Sheridan and Goldsmith

Katharine Worth

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 1992
• ISBN:
  9781350317598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria inglese

Each generation needs to be introduced to the culture and great works of the past and to reinterpret them in its own ways. This series re-examines the important English dramatists of earlier centuries in the light of new information, ew interests and new attitudes. The books will be relevant to those interested in literatire, theatre and cultural history, and to threatre-goers and general readers who want an up-to-date view of these dramatists and their plays, with the emphasis on performance and relevant culture history. This book explores the reasons for the deep and lasting appeal of Sheridan's and Goldsmith's comedies, showing how they operate at the profound imaginative level and draw on their author's experience as Irish wits in an English scene. Their subtle dramatic techniques are examined in relation to physical features of the eighteenth-century stage. A chapter on sentimental comedy relates to plays such as Hugh Kelly's False Delicacy to the balance of irony and sentiment in Goldsmith's The Good Natur'd Man and Sheridan's A Trip to Scarborough. The continuing freshness of the comedy of mistakes, masks and Harlequin-like role playing which the two playwrights draw from the operatic and theatrical conventions of their day is illustrated from modern productions. These have helped to illuminate the psychological truth and social awareness underlying the sparkling surfaces of Sheridan's and Goldsmith's classic comedies.

1

Sheridan and Goldsmith: Heavenly Twins

Sheridan and Goldsmith – it sounds a duo, almost a pairing of interchangeables like Tom Stoppard’s Ros and Guil in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It is not really so, needless to say. Sheridan and Goldsmith are utterly distinct and distinctive as playwrights, let alone as men. Yet they do have a great deal in common, more than enough to justify their being discussed at least partly in tandem. Both were Irishmen, born in Ireland of Irish parents, yet making their careers and fame in England. Sheridan was brought to England by his family as a child of eight (and given an English upbringing, including schooling at Harrow). Goldsmith came to London on his own initiative, settling there as a young man in his twenties, after studying at Trinity College, Dublin (and Edinburgh), and spending some colourful ‘wander’ years in various parts of Europe.

Although there were twenty years between them, in terms of their theatre careers they were quite close contemporaries, who had many interests and attitudes in common. They hit their high point in the English theatre within a year or two of each other. Goldsmith’s masterpiece, She Stoops to Conquer, had its first production at Covent Garden on 15 March 1773. It was followed at the same theatre, on 17 January 1775, by The Rivals. One brilliant Irishman succeeded another as though taking over the torch from the compatriot who was obliged to leave the scene (Goldsmith died in the year of Sheridan’s debut). Sheridan kept close to his predecessor in various ways, as will be seen.

In character the differences between the two are obvious, not least in the contrast of their conversational powers. Sheridan was as renowned for the irresistible charm and vivacity of his talk as Goldsmith for his clumsiness in conversation. Yet despite differences, they had something in common in personality as well as circumstance. Both had a blithe, feckless strain and were careless though generous with money. Goldsmith was an inveterate, unlucky gambler; Sheridan spent money like water and was erratic about paying bills, even – or perhaps especially – when managing Drury Lane. For years, only his privileged position as an MP protected him from arrest for debt (which caught up with him in the end). Goldsmith was equally well acquainted with the menace of bailiffs which he put to good comic use in his first play. Both could write at great speed, a gift they needed, being also great procrastinators. Stories abound of their troubles with deadlines. A taste for drink was a particular plague for Sheridan, getting out of control in his later years.

They also shared an unusual plenitude of talents, perhaps one reason for their easy attitude to responsibilities. They seemed able to triumph in any artistic occupation they took up and engaged successfully to a major extent in professional activities other than the theatre. While such mobility might not be unusual among minor playwrights, needing to turn their hand to anything for a living, it may strike us as odd that the theatre occupied so small a part in the oeuvre and lives of two such masters of comedy.

