Quotes Sheridan’s friend Samuel Rogers: ‘In his dealings with the world, Sheridan certainly carried the privileges of genius as far as they were ever carried by any man’ - and remarks: ‘the confidence trickster must have confidence in himself. Sheridan, the son of an Irish actor-manager and elocutionist, believed be could seduce one of the most beautiful and talented girls in England; that he could write his way to a fortune; that he could run a great theatre; the he could become not only a member of Parliament but a leading orator. So he did. But he also believed that he could influence events by his words. For that he would have needed a truer understanding of the attachments of human natures and the tides of his revolutionary times.’

McCue regards O’Toole as highly conversant with eighteenth-century theatre and excellent on Sheridan as a self-dramatiser. He quotes O’Toole: ‘He was genuinely not in favour of a French invasion of Britain (Ireland, of course, was a very different matter), especially since France itself was moving steadily towards a new kind of dictatorship’; ‘O’Toole writes of Sheridan’s lifelong quest for ‘an independent, non-sectarian Ireland", but one of Sheridan’s arguments for Catholic emancipation was that it would protect the empire’.

O’Toole writes that ‘Sheridan ‘painted a daringly grim picture of the effects of British rule", when he told the Lords of ‘plain unclothed and brown, villages depopulated and in ruins, temples unroofed and perishing, reservoirs broken down and dry". But the pathos of invoking chivalry and family piety in a political context was Burkean, as were the details, down to the famous example of the reservoirs’.

McCue questions if this means that Sheridan wanted dictatorship for his own homeland; quotes Burke on Sheridan’s powers of eloquence in the impeachment of Warren Hastings: ‘the most astonishing effort of eloquence, argument, and wit united of which there is any record or tradition’’ and also Edward Gibbon to the effect that ‘Sheridan at the close of his speech sank into Burke’s arms - a good actor; but I called this morning and he is perfectly well.’

McCue takes the view that Sheridan was primed and rehearsed by Burke, and that he lacked political intelligence himself; notes that in later life when he met Hastings he begged him ‘to believe that any part he had taken against him was purely political’, and that he was ‘a public pleader, whose duty it is, under all circumstances, to make good if he can the charges which he is commissioned to bring forward’. McCue considers his insincere.

‘[Sheridan] managed to be at once deeply traditionalist and potentially modern: for the poor man, of course, might win great wealth by sheer merit in the more democratic world now emerging. Sheridan saw himself as a rising comet of the new order: ’and as God very often pleases to let down great folks from the elevated stations which they might claim as their birthright, there can be no reason for us to suppose that he does not mean that others should ascend.’ [...] the world of the theatre might seem vulgar and amoral to fastidious souls, but it was open to all social clases, like the British constitution in which (said an admiring Sheridan) ‘no sullen line of demarcation separates and cuts off the several orders from each other." Here the lowly could imitate the exaclted in what amounted to rehearsal for a modern world.’ (p.139.)

Kiberd quotes Sir Anthony Absolute [in The Rivals]: ‘a circulating library in a town is as an ever-green tree of diabolical knowledge’, and remarks: ‘Sheridan as a radical might be expected to support female literacy, but on this too he had conflicting thoughts. He had after all been born in a land most of whose inhabitants still blieved in the power of oral tradition and in the notioni of literature as recorded speech.’ (p.140.)

On Malaprop and malapropisms: ‘Sheridan well understood the value of reading in the education of a person, despite Shelley’s belief that the library scene in The School for Scandal was an attack on the literary tradition as such. His real quarrel was with those fooolish enough to confuse literature and life. The mockery of Mrs Malaprop is aimed at a woman who has allowed everyday conversation to be contaminated by writerly phrasing. The laughter at Lydia is directed at a debutante who insists that love affairs should be conducted in freezing gardens under a ‘conscious moon" of a sort essential in romantic books.’ (p.143.)

[...]

