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1 Sheridan and Women Marianna D'ezio Born Into a Family Whose Reputation and Income Were Anchored in Literature and the Theatr 1 Sheridan and Women Marianna D’Ezio Born into a family whose reputation and income were anchored in literature and the theatre, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s predisposition to theatrical activity was not unexpected. His father Thomas Sheridan was an actor and a manager, and Sheridan himself had always been surrounded by talented women writers, from his mother Frances Chamberlaine—a gifted authoress and playwright, albeit her work and biography still lack a comprehensive critical study—to his first wife Elizabeth Linley, a singer who managed to make a living from her public performances and contribute to realizing her family’s financial independence. Furthermore, there was another society of women around Sheridan besides his family connections, comprising professional and amateurish playwrights who were pursuing their own way into the highly male-dominated arena of commercial theatres. Of the plays that premiered at Drury Lane during Sheridan’s part-ownership of the theatre and his father’s management in 1778–1781, twenty-six were written by women, including a whole generation of distinguished female playwrights like Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Elizabeth Griffith, as well as authoresses like Frances Burney who wanted to try their hand at writing for the stage.1 Official biographies of Sheridan have generally suggested that his role with regard to female theatrical productions was that of mentor.2 At the time of Frances Burney’s early attempts at writing for the stage, for example, when Sheridan had become the manager of Drury Lane, he nurtured her hopes by offering his assistance in producing her first play—the unstaged comedy The Witlings (1779)—and in trying to persuade her father, Charles Burney, to withdraw his ban concerning his daughter’s passion for dramatic writing.3 Burney writes an enthusiastic account of Sheridan’s insistent request that she write a comedy, a naively flattering description of the great man who had “meditated to [propose this] to you the first Time I should have the pleasure of seeing you”: As a manager who must, of course, be loaded with Pieces & recommendations, to urge me to write, & to promise to thank me for my Writing, instead of making a favour & a difficulty of even looking at it,—is it not truly good-natured & liberal minded? And now, my dear Susy,—if I should attempt the stage,—I think I may be fairly acquitted of presumption, & however I may fail,—that I was strongly pressed to try by Mrs. Thrale,—& by Mr. Sheridan,—the most successful & powerful of all Dramatic living Authors,—will abundantly excuse my temerity.4 In a similar tone, Elizabeth Griffith’s “Advertisement” to her comedy The Times, first performed at Drury Lane on 2 December 1779, addressed Sheridan’s father and “return[ed] thanks to my much- esteemed friend, Mr. SHERIDAN, senior, for his kind attention to the getting-up my Play, my ill health not permitting me to attend one Rehearsal.”5 For his part, Sheridan also wrote a conspicuous number of prologues and epilogues—to Elizabeth Craven’s The Miniature Picture, for instance, acted at Drury Lane on 24 May 1780,6 and to Hannah More’s The Fatal Falsehood, first performed at Covent Garden on 6 May 17797—ostensibly, as he wrote to Garrick, because he meant to be “vastly civil to female talent of all sorts.”8 Taking the above into account, it would seem pertinent to disagree with Ellen Donkin, who argues that Sheridan maliciously sabotaged women dramatists’ productions with the intention of undermining the idea of the woman playwright as professional.9 Sheridan was critical of women’s involvement in writing for the stage as well as in performing; however, evidence of and, more importantly, the reasons for Sheridan’s attitude towards women’s professionalism have yet to be fully demonstrated. One of the aims of this essay is precisely to shed light on Sheridan’s often-misinterpreted connections with the professional women of his time, in order to assess his own personal and professional stance towards the female sex and to measure the impact of his ideas regarding women on the course of his own career as a dramatist. Sheridan’s relationships with the women in his life—whether aristocratic female representatives, professional women writers, or his two wives—mirrored the contradictions and eccentric aspects of his own character. From his clandestine, romantic marriage with Elizabeth Linley as a young and penniless son of an Irish actor to his entry into the fashionable world of the Whig patroness Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, his notorious “womanizing” has been frequently distorted. Sheridan’s notions of love and his idealistic self-representation as passionate hero are