Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The Impresario in Political and Cultural Context
Edited by Jack DeRochi, Daniel Ennis
Publication date:
19 December 2012Length of book:
320 pagesPublisher
Bucknell University PressDimensions:
239x162mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781611484809
This new collection of essays on Richard Brinsley Sheridan brings the most important British playwright of the eighteenth century back to the forefront of literary and cultural studies of the era. While his pyrotechnic life as a romantic hero, playwright, Member of Parliament, and theatre manager has generated a number of recent biographies, it is Sheridan’s works—not just plays but also poetry and orations—that endure. These essays reclaim the legacy of the man of letters and partisan bon vivant who burst from obscurity to become a powerful cultural force in Georgian London. This collection covers the many lives of Sheridan, taking into account both his variegated career and the competing accounts of the man, as well as his early verse, which lays the foundation for his success as a playwright. Chapters are devoted to Sheridan’s theatre, and provide innovative readings of his most famous dramatic pieces: The Rivals, The Duenna, The School for Scandal, The Critic, and Pizarro. The volume also includes extensive discussion of the dramatic highs of Sheridan’s long political career, thus placing the playwright-politician firmly in the world in which performance and politics were inextricably entwined.
Contributors: Mita Choudhury, Jack E. DeRochi, Marianna D’Ezio, Daniel J. Ennis, Emily Friedman, Steven Gores, David Haley, Robert W. Jones, Daniel O’Quinn, Glynis Ridley, John Vance, David Francis Taylor
Contributors: Mita Choudhury, Jack E. DeRochi, Marianna D’Ezio, Daniel J. Ennis, Emily Friedman, Steven Gores, David Haley, Robert W. Jones, Daniel O’Quinn, Glynis Ridley, John Vance, David Francis Taylor
Transformative figures in their own right, the editors effectively update the enigmatic impresario for a current-day scholarly audience. The strength of DeRochi and Ennis’ collection resides in the treatment of its principal subject as a dynamic and complex participant in the social, political, and artistic discourses of the eighteenth century. . .DeRochi and Ennis bring together discrete critical voices, creating a holistic portrait of Sheridan as poet, playwright, critic, orator, and polemicist. In its desire to bring Sheridan into the twenty-first century, the collection imitates its principal subject, whose ability to transform himself with the changing times is dramatically and decisively detailed in these pages. . . .the collection is astoundingly great.