Kiberd argues that Sheridan is not simply the imitator he is believed to be by critics such as A. N. Kaul ('A Note on Sheridan’, in Peter Davison, ed., Sheridan’s Comedies: Casebook, London 1986), and writes: ‘Had Sheridan simply mirrored his age, his art would soon have been forgotten, but because he existed in an allegorical relation to his times he was able to float free of them. His transcendence of the limits of his age was made possible, like Merriman’s, by a dynamic traditionalism. He used the cynical shell of Restoration comedy to insure against his own sentimentality: and yet he saw beyond that sentiment to the romanticism of the next age. The character of Faulkland represented a new kind of protagonist, a male neurotic riven by doubt and self-cancelling instincts. His misplaced suspicions of the ever-faithful Julia contrast utterly with Malaprop’s misplaced confidence in the never-reliable Luclus O’Trigger. Compared with him, a good-bad son like Captain Absolute seems the very picture of rude health - yet Sheridan acutely senses that this new self-divided protagonist might prove endlessly fascinating in the role of male coquette forever teasing some unfortunate woman. Julia gamely explains her love: ‘his humility makes him undervalue those qualities in him, which would entitle him to it; and not feeling why [150] should be loved to the degree he wishes, he suspects that he is not loved enough". Toying with his own scruples, Faulkland can seldom feel worthy of his beloved. Immobilised by the very intensity of his feeling, he will in time become a subject better suited to a lyric poem or Bildungsroman, but in a play where even sentiment is open to suspicion, his sexual ardour is tolerated rather than celebrated. The rules of Restoration comedy, after all, had insisted that naked passion was risible as well as disruptive: and The Rivals is in the end ‘a nice derangement of epitaphs" on earlier English comedy, ‘one of those jaunty epitaphs that delight in rehearsing and summarising the main features and signal achievements of that which has passed from the world".’ (Kaul, op. cit., p.106.) Kiberd later lays emphasis on Mrs Malaprop’s closing sentiments: ‘We will not anticipate the past - our retrospection will be all to the future.’ (here p.158.)

[...]

‘Restoration comedy depends on the senses of ‘perpetual discrepancy between outer and inner essence’ and that ‘its heroes and heroines [...] negotiated that discrepancy with panache [while] its fools and fops simply got these things confused.’ (p.150.) Calls the denouement of School for Scandal ‘an utter reversal of the modes of Restoration comdedy, for it declaure the priority of the hearrt over the head, marriage over libertinism, the domestic over the sexual.’ (p.154) Lays emphasis on the screen-scene at the close of School for Scandal, which excited roars from the audience, and remarks: One effectof the confrontation was the collapse of a fashion system. henceforth the offence of the villain would not be against manners but against domestic virtue; and the scandal of such villains would be printed (rather than spoken) in the newspaper, the chosen [155] medium of the new bourgeoisie’ (pp.155-56.) Admits that Sheridan wrote in imitation of Congreve, Canbrugh and Wycherley, but defends him against the charge of being a ‘fretful imitator’ on the grounds that he practiced the method of ‘present[ing] new ideas in old packages’ and connects this with the procedures of Patrick Pearse and James Connolly: ‘the priceof promoting new ideas is often the need to clothe them in famiiliar garments in order to make them seem cosily unremarkable. One consequent danger is that covert innovators may go under-celebrated [...] he gave to his writings the look [sic] of tame traditionalism. Earlier in the eighteenth century, a much more conservative thinker, Swift, had performed a reverse feat, equally paradoxical, for he expresseed is defence of past culture in styles that were audaciously new. (p.157.)

Note: Kiberd quotes Fintan O’Toole [as supra] - illustrating the attitude of ‘[e]ven Sheridan’s greatest admirers’: ‘instead of proposing alternative modes of understanding or feeling, he operated entirely within those that were given him but seized control of them and made them serve his own purposes.’ ( A Traitor’s Kiss, 1997, p.87.)

Quotes Sheridan on Irish independence: ‘To keep Ireland against the will of the people is a vain expectation [...] we shall love each other, if we be left to ourselves. It is the union of minds which ought to bind these nations together.’ (Cited in O’Toole, p.340; here p.159.) Further quotes from Pizarro (1798): ‘They offer us protection. Yes, such protection as a vulture gives to lambs [...; see Quotations, infra .]