Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Both Sheridan and Goldsmith lamented the popularity of sentimental comedy in the later eighteenth century and wrote their witty and satirical plays (though never lascivious in the manner of Restoration comedies) to counteract the sentimental mode. The Rivals (1775) was a qualified success: the suave young officer who is 'forced' by his father to marry the very girl to whom he is secretly engaged must always please; but first audiences were as uncertain as later critics about how to evaluate his neurotic friend Faulkland, who invents a series of caveats for his marriage to the earnest Julia. A country squire who becomes alarmingly foppish in town, an impetuous Irishman and the linguistically challenged Mrs Malaprop complete the cast. This edition includes the original preface and several prologues; in an appendix it lists all the fashionable books and songs to which the characters allude.

Enduringly popular less for its plots than for its verbal brilliance and wit, The School for Scandal (1777) was the most frequently performed play of its time. Sir Peter Teazle has made the perennial mistake of elderly bachelors in English comedy and married a much younger wife in the hope that she will be too innocent to cross him. In fact, Lady Teazle spends her time with Lady Sneerwell and the worst set of scandalmongers in town, who have a beady eye on Charles Surface, the reckless young libertine, in expectation of seeing him ruined. Charles, however, turns out to possess the sterling virtues of generosity and loyalty to friends and family; and it is his hypocritical brother Joseph who ends up the villain of the piece. This edition discusses Sheridan's earlier drafts for the play and sets it into its theatrical context of anti-sentimentalism and its social context of the London High Society in which Sheridan had begun to move.

The intrigues of such aptly named characters as Lady Sneerwell, Sir Joseph Surface, Lady Candour, and Sir Benjamin Backbite have amused theater audiences for more than two centuries. They are the invention of the Irish-born playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and they unfold, collide, and backfire hilariously in his masterpiece, The School for Scandal, a play still considered by many the best comedy of manners in English. It is a comedy with two plots, one involving Sir Oliver Surface's attempts to discover the worthier of his two nephews, and the other unleashing Lady Sneerwell's strategies to ensnare both nephews and the hapless Lady Teazle in her designs. Both plots converge brilliantly in the screen scene -- one of the most famous in all of theater. The School for Scandal reveals not only Sheridan's mastery of the mechanics of stage comedy, but also his flair for witty dialogue and obvious delight in skewering the affectation and pretentiousness of aristocratic Londoners of the 1770s. Its evergreen appeal makes it one of the most produced of all theater classics today, and one of the most delightful to read.

Based on the 1776 edition, the last revised by Sheridan himself, this edition includes the author's preface and the original stage directions for Act V. The original language has been retained; punctuation, however, has been substantially modernized. Edited by Alan S. Downer, this edition of The Rivals for performance and study also includes an introduction, a list of principal dates in the life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and a selected bibliography.

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price A classic comedy of manners, ridiculing affectation and pretentiousness. Joseph Surface is apparently a model citizen; his brother Charles is a dissolute wastrel. But when the schemings of the scandalmongers go awry, the reverse is shown to be true. Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The School for Scandal was first performed in London at Drury Lane Theatre in 1777. This edition, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is edited and introduced by Colin Counsell.