A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1751-1816

Richard Brinsley Sheridan would have found irony in his burial in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. When Sheridan died in 1816, he had not written a play in seventeen years, his reputation as a playwright resting mainly on four comedies written in the 1770s. For over thirty years, he had been a leader in Parliament, and as his biographer Fintan O’Toole informs us, Sheridan would have chosen to be buried besides Charles James Fox, the Whig leader who had been Sheridan’s mentor, political ally, and friend for most of those thirty years. But the choice of burial site indicates how Sheridan would be remembered nearly two hundred years later: as one of the great comic dramatists in English, one of a quartet of writers whose roots were in Ireland (the others being Congreve, Wilde, and Shaw), but whose realm was the London stage, where they reigned supreme.

In A Traitor’s Kiss, O’Toole gets the balance right between the worlds of theater and politics in Sheridan’s life. Even though Sheridan was the owner and manager of Drury Lane from 1776 to 1812, it was Parliament that provided the main stage in his life. The theater was a means to an end, providing a base for Sheridan to become a gentleman in politics. Even though a portion of Sheridan’s daily schedule would be devoted to the running of Drury Lane, O’Toole skirts Sheridan’s role in the world of theater after his early theatrical successes and focuses on the role he played in politics.

Sheridan’s career as a playwright ended early. After the production of The Critic in 1779, Sheridan wrote no more plays with the exception of Pizarro, an adaptation of Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru, in 1799. O’Toole offers illuminating discussions of the plays, particularly of The Rivals, The School for Scandal, and Pizarro. He shows how each play can be seen as a theatrical transformation of events and circumstances in Sheridan’s life. Both The Rivals and The School for Scandal contain biographical elements: characters and situations which recall Sheridan’s romantic courtship of Elizabeth Linley, a story replete with an elopement and a duel, as well as the legacy of his literary mother and theatrical father, and his strained relations with a hypocritical older brother, at one point Sheridan’s rival for Elizabeth Linley. Pizarro may strike a modern reader as a curious example of outdated dramatic bombast, but in 1799 it was a great success. O’Toole shows how Sheridan gave the apparent contradictions in his public role as a politician dramatic life, even using an excerpt from one of the great moments in his political career (the oration leading to the impeachment of Warren Hastings) in the play.

And what were these contradictions? As O’Toole points out, Sheridan’s political position was “irrational . . . made up of elements that did not cohere. Opposition to a French invasion but support for the United Irish rebellion staged with French help; a passionate British patriotism and a belief that the British government was an organized tyranny; republican instincts and dependence on the Prince” (348). O’Toole carefully recounts the political compromises and role playing Sheridan used to survive in Parliament while at the same time promoting the causes he passionately espoused. During his thirty years in Parliament, the inconsistencies in his political positions and the roles he played served as fodder for his political enemies attempting to bring him down. To the political cartoonist William Cobbett, he was a “slippery, seditious Irishman” (404). Cobbett vividly lampooned what he saw as the contradictions between “Sheridan’s claims of loyalty and his practice of treason” (378).

O’Toole gives full due to Sheridan’s talents as a public speaker. Sheridan outlived most of his political rivals and enemies from the stormy years of revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. He came to be seen as “a brilliant anachronism, the last of the great eighteenth-century orators” (398). In his account of Sheridan’s most famous speeches, O’Toole recreates them as dramatic events. He notes that the written text can be seen as a “template” (205) for the actual speech, just as the script for a play, particularly the kind of comedy that Sheridan excelled in, only providing the base on which an actual performance was built.

Sheridan’s life was turbulent, and O’Toole gives a faithful account of the excesses and embarrassments as well as the moments of brilliance. Twice married (both times for love and under the most romantic of circumstances), Sheridan was incapable of being faithful to either wife. Late in life, he wrote a series of obscene letters whose object was Harriet Duncannon, the mistress of his younger days. Renowned as a public speaker, he was also capable of embarrassing himself by speaking in public when he was obviously in his cups. A man who would live in the style of an aristocratic gentleman, he wound up in debtor’s prison near the end of his life.

O’Toole shows a mastery of the complicated and sometimes contradictory elements in Sheridan’s life. O’Toole’s regard for his subject is evident throughout A Traitor’s Kiss. He seeks neither to apologize for nor to explain away Sheridan’s weaknesses and excesses; at the same time, he does not minimize Sheridan’s accomplishments and his claims to greatness in both the theater and politics. In the preface to the American edition of A Traitor’s Kiss, O’Toole points out that Sheridan’s plays and speeches carried powerful messages to Americans in the early days of the republic, that he was in the vanguard of revolutionary causes and human rights. In the course of time, much of what was new and original in Sheridan, both in his work in the theater and his role in politics, has come to seem hackneyed and familiar. O’Toole attempts to make the reader see his subject anew. He tries to locate Sheridan “in a time of upheaval, to see him as a public man animated by three revolutions, the American, the French, and, in his soured hopes, the Irish … to see him in the light of the ways he defined himself—as an Irishman, as an enemy of oppression, as a child of the Enlightenment, as a consummate conspirator, and, in the midst of all these things, as a man of the theatre” (xxi).