Vol. 19 No. 23 · 27 November 1997
pages 22-23 | 3364 words
Locked in a Room with a Pile of Anchovy Sandwiches, Two Bottles of Claret and Act III of ‘The Critic’
David Edgar
- A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan by Fintan O’Toole
Granta, 516 pp, £20.00, October 1997, ISBN 1 86207 026 1
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan: A Life by Linda Kelly
Sinclair-Stevenson, 366 pp, £25.00, April 1997, ISBN 1 85619 207 5
- Sheridan’s Nightingale: The Story of Elizabeth Linley by Alan Chedzoy
Allison and Busby, 322 pp, £15.99, April 1997, ISBN 0 7490 0264 6
Fintan O’Toole’s publishers announce that Richard Brinsley Sheridan has been generally ill-served by biographers, ‘who rehash the familiar outlines of his story every decade or so without bringing any intelligent new insights to the task’. By contrast, O’Toole has written a ‘gripping, carefully composed exploration of Sheridan’s career’. His biography comes hard on the heels of Linda Kelly’s, and it would be comforting to report that O’Toole’s was the rehash, but the Granta puff has it the right way round, while Alan Chedzoy’s life of the first Mrs Sheridan (the noted soprano and beauty Elizabeth Linley) is more boisterously entertaining than either of them.
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 1 · 1 January 1998
From Fintan O’Toole
David Edgar begins his review of my biography of R.B. Sheridan, A Traitor’s Kiss (LRB, 27 November), with the mysterious confession that he would find it ‘comforting’ to be able to dismiss it. He goes on to assuage his disappointment at not being able to do so by inventing a book worthy of scorn and attributing it to me. He writes, for instance, that I claim that ‘most’ of the Malapropisms in The Rivals are about languagessstor, he shows to be false. What I actually wrote is that ‘most of Mrs Malaprop’s more spectacular mistakes are … about language’ – a very different proposition. He writes of my contention that the relationship of Jack Absolute to his father in the same play is a ‘direct dramatisation of the relationship between Richard and his father’. What I actually wrote is that ‘Sheridan’s difficulties with this father were echoed’ in that relationship. An echo is, by definition, indirect.
Edgar attributes to me the ludicrous suggestion that Sheridan’s support for the American Revolution was merely an ‘expression of his revolt against his own father’. My actual suggestion is that in a particular draft pamphlet on the Revolution, ‘Sheridan’s pro-Americanism was linked in his own mind to his personal revolution, his declaration of independence from his father.’ Since, in the pamphlet in question, Sheridan wrote that ‘when a colony is of age’, there is ‘a Parallel between Father and Son’, this is simply a statement of the obvious.
Most seriously, David Edgar suggests that I understand Sheridan’s political beliefs to be, ‘like his plays’, ‘no more than a transference of "his erotic passions and familial affections" into another realm’. The phrase quoted is in fact used in a very specific context, to suggest that, in an early pamphlet on women’s education, ‘his feelings for Eliza were translated into a demand that women in general should be respected.’ To turn a suggestion that a particular political idea was inspired by personal affections into a statement that all of Sheridan’s dramatic and political ideas were ‘no more than’ the transference of such emotions is a grotesque distortion.
The bulk of my book is actually devoted to showing that Sheridan’s political beliefs were serious, tenaciously held and of striking relevance to contemporary Ireland. David Edgar obviously believes that these beliefs can be safely ignored. He writes that ‘most of the great political questions which Sheridan addressed are long since resolved (with the single exception of the land of his birth).’ And (with the single exception of the assassination of her husband) Mrs Lincoln had a most enjoyable evening at the theatre.
Fintan O’Toole
New York
