The Fate of Empires The American War, Political Parody, and Sheridan's Comedies

"The Fate of Empires": The American War, Political Parody, andSheridan's Comedies

David Francis Taylor

Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 42, Number 3, Spring 2009, pp.379-395 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/ecs.0.0055

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Taylor / “The Fate of Empires” 379

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 42, no. 3 (2009) Pp. 379–95.

“The FaTe oF empires”: The american War, poliTical parody, and sheridan’s comedies

David Francis Taylor

The American Revolution, and the prolonged not-quite-civil, not-quite-im-perial military conflict it precipitated, challenged—indeed, threatened to collapse—a whole array of cultural and political taxonomies on both sides of the Atlantic. In the imperial capital in particular, the ongoing propaganda war that this struggle generated—as the 1770s witnessed the unprecedented production and dissemination of pamphlets, periodicals, and newspapers—was at least in part a symptom of the desire to process the unsettlingly liminal events and identities at work in the conflict. In this essay I wish to consider three texts by two writers, one from London, the other Philadelphia, which sought to negotiate the shifting ideological, geographic, and technological boundaries of the revolutionary period through strategies of liter-ary parody and appropriation. Anonymously published, The Duenna (1776) and The Critic; or a Tragedy Rehearsed (1780), both attributed to Israel Pottinger, and The School for Scandal (1779) by John Leacock, all take their titles from Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s canonical dramas, yet make no attempt to engage aesthetically with their namesakes. Rather, each parody functions as what Margaret Rose calls a “word-mask” that is adopted as a means of broaching and satirizing subjects other than the target text.1 These works are really antigovernment pamphlets in dramatic form: specific critiques of the American War and the incompetence and corruption of the British administration that were not—and, given their overtly polemical content, could not have been—performed.

David Francis Taylor is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, where he is completing a thesis on Sheridan and political theater in Georgian London. He has published articles in the Keats-Shelley Review and the European Romantic Review, and is co-editing a volume on the Victorian actor Samuel Phelps for Pickering & Chatto.

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Each piece carefully masquerades as a work of legitimate drama. Their title pages deliberately counterfeit the typographic conventions of play publication, with the usual soubriquet, “performed at the Theatre Royal . . . with Universal Applause,” replaced by suggestive tags that read “performed by His Majesty’s Servants.” Equally, they retain the standard format of printing dramatis personae, employing the two parallel columns as a means of establishing a key for their coded satires, with a list of political nicknames substituted for the record of the actors. In Pottinger’s The Critic, for example, Dangle is performed by “Mr. Minden” (George Germain, American Secretary), Sneer by “Mr. Todd” (Whig leader Charles James Fox), and Puff by “Boreas” (the Prime Minister, Lord North). As shams, these plays were successful; in 1779 the London Magazine complained that it was “necessary to take notice” of Leacock’s School for Scandal in order to “apprize our readers of the deception which has contributed to its sale. Many persons have imagined that it was the celebrated comedy under that title written by Sheridan.”2 However, I am concerned less with the trickery these texts played on their contemporary reader-ship than with the ways in which they negotiate and recalibrate the personalities and themes of Sheridan’s dramas for political purposes.

Emerging from matrices in which theater either is suppressed (America) or censored (Britain), these Anglo-American texts adopt and adapt the dramatic form, politicizing Sheridanian comedy of manners in order to grapple with the new cultural technologies—most especially a mass media—engendered or accelerated by the war. This print culture operated, on the one hand, as a hegemonic apparatus, with the military campaign mediated through official publications produced accord-ing to specific institutional criteria. On the other hand, both in the testimonies of their characters and in their very existence these dramas record the countervailing potential of such media. In his study of British political culture at this time, Eliga Gould argues that “the language founded in pamphlets and newspapers could also generate its own ‘reality’ independent from the actual experiences of either its authors or readers.”3 We will see Pottinger and Leacock participating in exactly this imaginative reconstruction of the war and its ideological imperatives—what Gould calls a “sort of representational autonomy”—by harnessing the theatrical as a discourse not just for satirizing the corruptions of the Tory regime, but also for mapping and intervening in the contested spaces of print media and commer-cialized culture as they evolved and reoriented themselves to accommodate the trauma of global conflict.

VoTing black is whiTe: israel PoTTinger

Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedies entered the canon of British drama with remarkable speed, quickly establishing themselves as stock pieces in the rep-ertory of Georgian theaters. The School for Scandal, for instance, was performed more than any other play in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.4 Yet Sheridan was notoriously wary of publishing his works; authorized editions of his comic opera The Duenna and The School for Scandal did not appear until 1794 and 1799, respectively, two decades after their first performances. As a result, in a period in which plagiarism and literary piracy flourished, the texts of Sheridan’s plays pro-liferated in a multitude of unofficial forms, and their various discursive presences in the print culture of the late eighteenth century are almost as numerous as, and


certainly more protean than, their frequent appearances on stages in and beyond London. The absence of authoritative editions for such popular dramas, and the habitual unsanctioned dissemination and dilution of Sheridan’s writings that this absence generated—a kind of typographical Chinese whispers—unfolded a space in which conscious acts of parody and appropriation could and did take place. According to Dane Farnsworth Smith, the titles and/or characters of Sheridan’s plays were recycled by at least nine dramatic pieces before 1800.5

Noting the publication of the first of such pieces, The Duenna, a Comic Opera, in Three Acts, the Monthly Review of August 1776 asserted that its “Author has borrowed Sheridan’s mould, in which the famous Covent-Garden Duenna was so successfully formed, and he has melted into it a mass of political base-metal.”6 The Review, however, seemed unsure of where to place the travesty in its monthly catalog of new books: “It is one of the most impudent court satires we have ever seen; and yet, at the same time, a very unmeaning, common-place, contemptible catch-penny.” Not quite literature, not quite journalism, not quite polemic, The Duenna was thus the only entry in a category headed “Political,” which was tagged onto the end of five pages itemizing the recent publications concerned with the “American Controversy.” Yet the writers of the Monthly Review might just as easily have situated the political Duenna in this preceding group, for, in spite of its dramatic form and borrowed title, it was an intriguing contribution to the ongoing pamphlet war generated by the rebellion of the American colonies.

