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The Rivals is a comedy of manners by Richard Brinsley Sheridan in five acts which was first performed at Covent Garden Theatre on 17 January 1775. [2] The story has been updated frequently, including a 1935 musical and a 1958 episode of the TV series Maverick (see below) starring James Garner and Roger Moore , with attribution.
The Rivals, comedy in five acts by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, produced and published in 1775. The Rivals concerns the romantic difficulties of Lydia Languish, who is determined to marry for love and into poverty. Realizing this, the aristocratic Captain Jack Absolute woos her while claiming to be.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Jun 24, 2013 · R.B. Sheridan’s “The Rivals” is a perfect Comedy of Manners in the way it holds a mirror to social life, modes, and manners of the artificial, fashionable community of the 18 th Century English society by making Bath, a health resort in England, the center of the action of the play.
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- Further Reading
Richard Brinsley Sheridanwas born in Dublin, Ireland, on January 25, 1751. His father was an actor and teacher of elocution, while his mother was a writer with several novels published. Richard studied at Harrow, an elite private school in Dublin, where he was initially looked down upon as a “player’s son” (at the time, actors, or players, were gen...
Act 1
The Rivals opens with two old friends happening upon each other in Bath. Fag, servant to Captain JackAbsolute (who is masquerading as Ensign Beverley for the sake of a love affair) catches up with David, coachman to Sir Anthony Absolute, Jack’s father, thus introducing some of the characters to come. In the next scene, Lucy returns from a trip to the local circulating libraries laden with romantic novels for her mistress, Lydia Languish. It is because Lydia wants a love affair like those in h...
Act 2
In parallel to Lydia and Julia, now Jack Absolute and Faulkland discuss their love affairs. Jack accuses Faulkland of being a “teasing, captious, incorrigible lover” for constantly doubting Julia’s loyalty and love. Bob Acres, spurned suitor to Lydia, enters and pitches Faulkland into yet another fit of jealous despair by relating how Julia has entertained the Bath social circle with her singing of “My heart’s my own, my will is free” and with her carefree country dancing. Acres, a provincial...
Act 3
Now that Jack knows he is being forced to marry the girl he loves, he plays repentance and wins his father’s shocked approval. Faulkland confronts Julia with his paranoid fears and after several attempts at reassurance, she exits in tears. Too late, Faulkland recognizes his folly. Captain Absolute presents himself to Mrs. Malaprop, who does not guess his dual identity with Ensign Beverley. In a comic scene, she shows him his own letter to Lydia, and he feigns disgust at Beverley’s rude remark...
Sir Anthony Absolute
This spluttering, domineering baronet rules his son (Jack Absolute), and anyone else who gets in his way, with an iron fist. As Fag describes him at the very beginning of the play, Sir Anthony is “hasty in everything.” His method of raising Jack has consisted of issuing commands to the boy—“Jack do this”—and if Jack demurred, Anthony “knocked him down.” Now that Jack is a grown man, Sir Anthony announces his intention to bestow his £3,000 annual income on his son, onlyon the condition that Ja...
Captain Jack Absolute
Jack is Sir Anthony’s son, and a captain in the army. His father had prepared him for this career by enlisting him into a marching regiment at age twelve. Jack resents his father’s manner with him, but dares not resist the forceful old man. Instead, he vents his frustration on his servant, Fag. The rank of captain carries with it a reasonable commission (pay) and a great deal of prestige. It is precisely this prestige that gets in the way of his amorous intentions with Lydia, whose romantic d...
Bob Acres
Bob Acres is a country squire who has been wooing Lydia without success. At the beginning of the play, Acres has just been rebuffed, told by Mrs. Malaprop to discontinue his attentions to Lydia. Acres is an oddball and simpleton who has invented his own form of swearing oaths that are “an echo to the sense,” an idea he seems to have picked up from the Shakespeare line in Hamlet,to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” To make himself more attractive to women, Acres takes danc...
Artifice
With the exception of Julia, each of the characters in The Rivalspractices artifice, or lying, to get what he or she wants from the other characters. Beginning with David’s wig, his vain attempt to pass as a member of a higher society that has already dropped the wig from fashionable dress, and ending with Faulkland’s last attempt to trick Julia into admitting base motives for loving him, no one
TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
1. Read one of the sentimental novels of the eighteenth century, such as Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journal through France and Italy. After reading it, identify several defining aspects of the sentimental man. You might also consider contrasting the qualities of the sentimental man with those of a sentimental woman, as portrayed in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote. 2. At the end of the play, Lydia decides to marry Jack. Do you agree with her assessment of him as a marriage prospect? 3...