indeed much more complex and kaleidoscopic than they may seem. He possessed a strong yearning to be accepted into the high spheres of eighteenth-century society—one still reluctant to admit members of an intellectual middle class that was busy affirming its professional presence. And yet Sheridan was never a flatterer: he acquired his position amidst members of the upper classes with by his genius alone. From time to time, Sheridan took on the roles of public man, politician, gentleman, devoted husband, and affectionate lover, although his social and political ascent demanded in return the sacrifice of both Elizabeth Linley’s and his second wife Hecca’s sentiments. He could be relentless, impetuous, seductive, and even vengeful with the women he was determined to pursue, yet he was never vicious, and his female partners were always strong women with vivacious intellects and original minds. On the other hand, Sheridan consciously recognized the ambiguous character of his relationships with the female sex, and alternatively pictured himself as a candid lover consumed with “tormenting sensations,” and as the “Serpent [that] found [its] way to the ear of slumbering innocence,” learning with time to bargain his feelings for a much coveted place among the wits:11 I have fixed to myself a walk in Life, for my entrance into which I shall work ‘Oar and Sail’ as the Devil did in Milton, and when I am in, if I can’t make my way on, I shall deserve to be trod on.12 Both his wives would soon learn to “taste the forbidden fruit” in order to reconcile with his eccentric character and continue to live with him.13 Drawing liberally from his personal and professional relationships with women, Sheridan depicted and polished his ideal of the woman throughout his works: there is an interesting evolution of the female characters, especially in his comedies, that follows Sheridan’s own involvement with Elizabeth Linley and the coterie of fashionable women of Devonshire House, coming full circle in the uncommon “new woman” of The Camp (1799). The character of Nell, notably underestimated among the female characters in Sheridan’s theatrical production, is at the other extreme of Lydia Languish in The Rivals (1775). And yet these characters complement each other, thus offering a complete (and complex) notion of a Sheridanian female alter ego that, never finding full expression in a single character in Sheridan’s works, was instead fragmented into a series of fictional women that combine together his own multi-faceted personality. Writing to Mrs. Angelo from Bath in October 1770, Sheridan was probably already infatuated with the woman who would inspire so many characters in his comedies as well as some of the most adventurous episodes of his life, including duels, an elopement to France, and a secret marriage. He recounted that Bath was “no place for news,” except for the fact that “there is a Mr. Linley here, a music master, who has a daughter that sings like an angel; perhaps you may have heard of her.”14 At that time, he wrote that most of the women he associated with at Bath were, to use a theatrical expression, “as ugly as Lions,” and Elizabeth Linley was already a celebrity. The story of Sheridan’s romantic elopement with “Eliza” to escape the persecutions of Captain Mathews, and of their consequent clandestine marriage in France, is well-known to Sheridan scholars and readers. As a matter of fact, more than witnessing the passion that Sheridan bore for Eliza—“my love is almost the only Feeling I have alive”—the fashionable milieu of Sheridan’s love affair with her, made up of duels, gossip, speculations and newspaper paragraphs, turned into his first public performance and the ideal setting for his official entrance into the world à la mode.15 Before moving to Bath with his father in 1770, Sheridan was a solitary young boy, with some vague prospects of becoming a lawyer and a deep sense of revenge already rooted in his soul. His mother’s death in 1766, the rivalry he had always felt with his brother Charles, and the ambiguous relationship with his father exacerbated his anxieties about finding himself strangled by an ordinary life that could domesticate that “brilliancy of genius” his sisters always ascribed to him.16 The occasion of endorsing his concept of himself as the romantic hero offered by Eliza’s situation and prompted by Sheridan’s sisters could provide more excitement and popularity than simply laboring over the translation of some erotic fables from the Greek, or in writing a burlesque narrative of the amours of deities and mortals.17 To Alicia and Betsy Sheridan, it would be obvious that “one so handsome, clever and bold had been designed by Nature to act the part of a knight of olden time,” and Sheridan was captivated by this unexpected, romantic role he was called upon to play.18 He and Eliza spent the following
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