SOURCE: “Representation and Experimentation in the Major Comedies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3, Spring, 1992, pp. 309-30.

In the following essay, Wiesenthal studies Sheridan's concern with modes of artistic representation in The Critic, The School for Scandal, and The Rivals.

In his 1825 biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Thomas Moore pauses briefly to consider a “ludicrous little drama” entitled Ixion, the incomplete product of a juvenile collaboration between the nineteen-year-old Sheridan and a school chum. Insignificant in itself, the fragment, as Moore suggests, is yet “highly curious as an anticipation of The Critic,” for not only is it a burletta written in the form of a rehearsal, but it also features an embryonic precursor of Sheridan's famous Mr. Puff in its main character, a playwright-critic named Simile. “It is amusing,” Moore reflects by way of conclusion, “to observe how long this subject was played with by...