Courtship
The Rivalsputs the two common avenues to courtship—arranged marriage and falling in love—into opposition. Marriages were one important means for wealthy families to maintain or increase their dynastic power. For ambitious members of the middle class, an “advantageous” marriage of a daughter offered a means of securing a foothold into the next level of society. Girls were protected, therefore, as a kind of investment, and thus were not allowed to choose their own mates, and their public appear...
The Comedy of Manners
The Comedy of Manners hails from the Restoration period (1660-1700), but was revived a hundred years later toward the end of the eighteenth century by Richard Sheridan and his contemporary Oliver Goldsmith. While Restoration comedy was bawdy and playfully lewd, the eighteenth-century version is refined and genteel. Both satirize the affected manners of sophisticated society. Often the plot revolves around a love affair, which takes the form of a pitched battle with words as weapons. The dialo...
High Georgian Theater
Theater in Sheridan’s time appealed to everyone who could afford to attend. Prices ranged from one to five shillings, which amounts to roughly five to twenty-five American dollars in today’s monetary terms. After the license of Restoration Theater, Georgian Theater must have seemed almost prudish. Gone were the bawdy burlesques, with their ribald humor. Instead, the plays would be drawn from the new Comedy of Manners, as well as well-known stock pieces from the Shakespeare repertoire, the lat...
Late Eighteenth-Century Fashion in Bath
Wigs were the height of fashion for men and women alike up until the 1770s, with special kinds of wigs worn only by physicians and judges. At the time when The Rivalswas first produced, however, the wearing of wigs had gone completely out of style. Thus, the fact that Sir Anthony’s servant Thomas sports a wig marks him as a provincial, as does his countrified speech. Swearing also became unfashionable, suggesting unwanted vulgarity; thus Bob Acres practices “sentimental swearing,” a form desi...
COMPARE & CONTRAST
1. Eighteenth Century: A small group of women intellectuals, nicknamed “bluestockings,” claims to be the equal of male intellectuals, but they are both rare and resented. Samuel Johnson expresses a typical sentiment when he remarks about a female preacher, “A woman’s preaching is like a dog walking on his hinder legs. It is not well done; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”Today:While women professionals and intellectuals no longer suffer such ridicule for their accomplishments, th...
Samuel Johnson called The Rivals and Sheridan’s The Duenna“the two best comedies of the age.” Indeed, as reported in Walter Sichel’s 1909 biography of Sheridan, Sheridan: From New and Original Material, the play “never left the stage” from its inception until a slowdown in the latter nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, revivals have been ...
Carole Hamilton
Hamilton is an English teacher at Cary Academy, an innovative private college preparatory school in Cary, North Carolina. In this essay, Hamilton examines the construction of ethos as a central theme of the play and as a key issue in eighteenth-century British society. In 1780, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s father, Thomas Sheridan, saw his much-awaited pronouncing dictionary, ten years in the making, come to print. The idea had come from Thomas Sheridan’s godfather, the satirist Jonathan Swift,...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. In Samuel Richardson’s 1740-1741 Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded,a young servant girl fights to repulse the advances of her master, eventually forcing him to legitimize his desire through marriage. 2. Frances Burney’s Evalina; Or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World(1778) is the story of a witty and plucky young girl who selects her mate from a host of admirers. 3. Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story(1791) relates the plight of a young girl who falls in love with her protector...
Anne Parker
In the following essay, Parker examines Sheridan’s practice of ‘“absolute sense,’ common sense tempered by mirth and softened by good nature,” and it’s place within eighteenth-century theater. Sheridan has frequently been accused of trying to revive a moribund dramatic tradition, namely Restoration comedy. In these terms, he becomes a kind of second-hand Congreve, and not a very good one at that. Other critics, pointing to the sentiment in his plays, accuse him of being the very thing he supp...
Auburn, Mark S., Sheridan’s Comedies: Their Contexts and Achievements,University of Nebraska Press, 1977, pp. 40-52. Boswell, James, Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763,edited by Frederick A. Pottle, 1950, reprint, Edinburgh University Press, 1991, p. 30. Durant, Jack, “Sheridan and Language,” in Sheridan Studies, edited by James Morwood and David ...
Kelly, Linda, Richard Brinsley Sheridan: A Life,Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997. Morwood, James, The Life and Works of Richard Brinskey Sheridan,Scottish Academic Press, 1985. Morwood, James, and David Crane, eds., Sheridan Studies,Cambridge University Press, 1995. Porter, Roy, English Society in the Eighteenth Century,The Penguin Society History of Brita...
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“The Rivals” is a Comedy of Manners by Irish-born dramatist and statesman Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The five-act play first premiered in 1775, marking Sheridan’s work as a standout piece of eighteenth-century theater.
The Rivals, a comedy of manners by Anglo-Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, first charmed audiences in London in 1775. As is typical for this genre, this play involves intricate...