Authorship of the political Duenna is attributed to Israel Pottinger, a bookseller and playwright about whom little is known.7 In 1761 Pottinger pub-lished The Methodist, a comic play that satirized religious hypocrisy, announcing itself as having been intended for “the Theatre Royal Covent-Garden, but for Obvious Reasons suppressed.”8 The Duenna continued Pottinger’s interest both in unstageable satire and in the spread of Methodism, caricaturing John Wesley as “Canting John,” a character who asserts that his “pamphlet” (the pro-British Calm Address to our American Colonies of 1775) “proves that murder’s right.”9 Sheridan’s original comic opera had debuted at Covent Garden in November 1775 and immediately superseded The Beggar’s Opera as the most popular example of its genre. Set in Seville, Sheridan’s play charts the schemes of Louisa, whose hopes of marrying her beloved Antonio are forestalled when she is promised to an old Jew called Isaac Mendoza by her stubborn father, Don Jerome. To escape her fa-ther’s plans she switches places with her duenna and runs away, leaving Mendoza married to the governess.

Pottinger’s parody makes no attempt to duplicate this plot or to recycle Sheridan’s dialogue and characters. Instead, he depicts the Machiavellian intrigues of the British government as Boreas (North), Minden (Germain), and Twitcher (First Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Sandwich) seek to manage and contain the Ameri-can crisis, while Mac Boot (Lord Bute), whose influence over his pupil Don Louis (George III) is unrivalled, plays the puppet-master of the piece. Disguise provides the leitmotif for Sheridan’s comic opera; its plot is impelled by willfully deceptive appearances, and the errors and confusions that they generate, as old governesses play young maidens, young maidens play nuns, and Jews play Christians. Pottinger’s parody transposes this theme onto its ironic picture of ministerial machinations, politicizing Sheridan’s concern with and comedy of misrepresentation; the prime


minister declares that his supporters will “vote that black is white—that white is black, or that either one or the other are all the colours of the rainbow” (TD, 16). Moreover, like its namesake duenna, the play’s very text masquerades and markets itself as something it is not.

The opening of the parody unfolds a political culture of distrust and disil-lusionment set against a backdrop of pervasive imperial anxieties. Mungo (Jeremiah Dyson, Clerk of the Commons)10 complains that he must “run of[f] errands all day for rascals that I despise,” while a bewildered Don Louis sings, “where is Boreas, tell me where, / Who guides the helm of Empire right?” (TD, 1–2). Louis, however, is quickly distracted by the latest inventions of Little Pinchey (clockmaker and king’s favorite, Christopher Pinchbeck), leaving an indignant Mac Boot to grumble,

Cork-screws and button moulds! —When the fate of empires is at stake, and when all his honours and possessions totter on the brink of destruc-tion! Astonishing madness and folly!” (TD, 3).

So the scene is set, as Pottinger reveals a self-destructive administration whose scheming ministers are repeatedly traduced by their own associates, and in which political allegiances and patriotism are habitually subsumed by motives of personal gain. However, this satire of specific statesmen is punctuated throughout with com-ments and images that gesture toward the wider collapse of the colonial apparatus and the brutality of the British response to the American Revolution. Don Louis repeatedly frets upon “bad news from that rebellious continent” (TD, 6); Minden calls the military campaign “a bloody business” (TD, 9), while Boreas hopes that his supporters will have “consciences bloody and dark as my own” (TD, 16). Here, the reformed Caen-Wood (David Murray, Earl of Mansfield) becomes the mouthpiece of both political realism and American independence, asserting that the prime minister’s head is

full of imaginary ideas of subjugating the Americans: as if three million people, enthusiastic in the cause of liberty, hardy—brave—vigilant—possessing a country larger than all of Europe,—having within themselves all the conveniences and comforts of life, and fighting for every thing they hold dear to themselves and their posterity, could be conquered by any force that can be sent from this country. (TD, 33–34).

Throughout his political parody Pottinger sounds a proleptic warning to the West-minster parliament about its management of colonial affairs.

More subtly, Pottinger’s Duenna maps fundamental shifts in the economic and political culture of Britain, especially that of its capital. The opening scene thus serves as an overture for the parody; as Pinchey and Mac Boot vie for the king’s attention, state-of-the-art gadgetry, the products of an increasingly consumerist city, and the exigencies of the imperial polity are brought within the same dramatic circuit, presenting us with a panorama of a new politico-economic power on both micro- and macrocosmic levels. Simultaneously confronted by the fluid technolo-gies of commerce and geopolitics, Mac Boot is terrorized by the concomitants of the emerging modern state. In the same way, at the beginning of the second act, Boreas’s long soliloquy laments that “Opposition is a many-headed monster” (TD, 13). Not only does his ministry face resistance from the Whig supporters of


Lords Portland and Shelburne, but also from “the foolish citizens of London” (TD, 15), who have pledged allegiance to John Sawbridge (MP and supporter of John Wilkes) and the “Young Cub” (TD, Fox), the standard-bearers for the “opinion of the people” whose campaign would end “all ministerial influence” and render the prime minister “the servant only, not the tyrant of the public.”

Indeed, Pottinger’s drama depicts an aristocratic oligarchy that is increas-ingly required to accommodate a thriving public sphere. Mungo, addressing Boreas, understands

that half the business (the political business I mean) of the first mercan-tile city in the universe, is adjusted at the Half-Moon in Cheapside, the Kings-Arms in Cornhill, the Paul’s-Head in Cateaton Street . . . (TD, 22; original emphasis)

What is more, Mungo continues,

[this] body of people do not examine—they take upon trust—the asser-tions in an advertisement are with them as sacred as Holy Writ; and the Public Advertiser is their Magna Charta. By the way, my lord,—that ad-ditional tax upon news-papers was a d—d impolitic stroke of yours . . . Half a dozen of them, who used to be separate purchasers, will now club to buy a three-penny paper, which they read with additional avidity, and increasing rancour, on account of the super-added tax.—Among the better sort, who frequent the coffee-houses, the consequence will be still worse. . . . (TD, 22–23)

Boreas’s ministry confronts not only the direct challenge posed to its power by the American rebels, but also the insidious threat embodied by the sites of the ale and coffee houses, where those doubly empowered by the capital of mercantilism and the knowledge disseminated through print media are brought together. Pottinger reveals a metropolitan landscape in a state of socio-economic flux and constituted by a multifaceted public sphere, where the corporations and clubs, the nabobs who arrive from the East (“Doom’d thither for their vices to roam” [TD, 20]), and the consumers of papers and pamphlets all grasp at discourses of power which have previously been the privileged property of the social elite.

