Overview

Ambitious polymath Thomas Sheridan (1719-1788) was the lynch pin of the most fascinating family in Anglo-Irish literary history. The godson (and future biographer) of Jonathan Swift, the son of Thomas Sheridan senior, a talented poet and scholar, the husband of the novelist Frances Sheridan and the father of the dramatist and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan, this new study reconstructs this much maligned transitional Sheridan as a monumental figure in his own right. This book discusses the varied and relentless energies of Thomas Sheridan in an attempt to recover an overall purpose and agenda which unites his adventures as actor-manager of Smock Alley Theatre Dublin with his pioneering campaigns in the fields of oratory, elocution and lexicography. Infused with civic republican zeal (derived in part from close reading of Montesquieu and an admiration for native North American culture) Sheridan believed that humanity in general and Anglophones in particular suffered from a cultural and political enervation as a result of the cultivation of written language at the expense of spoken language. It is argued that ""republicanism"" functioned more as a figure of political virtue than as a preferred mode of government. Enjoying particular success in Edinburgh with his public lectures, Sheridan sought to unify the peoples of Britain and Ireland by making the principles of elocution available to all, effectively de-centralizing the linguistic claims of metropolitan center. The Sheridan who emerges from this study is a phonocentric obsessive who left an abiding mark on the future of both acting and speech-making, but whose limitations are equally interesting and influential. In seeking to tame the riotous eighteenth-century stage, he anticipated (unknowingly) a far more passive ""cinematic"" form of spectator entertainment (accelerated by his mentorship of the great Sarah Siddons, arguably the first player to be experienced as a ""movie star"").

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9781611480382

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Reviews

Sheridan (1719 -88) was once a well-known writer on elocution; today he is virtually forgotten, even though in his time he was a prominent actor-manager (Dublin's Smock Alley Theatre), a lecturer and writer on the primacy of the spoken word, and an educational theorist. Brunstrom, an Irish academic, hopes to reclaim Sheridan's reputation and importance. Yet this Sheridan (whose 1967 biography, Esther Sheldon's Thomas Sheridan of Smock-Alley, is still definitive) remains best known as father of playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan. For specialists in 18th-century Irish studies, this idiosyncratic investigation will likely prove of some interest. However, without adequate background on Irish history, culture, politics, and the arts (especially theater in Dublin), inexperienced readers will find this book inaccessible and too speculative (Brunstrom likes divergent discussions and topics tangential to Sheridan's activities). In four chapters, the author deals briefly with Sheridan's life, his role as mid-18th-century manager of Smock Alley Theatre, his writings on oratory and elocution, and his career within a history of 18th-century Irish patriotic rhetoric. Throughout there are careless errors, including the misspelling of several cited authors (French for ffrench, Pillon for Pullen, Roche for Roach). Choice

Sheridan (1719 -88) was once a well-known writer on elocution; today he is virtually forgotten, even though in his time he was a prominent actor-manager (Dublin's Smock Alley Theatre), a lecturer and writer on the primacy of the spoken word, and an educational theorist. Brunstrom, an Irish academic, hopes to reclaim Sheridan's reputation and importance. Yet this Sheridan (whose 1967 biography, Esther Sheldon's Thomas Sheridan of Smock-Alley, is still definitive) remains best known as father of playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan. For specialists in 18th-century Irish studies, this idiosyncratic investigation will likely prove of some interest. However, without adequate background on Irish history, culture, politics, and the arts (especially theater in Dublin), inexperienced readers will find this book inaccessible and too speculative (Brunstrom likes divergent discussions and topics tangential to Sheridan's activities). In four chapters, the author deals briefly with Sheridan's life, his role as mid-18th-century manager of Smock Alley Theatre, his writings on oratory and elocution, and his career within a history of 18th-century Irish patriotic rhetoric. Throughout there are careless errors, including the misspelling of several cited authors (French for ffrench, Pillon for Pullen, Roche for Roach). CHOICE

Author Information

Conrad Brunström is lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland Maynooth.

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