Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Both Sheridan and Goldsmith lamented the popularity of sentimental comedy in the later eighteenth century and wrote their witty and satirical plays (though never lascivious in the manner of Restoration comedies) to counteract the sentimental mode. The Rivals (1775) was a qualified success: the suave young officer who is ‘forced’ by his father to marry the very girl to whom...

In The School for Scandal, Sheridan's artificial world of heightened wit and heightened folly delights its audience. At times, it engages them with moments of human pain and happiness, before delivering them back to its comedy.