This was especially true of Goldsmith, who gained his immortality in the theatre on the strength of one play, after having written only one other. Most of his imaginative energy went into other forms of writing. He became the master of any genre with remarkable speed and ease, acquiring fame in his lifetime as poet, novelist and essayist as well as playwright. In fact it was as poet and novelist that he was best known for a time, a situation reflected in the critical commentaries on his life and work brought together in 1974 by G. S. Rousseau (Critical Heritage series): the reception of the plays occupies small space in this collection. Goldsmith could turn without apparent effort from the work required of a jobbing journalist and scholar, which was how he started literary life in London, to the writing of a long poem (The Traveller) which Dr Johnson thought the best thing of the kind since Pope. He then won a whole new reputation with an immensely popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, and another long poem, The Deserted Village. Writing for the theatre involved a bigger jump, but even there, one apprentice work, The Good Natur’d Man, was all the preparation he needed before producing a comic masterpiece in She Stoops to Conquer.

Goldsmith died early, in his forties, so we cannot draw too many conclusions from the pattern of his oeuvre as we have it. Who knows but that he would have gone on to write more frequently for the theatre. From this same point of view, Sheridan’s is a stranger case. His imaginative talent was entirely for drama; he was professionally committed to the theatre as a manager; he understood and loved the art of the actors. He might have been expected, despite his procrastination, to be a more prolific playwright.

Yet his theatrical career was curiously brief. Its great achievement was concentrated into a golden period of no more than four years, from 1775 to 1779 (modern taste would almost certainly exclude the declamatory Pizarro of 1799 which eighteenth-century audiences ranked as another triumph). When in 1775, at Covent Garden, the phenomenally successful The Duenna closed a year that had started with The Rivals, it was not surprising that the great Garrick, then on the point of retiring, should offer to the young playwright a major share in the rival playhouse, Drury Lane, in effect making Sheridan manager of the theatre. In the light of our knowledge of his later life, it is harder to understand why Sheridan accepted. He had a deeply equivocal attitude to theatres and actors and was incorrigibly unbusinesslike. It is one of the saddest ironies of theatre history that shortly after taking on the management of Drury Lane in 1776 – and immediately producing two masterpieces – Sheridan almost ceased to write plays or to make theatre his driving interest (it had to remain his business but there was at least as much harassment as enjoyment in his Drury Lane commitment). When in 1780 he took a step which placed politics at the centre of his life, entering the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for Stafford, he is on record as saying that it was the happiest moment of his life. With the exception of the operatic tragedy, Pizarro (in any case an adaptation from Kotzebue), there were to be no more plays from the once-fertile pen.

The early death of Goldsmith allowed no time for what might have been a fascinating and, one would hope, creative rivalry to develop between the two Irishmen. What we see instead is Sheridan following rather closely in Goldsmith’s footsteps, most obviously in his general attitude to what comedy in the theatre ought to be. They shared a distaste for the sentimental comedy in vogue in the 1770s. Goldsmith conducted a campaign against the ‘miserable hybrid’, attacking it in his prose works and providing a rival comic genre, as he considered it, in his plays. Sheridan benefited from the enthusiastic reception given to She Stoops to Conquer which created a climate friendly to his own spirited, ironic comic genius. It was natural, then, for him to continue the attack on the sentimental genre, as he amusingly did in his second prologue to The Rivals.

The situation was more complex, however, than their satirising might suggest. Both Sheridan and Goldsmith were ambivalent in their attitude to sentiment. Sheridan evidently revelled in the opportunities it gave him to poke fun at its more extreme absurdities: had sentimental comedy not existed, he would almost have had to invent it, to give himself an inexhaustible topic of mirth (and something more complex, in his characterisation of the sentimentalising Joseph Surface). Their mockery of the genre did not inhibit either writer from including plenty of full-bodied sentiment on his own account. Goldsmith’s sympathetic presentation of Mr Hardcastle, Sheridan’s softness to Lady Teazle, show them moving with the current of the age rather than against it. Their apparently total dismissal of the new genre requires a closer look, as does the genre itself, for sentimental comedy was an interesting dramatic movement which expressed radical changes in eighteenth-century sensibility and social conscience. Playwrights as sensitive to audience response as Sheridan and Goldsmith could never have stood aloof from this crucial shift in public consciousness. Sheridan indeed showed how well he understood it by his skilful adaptation of Vanbrugh’s The Relapse to the taste of his time (this adaptation is not all loss, any more than sentimental comedy represents a pure decline from the more acidly witty and bawdy comedies of the Restoration). For audiences of today the polemics on sentimental comedy have lost much of their force along with their topicality. Yet the attitudes which provoked the polemics remain highly germane to any discussion of Sheridan and Goldsmith. This will be the subject of chapter 4.

