A Trip to Scarborough; and, The Critic

by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

DANGLE.
True; my power with the managers is pretty notorious. But is it no credit to have applications from all quarters for my interest—from lords to recommend fiddlers, from ladies to get boxes, from authors to get answers, and from actors to get engagements?

MRS. DANGLE.
Yes, truly; you have contrived to get a share in all the plague and trouble of theatrical property, without the profit, or even the credit of the abuse that attends it.

DANGLE.
I am sure, Mrs. Dangle, you are no loser by it, however; you have all the advantages of it. Mightn’t you, last winter, have had the reading of the new pantomime a fortnight previous to its performance? And doesn’t Mr. Fosbrook let you take places for a play before it is advertised, and set you down for a box for every new piece through the season? And didn’t my friend, Mr. Smatter, dedicate his last farce to you at my particular request, Mrs. Dangle?

MRS. DANGLE.
Yes; but wasn’t the farce damned, Mr. Dangle? And to be sure it is extremely pleasant to have one’s house made the motley rendezvous of all the lackeys of literature; the very high ’Change of trading authors and jobbing critics!—Yes, my drawing-room is an absolute register-office for candidate actors, and poets without character.—Then to be continually alarmed with misses and ma’ams piping hysteric changes on Juliets and Dorindas, Pollys and Ophelias; and the very furniture trembling at the probationary starts and unprovoked rants of would-be Richards and Hamlets!—And what is worse than all, now that the manager has monopolized the Opera House, haven’t we the signors and signoras calling here, sliding their smooth semibreves, and gargling glib divisions in their outlandish throats—with foreign emissaries and French spies, for aught I know, disguised like fiddlers and figure dancers?

DANGLE.
Mercy! Mrs. Dangle!

MRS. DANGLE.
And to employ yourself so idly at such an alarming crisis as this too—when, if you had the least spirit, you would have been at the head of one of the Westminster associations—or trailing a volunteer pike in the Artillery Ground! But you—o’ my conscience, I believe, if the French were landed tomorrow, your first inquiry would be, whether they had brought a theatrical troop with them.

DANGLE.
Mrs. Dangle, it does not signify—I say the stage is ‘the mirror of nature’, and the actors are ‘the Abstract and brief Chronicles of the Time’: and pray what can a man of sense study better?—Besides, you will not easily persuade me that there is no credit or importance in being at the head of a band of critics, who take upon them to decide for the whole town, whose opinion and patronage all writers solicit, and whose recommendation no manager dares refuse.

MRS. DANGLE.
Ridiculous!—Both managers and authors of the least merit laugh at your pretensions.—The public is their critic—without whose fair approbation they know no play can rest on the stage, and with whose applause they welcome such attacks as yours, and laugh at the malice of them, where they can’t at the wit.

DANGLE.
Very well, madam—very well!

Enter SERVANT.