the absence of much in the way of loyalism. This is smart, sensible stuff. But Taylor soon moves into a more adventitious mode, drawing connections between Drury Lane’s theatrical productions and the politics of the 1790s. There are doubtless examples of cross-fertilization between these two areas; the case of Venice Preserv’d...