Representation and Experimentation in the Major Comedies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Abstract

IN HIS 1825 BIOGRAPHY of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Thomas Moore pauses briefly consider a ludicrous little drama entitled Ixion, the incomplete product of a juvenile collaboration between the nineteen-year-old Sheridan and a school chum. Insignificant in itself, the fragment, as Moore; suggests, is yet highly curious as an anticipation of The Critic, for not only is it a burletta written in the form of a rehearsal, but it also features an embryonic precursor of Sheridan's famous Mr. Puffin its main character, a playwright-critic named Simile. It is Moore reflects by way of conclusion, to observe how long this subject was played with by the current of Sheridan's fancy .I More than merely amusing, the fragment from Sheridan's juvenilia suggests an early, conscious fascination with the very nature of the dramatic form of representation itself. Perhaps the most manifold of the sister arts, the drama, as a type of story unfolding through a visible enactment, offered the young Sheridan a uniquely composite narrative and pictorial medium with which work-or perhaps more precisely, play. For indeed, as the germinal precur-