The Critic (Criticism)

Criticism

Daniel Moran

Moran is a secondary school teacher of English and American literature. In this essay, he examines the ways in which Sheridan’s play parodies a number of tragic conventions.

In 1763, sixteen years before the premiere of The Critic, James Boswell co-authored a pamphlet in which he jeered at David Mallet’s Elvira, a tragedy acted at the Drury Lane Theatre. Confessing to his friend Samuel Johnson that he felt somewhat guilty about the pamphlet, since he himself could not write a tragedy “near so good,” Boswell received another impromptu lesson from his mentor that found its way into The Life of Samuel Johnson.

Why no, Sir; this is not just reasoning. You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.

Boswell’s conscience may have been bothering him because of a trend of thought sometimes found among those faced with the critical evaluation of tragedy: the genre is so revered and taken so seriously that mocking it is sometimes regarded as aesthetically sacrilegious, like finding fault with Michelangelo’s Pieta. Comedy never tries to elicit the “pity or terror” (in Aristotelian terms) of tragedy, and its faults are therefore regarded as less damaging to the work as a whole. Along these same lines, the benchmark for a quality tragedy is often a higher one than comedy, since laughter is supposedly easier to elicit than catharsis. This is why the most improbable plot devices in comedies are accepted as part of the game, whereas the same improbabilities in tragedies are either glossed over or dismissed as unimportant in terms of the work’s total effect on a viewer. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, for example, Viola disguises herself as a man and in doing so becomes completely indistinguishable

from her twin brother — so much so that she excites the mourning Olivia into thunderous passion and never once causes her new master, Orsino, to question her gender. No viewer of this play would rail against this seemingly impossible device, yet if the same kind of incident occurred in King Lear, for example, audiences would have a much more difficult time “believing” it (to the extent that they suspend their disbelief and accept the action of any play as “real”). Yet even the greatest tragedies have a number of events in them that are wholly implausible yet infrequently questioned by awestruck viewers and readers. As Puff explains to Dangle and Sneer, “a play is not to show occurrences that happen every day, but things just so strange, that tho’ they never did, they might happen.” That “might” is where plots become farcical (in the case of comedy) or awkward (in the case of tragedy).

Sheridan, of course, knew all of this from his years spent reading, attending, writing, and managing plays, and it is this central idea — that tragedies belong to a genre so exulted that anyone criticizing their creators (like Boswell) can actually feel guilty — that fuels The Critic. Sheridan made Puff’s The Spanish Armada a tragedy instead of a comedy because he knew that the humor would arise in direct proportion to the earnestness and seriousness of its performance. Had he made Puff’s play a comedy, everyone in the audience would be laughing with the characters rather than at them, and making his audience laugh at writers like Puff is crucial to Sheridan’s vision. Once the members of Sheridan’s audience start laughing at the portentousness of Puff’s tragedy, however, they can begin to consider just how silly (and worthy of any number of pamphlets) the plots and conventions of even the greatest tragedies can be. As a viewer watches The Critic, therefore, he or she is invited to share in Sheridan’s laughter at tragic conventions and, ultimately, better appreciate those playwrights who are able to deal with these conventions in a way less laughable than Puff. “I improve upon established modes,” Puff boasts, and a careful reading of The Spanish Armada reveals Sheridan’s joy in parodying the established mode of tragedy and its conventions. Unlike Boswell, Sheridan never feels the slightest compunctions about mocking the genre or its less-than-talented disciples.

