SOURCE: “‘Absolute Sense’ in Sheridan's The Rivals,” in Ball State University Forum, Vol. XXVII, No. 3, Summer, 1986, pp. 10-19.

In the following essay, Parker considers Sheridan's balance of wit and sentimentality in The Rivals.

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 supposedly ridicules, a sentimentalist.¹ Neither of these accusations, which in effect try to put Sheridan's comedies snugly into one of two camps, takes into account what is now starting to become a critical commonplace: the Georgian period had its own view of comedy and, in its own way, developed the laughing tradition.² Sheridan is no exception. At his best, he adapted the conventions of...