If such an image of the recalibration of social and political structures in the late eighteenth century recognizes the manifestation of a bourgeois public sphere along Habermasian lines, Pottinger brings with this picture distinct qualifications.11 In the act of dramatizing this “first mercantile city,” and of unveiling coffee houses and taverns as extra-parliamentary arenas of ideological struggle and crucibles of a new species of political sociability, The Duenna gestures toward the asymmetrical shape of both the spaces and the technologies of this power.12 Kathleen Wilson, refining Habermas’s thesis, argues that newspapers at this time “chronicled the bids of the urban commercial and middling classes to social authority,”13 mapping a power achieved through discourse rather than enfranchisement, and disseminating “particularized interpretations of the state, nation, and polity” which were part of a project of “national imaginings.”14 Certainly, print media did function as such a barometer, yet Mungo’s comments elicit the extent to which this public sphere was already structured into a series of hierarchies. Though read and discussed communally, newspapers are digested uncritically: “the body of people do not


examine—they take upon trust” what they read. The power of print, operating and evolving beyond parliament, is nonetheless a concentrated, exclusory, political force. Where the Habermasian public sphere emphasizes rational discussion—the generation of discourses within a critical and communicative space—Pottinger’s Duenna and, as we will see, his Critic, are concerned primarily with the control and containment of these new discourses: that is, their hegemonic and counter-hegemonic functions. It is hardly surprising that Twitcher, finding that newspapers “too often tell unwelcome truths,” is “Gazetteered and Chronicled out of all my peace of mind” (TD, 27). Ministerial neuroses are concerned not with the “body of people,” but with the seizure of discourses of “truth” and, as Wilson suggests, of nationhood, by a select group of writers and journalists—the wielding of new forms of discursive production that, though available to and useful for oligarchic purposes, the administration cannot alone possess. Pottinger’s “Grub street piece,” as the Biographia Dramatica labeled it,15 is thus not only a critique of government, but also a self-reflexive commentary on the dynamics and ordering of the very print culture from which it emerges, and of which it represents such a fascinating hybrid example.

This interest in the cultural status of newsprint has much more in com-mon with the thematic programs of The School for Scandal or The Critic, both of which Pottinger’s Duenna predates, than with Sheridan’s comic opera. Where the parody does come into sharper focus, however, is in its songs. Pottinger repeats and carefully rewrites each of Sheridan’s original songs, and he does so in their intended order.16 Here is Antonio’s air from act 1, scene 2, with Pottinger’s parodic version, sung by Mungo, shown in parallel:

Friendship is the bond of reason, Money is the clue to guide us, But if beauty disapprove, Then, when masters disapprove,Heaven dissolves all other treason That same money will provide us In the heart that’s true to love. Maugre all their hate or love.

The faith which to my friend I swore The faith to which my lord I swore As a civil oath I view, As an idle oath I view,But to the charms which I adore, But to the Cash,—which I adore, ’Tis religion to be true.17 ’Tis my interest to be true. (TD, 5)

Antonio’s song—directed to his friend Ferdinand, who suspects Antonio might “sup-plant” him in the affections of his beloved Clara—argues that the binary contest of friendship and love, of reason and emotion, will always be unbalanced. Taking Sheridan’s equation, Pottinger substitutes “interest” for friendship, and precisely inverts the terms of the song: true love is replaced by the fickle favoritism of poten-tates, “civil” oaths become “idle” ones, while friendship is transformed into capital, “charms” into “cash,” and “religion” into “interest.” Pottinger’s parodic inversions translate the vocabulary of romance into a lexicon of self-interest in which faith and loyalty are reified as currency; through the metonymic logic of commercialization, parliamentary politics becomes a pathological fetish for capital.

Mungo’s song exemplifies the contrapuntal strategy that Pottinger’s Duenna employs; while working as an autonomous satire of political egoism, it operates in a far more sophisticated way when read closely beside the discourse it targets, for the meaning of its parody is partially located in the very act of inversion, at


the point or space at which the language of feeling becomes the language of inter-est. The same parodic process is at play in each of the songs, so that Margaret’s description of the physiology of desire is rewritten by Boreas as an account of the body’s experience of cultural incongruity and friction:

When a tender maid When a Nabob’s face Is first essayed, In a country placeBy some admiring swain. Is first with wonder seen, How her blushes rise, How the rustics stare If she meets his eyes, To behold him there, While he unfolds his pain; Till he unfolds the scene:If he takes her hand, she trembles quite, If he touch the hand—they tremble quite!Touch her lips, and she swoons outright, Shew them Punch, and they soon swoon outright! While a pit a pat, &c. While a pit a pat, &c. Her heart avows her fright. (DW, 1:251) Her heart avows her fright. (TD, 19–20)

With the nabob substituted for the maid, the physical symptoms of affection become those of the alien encounter, of culture shock; the innocence and simplicity of a virgin become the contrived modishness and colonial wealth of a nouveau riche.

Pottinger’s parody works as a sequence of such careful juxtapositions and inversions. Linda Troost contends that, while Sheridan used dialogue as a means of clarifying and furthering his plot, the songs in The Duenna serve as the primary vehicles of characterization.18 Pottinger preserves and modifies this important ele-ment of Sheridan’s comic opera, providing his parody with an inverted soundtrack that reifies affection and exposes the apparatus of political power as inextricably bound up with the exigencies of personal and imperial capital. The postmatrimo-nial glee with which Sheridan’s Duenna closes thus becomes an ironic gesture of collective action on the parts of Mac Boot, Twitcher, Minden, and Boreas. Having resigned en masse, the disgraced junto repeats the newly-weds’ refrain, which calls us to “banish care away” (DW, 1:283), as a ministerial disclaimer: idyllic romance is now a politics of disavowal. Finally, then, Pottinger replaces the rituals of mat-rimony, the archetypal comedic resolution with its promise of regeneration, with a grotesque jamboree of political meltdown.