We may be tempted to regret the remarkable versatility which drew the two writers in so many directions, thus perhaps depriving the theatre of more masterpieces. There is another way of looking at it, however. It is just the variety of their mental life, the sense of vivacious, far-ranging interests and abilities that may help to answer one of the most difficult questions about their drama. How is it that plays in a way so emotionally and morally simple, in comparison with, say, the piercing ironies of the best Restoration comedy, have always been able to fascinate audiences and continue to do so in the theatre of our own time?

For it is a fact that of all the Irish playwrights who have poured their talents into the making of the English theatre, Sheridan and Goldsmith have probably come nearest to Shakespeare in their power of drawing whole-hearted, warm and interested responses from all sorts of mixed audiences in every period. Peter Davison comments that Sheridan’s plays are in fact unique in their unbroken stage history of undisputed success.¹ They have inspired great actors and drawn appreciations from writers as subtle as Lamb, Hazlitt, Henry James (in his case, almost against his will). Charles Lamb, who had a glimpse of Sheridan’s own actors before they left the scene for ever, paid the most memorable of all tributes to a single comedy: ‘Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen The School for Scandal in its glory.’² The lines were gracefully adapted by Laurence Olivier, when he reflected on the hold The School for Scandal continued to exert on the affection and interest of actors (he had just been engaged in directing it): ‘I am prepared to swear that whatever mortifying circumstances attend the life of the Theatre throughout the world, this play will never grow old.’³ She Stoops to Conquer, The Rivals and The Critic have similarly drawn actors and directors of distinction – Tom Courtenay as Marlow; a glittering cast in the 1983 production of The Rivals at the National Theatre; Tom Stoppard brilliantly directing The Critic at the same theatre in 1985.

Yet these plays, so acceptable to the modern theatre, were very firmly rooted in the theatre of their time, as will be shown in more detail in the course of chapter 3. Sheridan and Goldsmith wrote for stages in some ways harder to imagine now than Shakespeare’s more distant one. It is in some ways easier for us to appreciate Shakespeare’s theatre – open to the sky and relying largely on natural light – than Covent Garden or Drury Lane in the 1770s. Their relatively modern appearance – roofed building, proscenium, scenery and so on – may well cause us to underestimate the chasm that exists between that stage and ours. Used as we are to brilliant lighting, how hard for us to think ourselves into a theatre as big as Drury Lane in 1777 which was yet lit entirely by candles and oil floats. Again, we seldom if ever experience the sort of audience participation all eighteenth-century theatre-goers took for granted; those moments before and after the play when an actor would step forward and talk to them directly about any subject the playwright wanted to air, usually also appealing for a favourable judgement on his play. It is not easy for us to assess the effect on audiences of these prologues and epilogues, often written by theatrical or literary celebrities on behalf of the author, like Dr Johnson’s prologue to The Good Natur’d Man. It is as if Iris Murdoch or Peter Hall could be expected to launch the latest new play at the NT or the Barbican with a swift run-down on points of interest and a plea for an unprejudiced hearing.

Goldsmith and Sheridan wrote with the special conditions of their theatre very precisely in mind; the stage requirements, the talents of particular actors, and the interests of the audience. They quoted from contemporary literature and theatre, made all kinds of topical allusions and allowed themselves in-jokes that need footnotes for anyone unfamiliar with eighteenth-century stage history. Sheridan has an orgy of such jokes in The Critic, as when Puff, played by Tom King, uses the real names of the actors performing the play in 1779 to illustrate his powers of hype. It was a comic crescendo such as cannot quite be reproduced today when the sly list culminated in compliments to the speaker himself ‘it is not in the power of language to do justice to Mr King!’.

