The Critic was Sheridan's response to a very specific political and theatrical situation. In the summer of 1779, a Franco-Spanish invasion seemed imminent and patriotic fervour superseded party divisions and personal animosities. The Critic satirises the panic of the summer in the form of the comically misconceived tragedy 'The Spanish Armada' that is in rehearsal in the second and third acts, but The Critic ends with genuine patriotic feeling. This edition traces both the political and the theatrical objects of Sheridan's satire and discusses its reliance (and improvement) on earlier meta-theatrical burlesques like The Duke of Buckingham's Restoration romp The Rehearsal.
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.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) was an Irish-born playwright and poet and long-term owner of the London Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. "The Rival" is a great comedy of manners, and "The School for Scandal" established his work in London.
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