SHERIDAN, RICHARD BRINSLEY BUTLER (1751— 1816), third son of Thomas and Frances Sheridan, was born in Dublin on Oct. 30, 1751. At the age of 1 T he was sent to Harrow school, where he spent six years.
After leaving Harrow he kept up a correspondence with a school friend N. B. Halhed who had gone to Oxford, and between them they published (1771) a metrical translation of Aristaenetus. They also wrote a farce entitled Jupiter, which was refused by Garrick and Foote and remained in MS. It contains the same device of a rehearsal which was afterwards worked out in The Critic. Some of the dialogue is very much in Sheridan's mature manner. The removal of the family to Bath in 1770-1771 led to an ac quaintance with the daughters of the cqmposer Thomas Linley. The eldest daughter, Elizabeth Ann (b. 1754), a girl of sixteen, the prima donna of her father's concerts, was exceedingly beauti ful. Her portrait, by Gainsborough, hangs at Knole, Kent. She had many suitors, among them Sheridan, N. B. Halhed and a cer tain Major Mathews. To protect her from this man's persecutions, Sheridan escorted Miss Linley, in March 1772, to a nunnery in France, having secretly gone through the ceremony of marriage with her near Calais. He returned and fought two duels with Mathews, while Mr. Linley brought his daughter back to Bath. Sheridan was sent to Waltham Abbey to continue his studies. He was entered at the Middle Temple on April 6, 1773, and a week later he was openly married to Miss Linley.
Although he had no income, and no capital beyond a few thou sand pounds brought by his wife, he took a house in Orchard Street, Portman Square, furnished it "in the most costly style," and proceeded to return on something like an equal footing the hospitalities of the fashionable world. His first comedy, The Rivals, was produced at Covent Garden on Jan. 17, 1775. It is said to have been not so favourably received on its first night, owing to its length and to the bad playing of the part of Sir Lucius O'Trigger. But at the second performance (Jan. 28) it at once took that place on the stage which it has never lost. His second piece, St. Patrick's Day, or the Scheming Lieutenant, a lively farce, was written for the benefit performance (2nd of May 1775) of Lawrence Clinch, who had succeeded as Sir Lucius.
In November 1775, with the assistance of his father-in-law, he produced the comic opera of The Duenna, which was played 75 times at Covent Garden during that season. Sheridan now began to negotiate with Garrick for the purchase of his share of Drury Lane, and the bargain was completed in June 1776. The sum paid by Sheridan and his partners, Thomas Linley and Dr. Ford, for the half-share was £35,000; of this Sheridan contributed £10,00o.
The money was raised on mortgage, Sheridan contributing only £1,300 in cash. (See B. Matthews's 1885 ed. of Sheridan's Come dies pp. 29-31.) Two years afterwards Sheridan and his friends bought the other half of the property for £35,000.
The direction of the theatre seems to have been mainly in the hands of Sheridan. In February 1777 he produced his version of Vanbrugh's Relapse, under the title of A Trip to Scarborough.
This is printed among Sheridan's works, but he has no title to the authorship. His task was to remove indecencies; he added very little to the dialogue. The School for Scandal was produced on May 8, 1777. Mrs. Abington, who had played Miss Hoyden in the Trip, played Lady Teazle, who may be regarded as a Miss Hoyden developed by six months' experience of marriage and town life. The lord chamberlain was only persuaded on grounds of personal friendship with Sheridan to license the play. There are tales of the haste with which the conclusion of The School for Scandal was written and of a stratagem by which the last act was got out of him by the anxious company, but we know from Sheridan's sister that the idea of a "scandalous college" had oc curred to him five years before in connection with his own ex periences at Bath. His difficulty was to find a story sufficiently dramatic in its incidents. The dialogue is so brilliant throughout, and the auction scene and the screen scene so effective, that the construction of the comedy meets with little criticism. The School for Scandal, though it has not the unity of The Rivals, nor the same wealth of broadly humorous incident, is universally regarded as Sheridan's masterpiece.