The Spanish Armada can be read as a catalogue of theatrical conventions, each of which is hilariously presented but each of which also provokes a reader into recalling where similar devices occur in other, “real” tragedies. The differences are merely ones of degree. For example, the opening scene of Puff’s play features two sentinels asleep at their post. When Sneer remarks that this is odd, considering the “alarming crisis” of a possible Spanish attack, Puff explains that the guards must be asleep, for Raleigh and Hatton would not speak if they knew the guards were watching them. This is a joke for the audience, but consider the death of Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: after she awakens from her drugged sleep in the Capulet tomb and learns that Romeo is dead, Friar Lawrence advises her to “Come, come away” and live among “a sisterhood of holy nuns.” When Juliet refuses, Friar Lawrence leaves the tomb, ostensibly because “the watch is coming” but really because had he stayed, Juliet would have been denied her opportunity to commit suicide. Moments later, the conveniently absent Friar returns with the lovers’ parents and confesses his role in their attempted elopement. Like Puff’s sleeping sentinels, Shakespeare’s Friar had to engage in an inexplicable action for the sake of dramatic expediency. This is similar to Hamlet’s dragging the body of Polonius into “the neighbor room” after he kills him; Hamlet may be doing so to spare his mother the horrible sight, but Shakespeare also knew that the actor playing Polonius had to get off the stage and having the actor jump up and exit after such an intense scene might break the spell of the moment.

Another theatrical convention skewered by Sheridan is the manner in which many playwrights struggle with the problem of exposition. After Hatton asks Raleigh why there is a “general muster” and “throng of chiefs” at Tilbury (although he plainly knows the answer), Dangle rightly asks Puff why, if Hatton “knows all this,” Raleigh continues telling it to him; Puff explains that Hatton and Raleigh speak for the audience’s sake. Information necessary to the plot is therefore presented but in such a way that its very presentation is laughably awkward. Jane Austen recognized the same problem and similarly parodied it in a play she wrote as a young girl, collected in her book Love and Friendship:

Pistoletta: Pray papa how far is it to London?

Popgun: My Girl, my Darling, my favourite of all my children, who art the picture of thy poor mother who died two months ago, with whom I am going to town to marry to Strephon, and to whom I mean to bequeath my whole Estate, it wants seven miles.

All playwrights face this challenge and meet it with varying degrees of success: to return to Shakespeare, consider the opening of King Lear, in which Shakespeare masterfully opens the play with the meeting where Lear divides his kingdom while simultaneously revealing his attitudes toward his daughters. Conversely, consider the opening of Hamlet, where Marcellus asks Horatio, who has returned to Denmark only two months ago, why Denmark is preparing “implements of war” in “sweaty haste.” Why Marcellus, a royal guard, would not know anything about this and need to ask a civilian student is not explained, or even considered by many viewers. Even Shakespeare nods.

Once the exposition is out of the way, a playwright still faces the problem of information: a character needs to learn some fact or secret but must learn it in such a way that seems dramatically plausible. Eavesdropping, therefore, is the dramatist’s friend; consider the number of plays in which a character learns something he or she is not supposed to by virtue of a good hiding place. In Othello, for example, the title character conceals himself so well that he can overhear Iago speak to Cassio of Bianca yet remain wholly unnoticed by Cassio, who speaks as freely as if he and Iago were on a deserted island. Similarly, Hamlet abounds in overheard conversations: Polonius and Claudius listen to Hamlet’s “Get thee to a nunnery” tirade against Ophelia, and Polonius is killed while hiding behind a tapestry in Gertrude’s room. As Puff proclaims, “If people who want to listen, or overhear, were not always conniv’d at in a Tragedy, there would be no carrying on any plot in the world.” Sheridan knew this to be true: his own The School for Scandal relies heavily on eavesdropping to propel its plot. Here, however, he takes great delight in laying bare the clumsy machinations of those who attempt to (in Hamlet’s words) “hold a mirror up to nature” but fail.

