Author
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
1751-1816
An Anglo-Irish playwright, theatre owner and Whig politician whose comedies The Rivals and The School for Scandal made his name before 32 years in Parliament.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan was born on 30 October 1751 in Dublin. His mother, Frances Sheridan, was a playwright and novelist, and his father, Thomas Sheridan, had been an actor-manager at Dublin's Smock Alley Theatre before writing books on education. The family moved to England in 1758, and Richard was at Harrow School from 1762 to 1768.
In 1772 he fought two duels with Captain Thomas Mathews, who had written a newspaper article defaming Elizabeth Ann Linley, the woman Sheridan meant to marry; later that year the couple eloped. His first play, The Rivals, failed on its first night at Covent Garden in 1775, but he rewrote it and a few days later it was a great success. In 1776 he bought David Garrick's share in the Drury Lane theatre, and the rest in 1778, and his later plays were all staged there.
The School for Scandal, the play on this site, opened at Drury Lane on 8 May 1777 and became his most famous work. It is a comedy of manners, and it was followed by The Critic (1779).
From 1780 to 1812 Sheridan sat in the House of Commons as an ally of Charles James Fox, and his 1787 speech demanding the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India, was praised by Burke, Fox and Pitt. He was Treasurer of the Navy from 1806 to 1807. After he lost his seat in 1812 his creditors closed in, and he died in poverty in 1816. He was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Sources: wikipedia.org