Pottinger returned to such themes in a second pamphlet of 1776 that ad-opted a poetic rather than a dramatic form. The General Fast; A Lyric Ode, written “By the Author of The Duenna” and still wrongly attributed to Sheridan, reaffirmed the sentiments of his parody.19 Four years later, following the watershed British loss at Saratoga in 1777, and the opening of a European front with the entry of first France and then Spain into the American War from 1778 onward, Pottinger once again hijacked Sheridanian comedy as a means of dramatizing the crisis of political culture. The Critic; or a Tragedy Rehearsed . . . as it is performed by His Majesty’s Servants, with the Greatest Applause was published in the year following the first performance of Sheridan’s afterpiece of the same name, which premiered at Drury Lane Theater in October 1779. The Monthly Mirror, reviewing this second political parody, called Pottinger a “Political Punchinello,” and complained that “the title of each new piece produced by the ingenious manager (and which for Reasons of State, he keeps unpublished), is instantly seized upon by this pilferer, and applied to his own improper use: to impose a state satire on the public with the appearance


of a theatrical performance.”20 Sheridan’s farce, an update of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (1672), satirized hack journalism, theatrical connoisseurship, and the histrionics of contemporary dramaturgy through its depiction of Mr Dangle and his fellow dilettantes in attendance at a rehearsal of “The Spanish Armada,” a new tragedy penned by their friend, Mr Puff. Pottinger’s parody preserves the frequent disruptions and failures of dramatic action that are a key component of Sheridan’s comic strategy. His play thus ends with the scene nonsensically switched from St. Stephen’s Hall to Hyde Park, following the sudden and meaningless entrance of a “Duellist,” who interrupts a parliamentary debate exclaiming, “What nonsense is all this!”21 As in the mock-patriotic allegorical tableau which concludes Sheridan’s original, where the figure of the Thames appears with “both banks on one side” (DW, 2:549), the mismanagement of stage business, the chaos of choreography, emblematizes the paralysis of the political state. “And this is the issue of modern debate,” Pottinger has “A Spectator” declare at the close of his Critic: “People fall out they know not why, and fight they know not wherefore” (TC, 42).

However, as in his Duenna, Pottinger makes no attempt to replicate either the plot or characterization of Sheridan’s drama. Here, Dangle is played by Ger-main, Sneer by Fox, and Puff by North, while Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Christopher Hatton, and Wiskerandos (the personae of Puff’s tragedy) are Sandwich, Speaker of the House of Commons Fletcher Norton, and King George III, respectively. Importantly, Pottinger discards the play-within-a-play structure, collapsing the characters of Puff’s pseudo-Shakespearean extravaganza into those of Sheridan’s comedy. Again, political commentary arrives at the moment and in the very act of structural revision. The parody, like the intensive propaganda machine deployed by the British government in the late 1770s finally has elided the already flimsy distinctions between reality and fiction. As a thematic sequel to his Duenna, Pot-tinger’s Critic once more maps the imperial and cultural neuroses engendered by the war and its coverage by a mass media. Exactly echoing Mac Boot, Dangle understands that “the fate of empires may await the issue of the present moment” (TC, 3; my emphasis), while Wiskerandos worries about how “to subjugate these rebellious tenants of mine” (TC, 8). Moreover, these anxieties now pervade the parliamentary-political spectrum, so that opposition spokesman Orator (Edmund Burke) understands that his reform bills will decide “the fate of this mighty em-pire” (TC, 22).

Pottinger’s primary concern, however, is to return us to the politics of subterfuge dramatized in his first parody:

Wiskerandos: We have a little debate, Sir Walter, and you are to be the umpire. Is black white?

Raleigh: Yes, Sir.Wiskerandos: Do two and two make four?Raleigh: No.Wiskerandos: Do you think in your conscience, that—Puff: Conscience! ha! ha! ha! I’ll be d—d if he has any more

conscience than myself; and, I believe, if all things were settled, not quite so much. (TC, 7)

As in the political Duenna, Sheridan’s plot is discarded but his principal theme of misrepresentation is reworked and overtly politicized. Pottinger’s Critic serves as


an extended meditation on the politics of contemporary media—the journalistic inventions and distortions that Sheridan satirizes in act 1 of his afterpiece. So, like Sheridan’s original, Pottinger’s play opens with Dangle and his wife reading the morning reports:

Dangle: (reading) “Brutus to Lord North.”—“Letter the second on the State of the Army”—Pshaw! “To the first L—dash D of the A—dash Y.”—“Genuine Extract of a Letter from St. Kitt’s.”—“Coxheath Intelligence.”—“It is now confidently asserted that Sir Charles Hardy.”—Pshaw!—Nothing but about the fleet, and the nation!—and I hate all politics but theatrical politics.—Where’s the Morning Chronicle? (DW, 2:497)

Dangle: Don’t interrupt me, Mrs Dangle: this news from America is the most extraordinary that ever reached the British shore. I must read the dispatches.—Hum! hum!—Savan-nah—Prevost—D’Estaing. (TC, 1)

Like the songs of The Duenna, this scene precisely inverts that which it parodies; both Sheridan and Pottinger present us with the spectacle of a consumer of print media, but where one considers politics anathema, the other is utterly absorbed by news of the war.

