Whig Oratory on Stage Sheridan's Pizarro

Abstract

PIZARRO REMAINS AN ENIGMA in Sheridan's career. How could the author of The Critic publicly associate himself with a play that resembled Mr. Puff's Spanish Armada? How could a man who twenty years earlier had revealed an acute sensitivity to emotional pretentiousness indulge the extravagant heroics of Pizarro? He was not in the first instance responsible for the play, which is and was acknowledged to be an adaptation from the German of Kotzebue, Die Spanier in Peru, but it is a free adaptation in which more than language is original. Sheridan had an important share of responsibility for it, and he was proud of it and its enormous success in the theatre. Although he had shown a reluctance to regard The School for Scandal as ready for the press, he promptly published this play. Despite the traditional and justified disparagement of Pizarro by students of the drama, it is not without its claim on our attention. It provides a major link between Sheridan's dramatic and his Parliamentary careers. It is his only play written after his election to the House of Commons in 1780, just as it is the only one of his plays with emphatic political comment. In a century remarkable for the political eminence of literary men, Sheridan is unique among the major literary figures in his political prominence and inffuence. Addison as Secretary of State held higher office, but it is hard to think of Addison's brief tenure of that position or of his previous career in Whig politics as providing any real parallel to Sheridan's thirty years in Parliament, many of them spent as a principal leader of the Opposition to Pitt and as a principal adviser of the Prince of Wales. Addison was a silent member of Commons; Sheridan one of the most eloquent orators in the history of Parliament. He is the single man of high accomplishment who achieved comparable success as a writer and a politician. Swift, Steele, and even Addison were pri-