Sir Peter: “The fashion indeed! What had you to do with the fashion before you married me?”
Lady Teazle: “For my part—I should think you would like to have your wife thought a woman of taste.”
Sir Peter: “Aye, there again—Taste! Zounds, Madam, you had no taste when you married me.”
The retort is inevitable and a modern playwriter—say, Shaw or Pinero—would leave the audience to make it, Lady Teazle answering merely with an ironical bow. But Sheridan was not addressing subtle intellects, and he doesn’t let us off from the lady’s answer in good blunt terms: “That’s very true indeed, Sir Peter! After having married you I should never pretend to taste again, I allow.” But why expose these tricks of the trade? All playwrights have them, and Sheridan uses them very cleverly, if rather transparently. Another time-honored stage convention which Sheridan practises is the labelling of his characters. Names like Malaprop, O’Trigger, Absolute, Languish, Acres, etc., are descriptive; and the realist might ask how their owners came by them, if he were pedantic enough to cross-question the innocent old comedy tradition, which is of course unnatural and indefensible enough if we choose to take such things seriously.
About the comparative merits of Sheridan’s two best plays, tastes have differed. “The Rivals” has more of humor; “The School for Scandal” more of wit; but both have plenty of each. On its first appearance, January 17, 1775, “The Rivals” was a failure, owing partly to its excessive length, partly to bad acting, partly to a number of outrageous puns and similar witticisms which the author afterwards cut out, and partly to the offense given by the supposed caricature of an Irish gentleman in the person of Sir Lucius O’Trigger. Sheridan withdrew the play and revised it thoroughly, shortening the acting time by an hour and redistributing the parts among the members of the Covent Garden Theatre company. At its second performance, eleven days later, it proved a complete success, and has remained so ever since. It has always been a favorite play with the actors, because it offers so many fine rôles to an all-star company. It affords at least four first-class parts to the comic artist: Sir Anthony Absolute, Mrs. Malaprop, Bob Acres, and Sir Lucius O’Trigger: while it has an unusually spirited jeune premier, a charming though utterly unreasonable heroine, a good soubrette in Lucy, and entertaining minor characters in Fag and David.
As we have no manuscript of the first draft of “The Rivals,” it is impossible to say exactly what changes the author made in it. But as the text now stands it is hard to understand why Sir Lucius O’Trigger was regarded as an insult to the Irish nation. Sheridan was an Irishman and he protested that he would have been the last man to lampoon his compatriots. Sir Lucius is a fortune hunter, indeed, and he is always spoiling for a fight; but he is a gentleman and a man of courage; and even in his fortune hunting he is sensitive upon the point of honor: he will get Mrs. Malaprop’s consent to his addresses to her niece, and “do everything fairly,” for, as he says very finely, “I am so poor that I can’t afford to do a dirty action.” The comedy Irishman was nothing new in Sheridan’s time. He goes back to Jonson and Shakespeare. In the eighteenth century his name was Teague; in the nineteenth, Pat or Mike. We are familiar with this stock figure of the modern stage, his brogue, his long-skirted coat and knee breeches, the blackthorn shillalah in his fist and the dudeen stuck into his hatband. The Irish naturally resent this grotesque: their history has been tragical and they wish to be taken seriously. We have witnessed of late their protest against one of their own comedies, “The Playboy of the Western World.” But perhaps they have become over touchy. There is not any too much fun in the world, and if we are to lose all the funny national peculiarities from caricature and farce and dialect story, if the stage Irishman has got to go, and also the stage Yankee, Dutchman, Jew, Ole Olsen, John Bull, and the burnt cork artist of the negro minstrel show, this world will be a gloomier place. Be that as it may, Sir Lucius O’Trigger is no caricature: he doesn’t even speak in brogue, and perhaps the nicest stroke in his portrait is that innocent inconsequence which is the essence of an Irish bull. “Hah, my little ambassadress,” he says to Lucy, with whom he has an appointment, “I have been looking for you; I have been on the South Parade this half hour.”
“O gemini!” cries Lucy, “and I have been waiting for your worship on the North.”
“Faith,” answers Sir Lucius, “maybe that was the reason we did not meet.”
A great pleasure in the late sixties and early seventies used to be the annual season of English classical comedy at Wallack’s old playhouse; and not the least pleasant feature of this yearly revival was the performance of “The Rivals,” with John Gilbert cast for the part of Sir Anthony, Mrs. Gilbert as Mrs. Malaprop, and Lester Wallack himself, if I remember rightly, in the rôle of the Captain. But, of course, the comic hero of the piece is Bob Acres; and this, I think, was Jefferson’s great part. I saw him three times in Bob Acres, at intervals of years, and it was a masterpiece of high comedy acting: so natural, so utterly without consciousness of the presence of spectators, that it was less like acting than like the thing itself. The interpretation of the character, too, was so genial and sympathetic that one was left with a feeling of great friendliness toward the unwarlike Bob, and his cowardice excited not contempt but only amusement. The last time that I saw Joe Jefferson in “The Rivals,” he was a very old man, and there was a pathetic impression of fatigue about his performance, though the refinement and the warm-heartedness with which he carried the part had lost nothing with age.
Historically Sheridan’s plays represent a reaction against sentimental comedy, which had held the stage for a number of years, beginning, perhaps, with Steele’s “Tender Husband” (1703) and numbering, among its triumphs, pieces like Moore’s “Foundling” (1748), Kelly’s “False Delicacy,” and several of Cumberland’s plays. Cumberland, by the way, who was intensely jealous of Sheridan, was the original of Sir Fretful Plagiary in “The Critic,” Sheridan’s only condescension to personal satire. He was seemingly a vain and pompous person, and well deserved his castigation. The story is told of Cumberland that he took his children to see “The School for Scandal” and when they laughed rebuked them, saying that he saw nothing to laugh at in this comedy. When this was reported to Sheridan, his comment was, “I think that confoundedly ungrateful, for I went to see Cumberland’s last tragedy and laughed heartily at it all the way through.”