Yet it quickly becomes clear that there is a significant discrepancy between Dangle’s dispatches and the information disseminated to the public through govern-ment organs such as the London Gazette which, Dangle concedes, habitually convey “false intelligence” (TC, 2). Sheridan’s play is itself a satire on print propaganda; his Puff pens not only theatrical and social fictions, but has also “undertaken to-morrow . . . to establish the unanimity of the fleet in the Public Advertiser, and to shoot Charles Fox in the Morning Post” (DW, 2:518). Pottinger unravels Sheridan’s portrayal of the dubious politics of media into a sustained attack on the subterfugal strategies of the North government. The character of Scribble (probably Thomas Coombe, the clergyman and American loyalist who had arrived in London in 1779), described by Dangle as “the general, public tool, of every infamous character, for any dirty purpose whatever” (TC, 11), plays the chief propagandist, and in many ways serves as the centrifugal force, of the satire. As various ministerial characters seek to oppose “incendiary printers” who endorse the Foxite “rascally patriots” (TC, 27), Scribble, echoing Sheridan’s Puff, informs his masters that he has “taken care to abuse the petitioners for to-morrow’s paper” (TC, 10). The most signifi-cant battlefield of the War of Independence, as it appears in the political Critic, is textual: Pottinger portrays a cynical administration which, in contrast to that of his Duenna, understands that the control and management of the discourses generated by and reporting the American War are crucial to the maintenance of its power. Scribble’s propagandic publications seek to negate the political agency of the population; they preach, Raleigh tells us, “passive-obedience, non-resistance, and unconditional submission” (TC, 11).

Where Pottinger’s Duenna dramatized the dissemination of print media within a public sphere of taverns and coffee houses by the anti-North lobby, his Critic depicts a government ferociously opposing such discursive production with official and carefully sanitized images of war and nationhood insistently pressed


upon the public by their own media apparatus. Yet, whether as a hegemonic or counter-hegemonic force, print media are designed to act as “holy writ,” to obvi-ate both the need and the capacity for rational debate and collective discussion, to provide the illusion of argument rather than to facilitate it. War becomes a contest not only of different vocabularies, but also—to frame the conflict within Eliga Gould’s paradigm of print culture—of different contrapuntal “realities.”

In this way, Pottinger’s parody of The Critic is a careful rereading of Sheri-dan’s original afterpiece, an exercise in political exegesis that elicits, augments, and reorients the coded critique of the politics of print culture contained within the first act of Sheridan’s farce. Pottinger’s appropriation and distortion of The Critic is thus a far more complex, even paradoxical, project than it first appears; it mis-represents one of Sheridan’s works as a means of making an emphatic statement about the suspect ideologies and repressive practices that underpin both pro- and antiwar public discourses and their transmission at a time of global warfare and of immense shifts in cultural and cross-cultural fault lines.

The geoPoliTics oF ParoDy: John leacock

Such issues, what Simon Denith calls “the cultural politics of parody,”22 emerge in even more striking chiaroscuro when these processes of transmission and appropriation diagram the very nexus of imperial power, traversing the borders between the contested spaces of colony and metropole. In his discussion of early performances of Sheridan’s plays in Jamaica, Philadelphia, and New York in the 1770s and ’80s, George Nettleton points to the comedies’ “peaceful invasion of the American scene.”23 With a decree by the Continental Congress in October 1774 prohibiting the performance of drama, The Rivals and The School for Scandal were first staged by British “Military Thespians” in 1778 and 1782, respectively. Sheridan entered revolutionary America as an inherently British cultural commodity produced by an occupying force. Given this context, it is hardly surprising that in 1778 the Philadelphia publisher and Patriot Robert Bell reprinted Pottinger’s anti-North Duenna,24 or that the following year Sheridan’s most famous work would itself be hijacked by an American parodist.

The man widely regarded as having been the author of the 1779 political parody of The School for Scandal is John Leacock, a Philadelphian goldsmith and an associate of both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.25 In 1776 Leacock had published, and probably staged, The Fall of British Tyranny, or, American Liberty Triumphant . . . As Lately Planned at the Royal Theatrum Pandemonium.26 This tragicomedy was a disjunctive cocktail of American nationalism, anti-British sat-ire, and depictions of battlefield atrocity. Its opening scene unfolded at St. James’s palace, with Lord Catspaw (North) urging that “Barbarous nations must be held by fear, rein’d and spurr’d hard, chain’d to the oar, and bow’d to due controul, till they look grim with blood”; act 3 relocated the drama to Boston, charting the bloody aftermath of the early battles at Lexington and Bunker Hill.27 It is to the satire of the first two acts of The Fall of British Tyranny that Leacock’s School for Scandal provides a sequel. Written at a moment when colonial theater has been institutionally suppressed—just as Pottinger was writing under conditions of censorship which precluded direct critique—the parody of legitimate drama, the


unperformable masquerading as the already performed, functions once again as a strategy through which the imperial power structures can be ridiculed and resisted, and the technologies mediating the war negotiated.

Much of Leacock’s cast is recognizable from Pottinger’s two parodies: North now plays Moses, Bute and Mansfield become Joseph Surface and Crabtree, with Germain in the role of Sir Benjamin Backbite, and George III as Charles. Two new characters also make an appearance: William Fraser, editor of the London Gazette, who appropriately assumes the part of the arch-forger Mr Snake;28 and opposition frontman and future prime minister Lord Shelburne, who becomes Sir Oliver. Like Pottinger, Leacock portrays the king sympathetically, caught in a whirl-wind of ministerial intrigue and corruption and manipulated by the Machiavellian Bute in particular. “The Gentleman from whom I drew the character of Charles,” Leacock states in a dedication to the satirist and playwright Richard Tickell, “I hold in the greatest esteem for the goodness of his heart.”29

Indeed, Leacock carefully matches his political players to their parts, eliding Sheridan’s plot but upholding his characterizations in a way that Pottinger does not; while the monarch is the misguided but ultimately virtuous Charles Surface, Bute acts his duplicitous brother, Joseph. In this way, the drama of national and colonial crisis is reduced to, and ridiculed as, a drama of household misfortunes. America (“Occidentia”) is home to Charles’s “tenants”; the British West Indies are his “sugar-houses” and “rum stills”; while the Houses of Parliament, or “two kennels,” provide a platform for troublesome “domestics.” Writing from the epi-center of colonial crisis—indeed, as a colonial subject participating in a struggle for self-sovereignty—Leacock’s focus is panoramic. Where Pottinger’s perspective is at times microscopic, dissecting the minutiae of metropolitan politics, Leacock lays before us the landscape of a global empire and its kaleidoscope of concerns and conquests. He exposes and bathetically domesticates the market economics of empire that impel the circumatlantic conflict. Imperial breakdown becomes personal bankruptcy.

