Navigating Crisis in Sheridan’s The Rivals

This essay begins with the observation that crisis is an important concept for Lauren Berlant not only because she deploys it to displace trauma theory’s monopoly on the analysis of severe social transformation, but also because her primary historical archive responds to contemporary examples of social insecurity that resonate with the cascade of adjustments that beset Britain in 1770s. I argue that the emergence of laughing comedy in the 1770s, particularly in the work of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, is one such instance where paradoxically audiences were called on to feel and assess the historical impasse besetting all aspects of the British polity during the American crisis.