Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Irish playwright and Whig Statesman. 1751 – 1816
 Richard Brinsley Sheridan was born in Dublin on October 30, 1751 at 12 Dorset Street, a fashionable street in the late eighteenth century. (Fellow playwright Sean O'Casey was born on Dorset Street 130 years later).
He was baptized on November 4, 1751, his father Thomas Sheridan being an actor-manager who managed the Theatre Royal, Dublin for a time, and his mother, Frances Sheridan, a writer (most famous for her novel The Memoirs of Sidney Biddulph). She died when her son was fifteen.
At the age of eleven he was sent to Harrow school. Sheridan was extremely popular at school, winning somehow, Dr. Parr confesses, "the esteem and even admiration of all his schoolfellows"; and he acquired, according to the same authority, more learning than he is usually given credit for. He left Harrow at the age of seventeen, and was placed under the care of a tutor.
He was also trained by his father in daily elocution, and put through a course of English reading. He had fencing and riding lessons at Angelo's
Works
-
The Rivals (first acted January 17, 1775)
-
St Patrick's Day (first acted May 2, 1775)
-
The Duenna (first acted November 21, 1775)
-
A Trip to Scarborough (first acted February 24, 1777)
-
The School for Scandal (first acted May 8, 1777)
-
The Camp (first acted October 15, 1778)
-
The Critic (first acted October 30, 1779)
-
The Glorious First of June (first acted July 2, 1794)
-
Pizarro (first acted May 24, 1799)
-
He also wrote a selection of poems, and political speeches for his time in parliament.
Career
His first play, The Rivals, produced at Covent Garden in 1775, was a failure on its first night. Sheridan cast a more capable actor for the role of the comic Irishman for its second performance, and it was a smash which immediately established the young playwright's reputation. It has gone on to become a standard of English literature.
Having quickly made his name and fortune, Sheridan bought a share in Drury Lane. His most famous play The School for Scandal (1777) is considered one of the greatest comedies of manners in English. It was followed by The Critic (1779), an updating of the satirical Restoration play The Rehearsal, which received a memorable revival (performed with Oedipus in a single evening) starring Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic Theatre in 1946.
Politics
Richard Brinsley Sheridan was also a Whig politician, entering parliament in 1780 under the sponsorship of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. A great public speaker, he remained in parliament until 1812, and was a leading figure in the party.
He was the grandfather of society beauty and author Caroline Norton, and the great-grandfather of Lord Dufferin, third Governor General of Canada and eighth Viceroy of India. The famous ghost story writer Sheridan le Fanu was his great-nephew.
He sat in parliament for Westminster in 1806-1807. At the general election of 1807 he stood again for Westminster and was defeated, but was returned as member for Ilchester, at the expense, apparently, of the prince of Wales.
In 1812 he failed to secure a seat at Stafford. He could not raise money enough to buy the seat. He had quarrelled with the Prince Regent, and seems to have had none but obscure friends to stand by him. As a member of parliament he had been safe against arrest for debt, but now that this protection was lost his creditors closed in upon him, and the history of his life from this time till his death in 1816 is one of the most painful passages in the biography of great men.
It may be regarded as certain, however, that the description of the utter destitution and misery of the last weeks of his life given in the Croker Papers (i. pp. 288-312, ed. L.J. Jennings) is untrue. In any attempt to judge of Sheridan as he was apart from his works, it is necessary to make considerable deductions from the mass of floating anecdotes that have gathered round his name. It was not without reason that his grand-daughter Mrs. Norton denounced the unfairness of judging the real man from unauthenticated stories.
The real Sheridan was not a pattern of decorous respectability, but we may fairly believe that he was very far from being the Sheridan of vulgar legend. Against stories about his reckless management of his affairs we must set the broad facts that he had no source of income but Drury Lane theatre, that he bore from it for thirty years all the expenses of a fashionable life, and that the theatre was twice rebuilt during his proprietorship, the first time (1791) on account of its having been pronounced unsafe, and the second (1809) after a disastrous fire.
Enough was lost in this way to account ten times over for all his debts. The records of his wild bets in the betting book of Brooks' Club date from the years after the loss, in 1792, of his first wife, to whom he was devotedly attached. He married again in 1795, his second wife being Esther Jane, daughter of Newton Ogle, dean of Winchester.
The reminiscences of his son's tutor, Mr. Smyth, show anxious and fidgetty family habits, curiously at variance with the accepted tradition of his imperturbable recklessness. He died on the 7th of July 1816, and was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey.
Upon his death, Sheridan was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.
|