The play opens with Charles and Joseph discussing the former’s affairs. Charles has lost one of his “sugar-houses” (Dominica) to the “perfidious foe” (SS, 4); reports have arrived confirming, first, that “Sir Harry Clatter [Henry Clinton] is repulsed with great loss of men, in his expedition up Boreas river [the Hudson] on a foraging party” (SS, 6) and, second, that “St. Petite and St. Mignonette” (St. Pierre and Miquelon) have been taken (SS, 9). Despite these accounts, Charles remains optimistic, believing that “another attack conducted with vigour, and made by sufficient numbers, would soon bring them into submission” (SS, 11). The scene then switches to a conference between Moses, the prime minister, and Snake, his chief propagandist, who uses recent dispatches as negatives for his of-ficial “Hum” or press release: “a r–p–lse you turn into a v–ct–ry;” exclaims the astonished Moses, “a dozen prisoners you multiply into two hundred” (SS, 14). Under the watchful eye of his master, Snake exaggerates lists of items requisitioned and rewrites recent history. Handing the ministry penman details of an expedition, Benjamin Backbite orders him

to skim the cream of them directly, and whip it up as a syllabub for the tenants and servants of the estate to swallow this night ere they go to-


bed, that they might have at least one night’s sound sleep more in their lives. (SS, 16)

Leacock’s polemic, like Pottinger’s, is concerned with the governmental discourses that, in expurgating and fictionalizing the news, seek to engender a passive nation-hood. The North ministry, like the political parodists, willfully inverts one text in order to create a second—but where the satirists do so as a means of exposure and illumination, the statesmen seek concealment and denial. The plays I am discussing here, then, are rewrites that are themselves concerned with the acts and ideological implications of rewriting. Once again, Sheridan’s work is less parodied than it is reread: the malicious gossip of his School for Scandal, with its deliberate perversions of meaning, is now oriented and magnified through the frame of colonial politics and the media machine upholding and surrounding it. At one moment, Leacock even approaches a verbatim repeat of the opening dialogue of Sheridan’s comedy of manners, with Moses asking Snake if he has “wrote those paragraphs I spoke to you of,” to which the latter replies, “Yes, Sir: Here they are (pulling a slip of paper out of his pocket)” (SS, 22).30

The diptych of print culture offered in Pottinger’s two parodies drama-tized its governmental and oppositional operations—the vicious contest over discourses of truth, of the printed word establishing cultural reality. For Leacock, positioned at the site of colonial insurrection, the print technologies developed and consolidated during the American War are presented as a primarily repressive apparatus. Crabtree thus seeks a duty on the press that will ensure the “annihila-tion of typ–gr–phical licentiousness” (SS, 34), the suppression of dissenting voices. The American writer represents the British misrepresenting America as a means of controlling its subjects, or rather, its “servants.” The America understood by the British is a propagandic surface—a projection of the world no more real than the maps pasted to the key prop and symbolic center of Sheridan’s comedy, the notorious screen in Joseph’s study.

However, as the statesmen become lost in a labyrinth of subterfuge, mu-tual distrust, and unfeasible legislation (Moses proposes a plethora of new taxes on, among other things, cats, lapdogs, hats, bachelors, and adultery [SS, 36–40]), political satire gives way to political fantasy. “My last scene, I own, is anticipated,” Leacock informs his readers, “but I flatter myself that I shall soon have the hap-piness of its being performed” (SS, iv). Thus the play closes with the exasperated Charles finally turning to the “greatness of mind, depth of understanding, and pa-triotic enthusiasm” of the opposition leader, Sir Oliver. Offered the premiership, he informs the king that his current ministers “keep you hoodwinked . . . and poison your mind” (SS, 57), and declares,

the quarrel with your Western servants was begun in error and contin-ued in obstinacy; it has cut off a vast many of those rich fountains from which you drew the sinews of your once formidable power; benumb’d and almost annihilated the commerce of your afflicted servants, who are now on the brink of misery— (SS, 60)

Tyranny is brought to a moment of anagnorisis, an ideological epiphany, through the voice of reason; Charles confesses that Sir Oliver’s eloquence has “awakened me from my lethargy.” Leacock’s play concludes with Sir Oliver ordering an immediate


cessation of military activity and preparing “agreeable and honorable proposals of reconciliation” (SS, 60–61). Finally, by way of an epilogue, he restates the words of Hastings in Nicholas Rowe’s Jane Shore (1714):

Beyond or Love’s, or Friendship’s sacred bandBeyond myself, I prize my native land!On this foundation will I build my fame,And emulate the Greek and Roman name;Think England’s peace bought cheaply with my bloodAnd die with pleasure for my Country’s Good. (SS, 62)

Leacock’s political parody ends by appropriating a second famous English drama; the speech of Rowe’s arch-patriot—who will be executed as a traitor to his king for articulating such sentiments—is now delivered before, and with the express sanction of, a reformed monarch. In a dramatic recalibration of the circumatlantic conflict, English and American patriotisms become complementary; peace, political autonomy, and the prosperity that both will bring are their mutual objectives. Britain will safeguard its world markets, America its existence as a sovereign state.

The conclusion of Leacock’s The School for Scandal is remarkable not only in its prophetic imaging of the Shelburnian ministry that in 1782 would indeed negotiate a peace treaty with the United States, but also for the way it rewrites the colonial associations, or rather the colonial credentials, of Sir Oliver’s character. In Sheridan’s original comedy, he is “the devilish rich Uncle in the East Indies” who returns to England and applies the panacea of “eastern liberality” (DW, 1:372, 401) to his dysfunctional family. Mita Choudhury contends that, in depicting the Nabob as moral compass, and the capital he has acquired through the East India Company as a mechanism of rehabilitation, Sheridan’s play implicitly endorses an “imperial ideology.”31 Though Sheridan’s portrayal of Sir Oliver is perhaps more ambivalent than Choudhury suggests, her thesis elicits the important dynamic between the exigencies of empire and those of family that pervades The School for Scandal. Leacock, however, transforms the colonial merchant into an agent of devolution; rather than accruing an imperial wealth that empowers him socially and ethically, Sir Oliver now becomes the instrument through which Britain’s American colonies achieve independence.