The list of conventions thus parodied continues. Tilburnia’s first speech mocks overdone pseudo-poetic language: she takes twenty lines to say, “It is morning and I am unhappy.” The tendency for playwrights to imbue their characters with (in Puff’s words) the ability “to hear and see a number of things that are not” is mocked by Tilburnia’s description of the approaching armada; again, this is a ludicrous moment in Puff’s play, but anyone who rereads Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death in Hamlet is faced with the same problem: from where did Gertrude get this information, and why did the person telling it not attempt to rescue Ophelia as she drowned? The playwright’s necessary manipulation of props is mocked when Don Whiskerandos and the Beefeater happen to discover two swords dropped by Hatton and Raleigh; while humorous here, the same kind of manipulation occurs at the end of Hamlet when Hamlet and Laertes unknowingly switch swords during their final duel, thus allowing Shakespeare to kill them both with the same poisoned tip. Another tragic convention — madness — is often used by playwrights to solicit the pathos of the audience; such “mad scenes,” however, often feature a character speaking in a way that cleverly reveals significant aspects of their personalities in a way that seems unlike “real” madness. (Lady Macbeth, for example, manifests her madness in sleepwalking while attempting to symbolically wash her hands of the guilt that plagues her.) This convention is ridiculed by Sheridan when he makes the mad Tilburnia babble such nonsense as:

Is this a grasshopper! — Ha! no, it is my Whiskerandos — you shall not keep him — I know you have him in your pocket — An oyster may be cross’d in love! — Who says A whale’s a bird? —

The more tragedies one has seen, the funnier Puff’s play becomes. It is important to remember, however, that Sheridan does not do all this in an effort to mock the genre of tragedy as a whole; rather, he expresses his amusement with those writers who struggle with these conventions when composing their work and can only meet these challenges in the most dramatically clumsy ways. As a playwright himself, Sheridan knew of these struggles firsthand, and it is by presenting The Spanish Armada, a play where all of these struggles prove too great for Puff, that Sheridan invites his audience both to laugh at those who cannot meet the challenges of composition and to applaud those (like himself) who do. Puff’s play, therefore, is a guide to Sheridan’s aesthetics, albeit a guide that shows its user what not to do rather than what he or she should do. Great skill is needed to depict the work of an unskillful playwright, and, by examining the tragic conventions parodied in The Spanish Armada, a viewer can better appreciate the skills of tragedians who handle these conventions more adroitly than Puff.

Source: Daniel Moran, Critical Essay on The Critic, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

What Do I Read Next?

• Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600) features a band of actors who rehearse their tragedy, The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisby, with hilarious results. Act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream features the play’s performance.
• Like The Critic, Michael Frayn’s farce Noises Off (1982) consists of rehearsals for a play where nothing happens as it should. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Noises Offends with the audience watching the play they just saw being rehearsed.
• The Rivals (1775), Sheridan’s first play, is a comedy concerning the thwarted (but eventually reconciled) love between Captain Absolute and Lydia Languish. The play is famous for the character of Mrs. Malaprop, Lydia’s aunt who makes a number of “malapropisms,” humorous linguistic errors (“As headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile”).
• Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), considered by many to be his masterpiece, follows the drawing room adventures of Lady Sneerwell and her group of gossips. Critics routinely praise the play as the perfect “comedy of manners.”
• The American playwright David Mamet’s A Life in the Theater (1977) concerns two actors — one young, one old — who discuss, in a series of vignettes, their work as actors and their struggles with their craft.
• The Renaissance team of Francis Beaumont and John Fetcher’s The Night of the Burning Pestle (1613), like Puff’s The Spanish Armada, features a number of dramatic conventions exploited for their comic potential.
• Henry Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731), like The Critic, offers a mock tragedy through which Fielding parodies and satirizes specific authors and writers of his age. The printed edition of the play contains extensive footnotes by Fielding that identify his allusions and satirical targets.
• John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) broke a number of theatrical conventions, both in its subject matter and political overtones. It was one of the most popular plays of the eighteenth century and inspired Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera in 1928.
• Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) offers its reader a glimpse of Shakespeare’s Hamlet through the eyes of two of its minor characters. Like Sheridan, Stoppard delights in exploring the nature of theater and its conventions.