The Rivals (Style)

Style

The Comedy of Manners

The Comedy of Manners hails from the Restoration period (1660-1700), but was revived a hundred years later toward the end of the eighteenth century by Richard Sheridan and his contemporary Oliver Goldsmith. While Restoration comedy was bawdy and playfully lewd, the eighteenth-century version is refined and genteel. Both satirize the affected manners of sophisticated society. Often the plot revolves around a love affair, which takes the form of a pitched battle with words as weapons. The dialogue is witty and characters are distinguished by their ability to match wits with their partners. Characters are usually thinly drawn, representing types rather than individual personalities. Emphasis is placed on the language, such as wit and clever double-entendres, rather than the characters’ motives or actions.

The Comedy of Manners of the eighteenth century served a different audience than that of the Restoration period. Whereas the early Comedy of Manners was designed to entertain those it ridiculed — the social elite — later variations of this form of comedy served a more diverse audience, which included a growing middle class hungry to acquire the social mannerisms necessary to move up the social ladder.

Sheridan and Goldsmith revived the Comedy of Manner as a protest to the plays of sentimental comedy that predominated in the middle eighteenth century. Didactic and moralizing, sentimental comedies with titles such as False Delicacy, The Clandestine Marriage, and The Fashionable Lover portrayed tender lovers who make huge social mistakes and pay dearly for them by the last curtain. Sentimental comedies thus predicted the social reformist drama of the nineteenth century.

In the late eighteenth-century climate of puritanical conservatism, Sheridan revived the satiric bite of the true Comedy of Manners, yet in a more subdued and less bawdy form. In The Rivals, Sheridan satirized popular sentimental comedy by ridiculing his heroine’s misguided sentimental ideas instead of presenting them as caused by society’s unfairness. Lydia Languish is not to be pitied, but to be mocked. Her very name reveals the playwright’s attitude toward her mawkish desire to fulfill the fantasies of sentimental novels. Her return to her senses at the end of the play as she lets go of her foolish whimsies is Sheridan’s subtle attack on mawkish sentimentality.