This transformation is a considered revision of Sheridan’s template. Lea-cock’s Sir Oliver, like his predecessor, broaches the world in terms of market forces, hoping that an autonomous America will “consent to a federal union, a reciprocal trade,” and even “voluntary supplies” with Britain (SS, 61). Through the character of Sir Oliver, Leacock overwrites the old economic model of imperialist mercantil-ism with a free-trade paradigm appropriate to the new circumatlantic order. The king thus is persuaded not just by the voice of reason, but by a voice of commerce which distils the imperatives of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), that most cogent articulation of an economics adjusted to the exigencies of a transformed geopolitical order. Where Pottinger regards interest with extreme skepticism as a socially and politically corrosive force, Leacock accommodates and embraces a new commercialized culture as establishing a network of equitable and lucrative relations—a market of “rich fountains” that provide the “sinews” of “formidable power”—between Western nations.


Theorizing the possibility of understanding American writing as the “first post-colonial literature,” Lawrence Buell posits that American Renaissance texts are often “cross-cultural collages.”32 Leacock’s The School for Scandal is exactly such a collage; it engages with and rewrites an English drama that had been performed by redcoats in America as a means of reaffirming British hegemony, transform-ing this drama into a vehicle of protest, a portrait of hegemonic disintegration. His School for Scandal is a sophisticated act of appropriation that disrupts the flow of cultural capital, the apparatus of acculturation, by using Sheridan—the most famous contemporary British playwright, functioning in colonial America as a totem of cultural supremacy—to ventriloquize the ideology of American republicanism and the collapse of the British empire. Yet, as we have seen, this appropriation is neither an inversion nor a disavowal, but rather an act of “cul-tural hybridization,” a concept that Buell argues is fundamental to the nature of the American literary text. Leacock’s parody negotiates and traverses British and American cultures in a manner which seeks to locate identity beyond the binary. Parody becomes a means of cultural dialogue, even transculturation.33 The words and characters of Sheridan—just as in Pottinger’s Duenna and Critic—lie beneath those of Leacock, so that the parodic text is also a cultural palimpsest, a complex layering of vocabularies and ideas that encompasses the frictions and possibilities of the transatlantic relationship.

Dror Wahrman has shown the extent to which the American War pre-cipitated a crisis of identity in England, as the nation grappled with the difficulty of representing and fixing America as an enemy, and of understanding a conflict that was regarded as alternately civil and global. Importantly for Wahrman, the unease generated by this “tension between sameness and difference,” the failure to comprehend the trauma of war within the binarisms of self/other, them/us, was articulated through a language of “artifice and dissimulation, masking and disguise.”34 The dramas of Leacock and Pottinger not only are populated with characters and situations that deploy such strategies, the texts themselves are mas-querades. Political parody becomes for two writers from London and Philadelphia a means of confronting the epistemological issues engendered by the technologies of conquest, commercialization, and media at work in the war—a way of explor-ing the fractured identities of individuals, communities, and nations. The variety of masks offered by the forms of theater and parody, predicated on economies of pretense and dissimulation, serve as the apposite vehicles for registering and ex-amining the fluid and delusive conceptions of nationhood and citizenship at work in the conflicts of the 1770s.

These parodies are also testaments to Sheridan’s international theatrical celebrity, and the cultural capital invested in his dramas. As I stated in my intro-duction, Sheridan was extremely slow to release his plays into print. According to eighteenth-century copyright practice, publication immediately legitimized the performance of a dramatic work at any playhouse. In declining to publish his phe-nomenally popular comedies, Sheridan, as manager of Drury Lane, was employing the only legal means at his disposal to maintain control of, and a monopoly over, what were extremely valuable commodities.35 Pottinger’s Duenna and Critic and Leacock’s School for Scandal all predate even unofficial publications of the plays they parody; they exploited a textual vacuum. Yet, in a theatrical world where performed pieces were not always printed, the parodic targeting of Sheridan is ex-


ceptional. Besides a political pastiche of The Belle’s Stratagem (which used Hannah Cowley’s 1780 comedy to caricature attempts to control the Prince of Wales), I have located no other works of the period which engage with either contemporary or established dramatists in the way that Pottinger and Leacock approach Sheridan.36 Their parodies appropriated Sheridan because his comedies were thematically appealing. As Christine Wiesenthal has suggested, plays such as The Critic were primarily concerned with “the modes and means of representation.”37 Sheridan’s theater elicits and satirizes the difficulty of negotiating a society which fetishizes the ornamental surfaces of commodities, texts, and individuals; his dramas con-front issues—print culture, forms of social propaganda, misrepresentations of/in discourses, imperial capital—that readily lend themselves to overt polemiciza-tion. In employing Sheridan as a vehicle for their critiques of the British empire, Pottinger and Leacock were also publishing rereadings of his works, projects of political exegesis. One might go so far as to say that they mobilize the nascently political in Sheridan’s works.

Yet defining these pieces remains as difficult now as it was for the Monthly Review in 1776. Parodies that are barely parodic; encrypted polemics that hide the personalities they satirize behind nicknames and stage characters; examples of and meditations on a burgeoning public sphere and its technologies of print and commerce; interfaces between print and theatrical cultures; unperformed and unperformable dramas dressed up as the already performed; margins in the guise of centers: the forgotten plays of Pottinger and Leacock remain a challenge to the precarious taxonomies and categories with which we approach the global eighteenth century.

NOTES

1. Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 30.

2. Cited in R. Crompton Rhodes, The Plays and Poems of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 3:343.

3. Eliga Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000), xxiv.

4. Charles Beecher Hogan, ed., The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertain-ments and Afterpieces Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1968), pt. 5, 1:clxxi.

