A Traitor's Kiss: Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

A Traitor's Kiss: Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan Book

Richard Sheridan is primarily remembered for three brilliant plays: The Rivals, The School for Scandal, and The Critic. With these elegant comedies of manners, he almost single-handedly revived the comic spirit of the Restoration, deemed too coarse by the more refined society of the latter 18th century. In Sheridan's work, the clichés of traditional melodrama are turned on their heads (The Rivals, for example, features a man who forces his son to marry the woman he himself is in love with), and romantic intrigues become a forum for discussing political issues and the nature of theater itself. Sheridan's major plays were all written by the time he was 28. While melodramas, adaptations, and pantomimes followed, his career as a playwright was just a prelude to a long involvement in other fields, most notably managing London's Drury Lane theater and a political career that eventually led to a seat in the House of Commons. Little has been written about his later political and business life. There are romantic intrigues, political battles, and dodges from the debt collectors aplenty in Sheridan's later life, though they seem but a lengthy epilogue to the wit and creativity of his early years. O'Toole is wonderfully lucid, however, in explaining the struggles for Irish autonomy in this period (Sheridan would all his life, to the detriment of his social standing, identify himself as Irish), and he offers an in-depth analysis of the elaborate political and social arena of the time. Particularly well drawn are Sheridan's complex romantic relationships with his wives, involving infidelities and duels. But when compared to the brilliance of his early plays, the historical details of his later life seem somewhat lackluster. --John Longenbaugh Read More

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  • Product Description

    This is a biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the author of "The School for Scandal" and "The Rival". He was the quintessential dramatist-entrepreneur, an 18th-century wit and man about town, and one of the foremost politicians in Britain - an unthinkable combination today. Sheridan was also a complicated and ambitious Irish person, interested in the Gaelic culture of the Catholic majority, and his relationship with English society was extraordinarily tense. A friend of the parliamentary radicals led by Fox, he sailed close to the wind of treason in his support for the United Irishmen, the organization that sparked the savage uprising of 1798, and was influenced by French Revolutionary ideas. The book shows how Sheridan's Irishness was a crucial factor in his drive for English literary and political success, and brings the two countries to life in an age of war and revolution, when London was becoming the capital of a huge colonial empire. Fintan O'Toole is the author of "Meanwhile Back At the Ranch", "Black Hole", "Green Card" and "A Mass for Jesse James".

  • 1862070261
  • 9781862070264
  • Fintan O'Toole
  • 30 October 1997
  • Granta Books
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 512
  • First Edition, First Impression
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