The period feeling is so strong in these comedies that even in today’s theatre, where it is almost second nature to set classics in some time other than their own, She Stoops to Conquer or The School for Scandal are seldom given such treatment but commonly retain their eighteenth-century look. Perhaps we are still in that phase defined by Shaw in which ‘obsolete costumes and manners’ positively add to the attraction of a play.⁴ Or perhaps there is some pressure from the realism that is part of the comedy (a realism noted by Laurence Olivier and an important element, to which we will return). It might also be thought difficult to transfer to some other period the moral and aesthetic climate surrounding the Julias and Sir Olivers and Hardcastles.

Yet of course the plays have succeeded in soaring out of their environment and becoming a self-contained world in which anyone can feel at home. They provide a telling illustration of the paradox that in order to be universal it is first necessary to be intensely parochial. How was this done, what is there in these comedies to account for their admission into the modern repertoire as undisputed classics? Because they are so gloriously comic? No doubt of that – but what else? For there is something else; to do with irony and satire as well as farce, with feeling as well as fun, with morality and serious behaviour as well as intrigues and amusing complications. This is the sphere which can cause critical problems or discomfort even for some who admire the comic genius of both playwrights.

With its emphasis on rationality, uplifting sentiment and decorum the ethos in the plays can often seem more remote from modern taste than that in Shakespeare’s comedies. The benevolent optimism that prevails may strike an alien note. We are more sceptical today about happy endings, more prone to demand a dose of realism mixed with them. How can we take without discomfort so pious a curtain speech as Julia’s at the end of The Rivals, so complete a resolution of warring elements as in She Stoops to Conquer? Still more difficult, can we attribute any kind of seriousness to plays which (or so it might seem) ignore the darker side of life, omit the deeper notes struck in Shakespeare’s comedies, famously in Love’s Labour’s Lost, with its reminders of death and the need for professing lovers to encounter the reality of life in hospitals? What too of the missing political dimension? This is not just a question of the severe eighteenth-century censorship which gagged all playwrights. On Sheridan’s part, at least, the avoidance of political issues was a matter of deliberate choice (rather strange, we might think, in one who so immersed himself in politics). Some would add to this list of absences a lack of serious sociological satire, of the sharpness, even bitterness of a Wycherley or a Molière. For audiences reared on black comedy and farce far more outrageous and ‘low’ than the eighteenth-century theatre could have begun to conceive, there might seem something bland and insipid in the comedy of Goldsmith and Sheridan; one modern critic does indeed find The Rivals ‘too inoffensive and vanilla-flavoured, too given to playing safe’.⁵

But is it really true that there is no sense of life’s complexities and densities in the comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan, that they offer only a witty and delightfully comic surface? The word ‘surface’ might give us pause, for Sheridan uses it himself in a pointed way in The School for Scandal, through the name of the two so unlike brothers, Charles and Joseph, drawing attention to something deep in his comedy, we might say at its heart. It is something that does indeed hold serious interest for moderns, is one of the great preoccupations of the modern stage; no less than the whole business of projecting personae; performing, as a function not just of the theatre but of life. It is the realm of masks and faces – of double selves – that is displayed with such comic élan in the dual personality of Marlow in She Stoops to Conquer, Captain Absolute in The Rivals, and, supremely, in the brothers who complement each other so neatly in The School for Scandal.

We have to bear in mind, of course, that the recurrence of masking motifs in these plays owes much to dramatic tradition. Disguises, pretences, mimicry are obviously the perennial stuff of comedy and were constantly used by Shakespeare, the Restoration playwrights, commedia dell’arte, Marivaux; all at one time or another models for Sheridan and Goldsmith. Some critics take a sternly censorious line on this, equating the use of conventional material with lack of originality. Both The School for Scandal and The Rivals, according to Marvin Mudrick, are no more t...