SOURCE: “Sheridan's Grotesques,” in The Theatre Annual, Vol. XXXVIII, 1983, pp. 13-30.

In the following essay, Durant discusses Sheridan's juxtaposition of the comic and the terrifying in his dramas.

From the beginning of his career as a writer, Richard Brinsley Sheridan demonstrated a distinct flair for the grotesque. His first published poem, “The Ridotto of Bath” (1771), pictures gaudily dressed people crowding into the new Assembly Rooms at Bath and gorging themselves in a disgustingly comic way. They disfigure themselves with chewing and swallowing; they spill food all over their clothes and trample it messily into the carpeting.¹ Another poem of the same year, actually a loose translation from the Greek poetaster Aristaenetus, presents two deformed prudes, one with a hunched back and the other with a single eye, who earn the speaker's contempt by daring to make judgments against his ladylove while suppressing torrid passions of their own. They...