5. Dane Farnsworth Smith and M. L. Lawhon, Plays About the Theatre in England, 1737–1800 or, The Self-Conscious Stage from Foote to Sheridan (London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1979), 100. Most of these play are indignant responses to the two patent theater companies’ coalition between 1778 and 1780, such as The Critick Anticipated; or, The Humours of the Green Room: A Farce as Rehearsed behind the Curtain of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, by R. B. S. Esq. (London: S. Bladon,1779). There is, however, another political The School for Scandal (London: G. Lister, 1784), a piece of Pittite propaganda that dramatizes the collapse of the Fox-North coalition and the rise to power of Pitt the Younger. As it makes absolutely no reference to Sheridan’s original, however, I have omitted it from my discussion.

6. Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal vol. 55 (July –December 1776), 156.

7. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Pottinger, Israel (fl. 1759–1761)” (by G. Le G. Norgate, rev. Michael Bevan), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22627 (accessed November 27 2007).


8. Israel Pottinger, The Methodist, A Comedy; Being a Continuation and Completion of the Plan of the Minor, Written by Mr Foote (London, [1761]).

9. [Israel Pottinger], The Duenna: A Comic Opera, in Three Acts: As it is performed By His Maj-esty’s Servants (London: E. Johnson, 1776), 38. (Hereafter cited parenthetically as TD.)

10. Dyson was nicknamed after the character of the overworked Negro slave in the comic opera The Padlock (1768), by Isaac Bickerstaff and Charles Dibdin.

11. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (London: Polity Press, 1989).

12. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge offer a seminal critique of Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere as an exclusory apparatus in Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi et al. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993).

13. Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), 33.

14. Wilson, Island Race, 32, 34.

15. David Erskine Baker, Isaac Reed, and Stephen Jones, Biographia Dramatica; a Companion to the Playhouse, 3 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1812), 2:178

16. As Rhodes notes (Plays and Poems, 3:246), Pottinger mysteriously parodies an additional song printed neither in the song sheets sold at the theater nor in the 1775 publication of the music.

17. The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ed. Cecil Price, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 1:234. (Hereafter cited parenthetically as DW.)

18. Linda V. Troost, “The Characterizing Power of Song in Sheridan’s The Duenna,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 20 (1987): 153–72.

19. [Israel Pottinger], The General Fast; A Lyric Ode: with A Form of Prayer Proper for the Occa-sion; and a Dedication to the King. By the Author of the Duenna (London, 1776), 6–7. Walter Sichel wrongly attributed the poem to Sheridan in Sheridan: From New Original Material, 2 vols. (London: Constable & Co., 1909), 1:474–76. Rhodes addressed the confusion (see Plays and Poems, 3:344), but misattribution continues. For recent examples see Fintan O’Toole, A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London: Granta, 1997), 97; and Robert W. Jones, “Sheridan and the Theatre of Patriotism: Staging Dissent during the War for America,” Eighteenth-Century Life 26 (2002): 34.

20. Cited in Rhodes, Plays and Poems, 3:352.

21. [Israel Pottinger], The Critic; or a Tragedy Rehearsed: A New Dramatic Piece in Three Acts; as it is Performed by His Majesty’s Servants, with the Greatest Applause. By the Author of the Duenna (London: S. Bladon, 1780), 42. (Hereafter cited parenthetically as TC.)

22. See Simon Denith, Parody (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–38.

23. George H. Nettleton, “Sheridan’s Introduction to the American Stage,” PMLA 65 (1950): 73.

24. [Israel Pottinger], The Political Duenna, A Comic Opera, In Three Acts, As it is performed by the Servants of his Britannic Majesty, With Lord North’s Recantation (Philadelphia: R. Bell, 1778).

25. According to Jenna M. Gibbs, Leacock was a neighbor and friend of Franklin’s, and had been introduced to Thomas Paine by the publisher Robert Bell. See Jenna M. Gibbs, “Slavery, Liberty and Revolution in John Leacock’s The Fall of British Tyranny; or American Liberty Triumphant (1776),” Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 31 (2008): 241–57, esp. 243–44.

26. For information regarding the staging of The Fall of British Tyranny, see S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 51; and Jeffrey H. Richard, Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607–1789 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991), 249–51.

27. [John Leacock], The Fall of British Tyranny, or, American Liberty Triumphant. The First Cam-paign. A Tragi-Comedy of Five Acts, as Lately Planned at the Royal Theatrum Pandemonium, at St.


James’s (Providence, RI: J. Douglass McDougall, 1776), 5, 13. The play was also printed in Philadelphia by Bell, and in Boston.

28. See P. M. Handover, A History of The London Gazette 1665–1965 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1965), 57–61.

29. [John Leacock], The School for Scandal, a Comedy (London: S. Bladon, 1779), iv. (Hereafter cited parenthetically as SS.)

30. Sheridan’s original, of course, opens with Lady Sneerwell’s question: “The Paragraphs you say, Mr. Snake, were all inserted?” (DW, 1:359).

31. Mita Choudhury, “Sheridan, Garrick, and a Colonial Gesture: The School for Scandal on the Calcutta Stage,” Theatre Journal 46 (1994): 319–20.

32. Lawrence Buell, “Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon,” American Literary His-tory 4 (1992): 429, 434.

33. Peter Hulme suggests that “transculturation” might be the most appropriate paradigm in con-ceptualizing a postcolonial America. See his “Postcolonial Theory and Early America: An Approach from the Caribbean,” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2000), 47. In Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1998), Edward Watts also discusses the importance of hybridity to colonial and postcolonial America’s cultural position.

34. Dror Wahrman, “The English Problem of Identity in the American Revolution,” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1238, 1259.

35. Julie Stone Peters offers a good survey of eighteenth-century theatrical copyright practices in Theatre of the Book 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 219–36.

36. The Belle’s Stratagem: a Comedy as it is performed by His Majesty’s Service with Universal Ap-plause (London: J. Williamson, 1781). The authentic text of Cowley’s play was published in 1782.

37. Christine S. Wiesenthal, “Representation and Experimentation in the Major Comedies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 25 (1992): 310.

Documents

The Fate of Empires The American War, Political Parody, and Sheridan's Comedies