SOURCE: “Plot, Character, and Comic Language in Sheridan,” in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan: Change and Continuity in the English and European Dramatic Tradition, edited by A. R. Braunmuller and J. C. Bulman, Associated University Presses, 1986, pp. 274-85.

In the following essay, Hogan views the plotting and characterization of Sheridan's dramas as in some ways lacking, but acknowledges the brilliance of his comic language in The Rivals, The School for Scandal, and The Critic.

Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—these two Irishmen are inevitably considered the preeminent comic talents of the English-speaking theater in the eighteenth century. Indeed, many literary historians have said that from the retirement of Congreve and the death of Farquhar early in the eighteenth century, until the appearance of Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and W. B. Yeats late in the nineteenth century, there were no dramatists who even approached the quality of Goldsmith...