In 1813 Lord Byron, discussing the elderly Richard Brinsley Sheridan with some friends, gave his opinion that
Whatever Sheridan has done or chooses to do has been, par exellence, the best of its kind. He has written the best comedy (School for Scandal), the best drama (The Duenna, to my mind far beyond that St Giles lampoon, The Beggar’s Opera), the best farce (The Critic—it is only too good for a farce), and the best address (Monologue on Garrick); and, to crown all, delivered the very best oration (the famous Begum speech) ever conceived or heard in this country.
It is true that Sheridan was a man of extraordinary talent, abilities, and energy. He had two separate and very successful careers: a literary one—upon which his reputation rests today—that lasted, incredibly enough, only until he was thirty; and a political one, to which he personally attached more importance, that continued until his death at the age of sixty-five.
Sheridan saw himself as a parliamentarian first, a playwright second, but posterity has never agreed: when he was buried in Westminster Abbey it was not upon the spot he would have chosen, at the side of his longtime comrade-in-arms, Charles James Fox, but in Poet’s Corner. (With insult added to injury, he was placed next to Richard Cumberland, the writer he had so memorably mocked in his play The Critic).
A new biography of Sheridan by the Irish
