The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Rivals, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

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Title: The Rivals
A Comedy

Author: Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Release Date: March 6, 2008 [EBook #24761]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIVALS ***

Produced by Kent Cooper

The RIVALS
A Comedy

By Richard Brinsley Sheridan

* * * * * * *

PREFACE

A preface to a play seems generally to be considered as a kind of
closet-prologue, in which--if his piece has been successful--the author
solicits that indulgence from the reader which he had before
experienced from the audience: but as the scope and immediate object of
a play is to please a mixed assembly in _representation_ (whose
judgment in the theatre at least is decisive,) its degree of reputation
is usually as determined as public, before it can be prepared for the
cooler tribunal of the study. Thus any farther solicitude on the part
of the writer becomes unnecessary at least, if not an intrusion: and if
the piece has been condemned in the performance, I fear an address to
the closet, like an appeal to posterity, is constantly regarded as the
procrastination of a suit, from a consciousness of the weakness of the
cause. From these considerations, the following comedy would certainly
have been submitted to the reader, without any farther introduction
than what it had in the representation, but that its success has
probably been founded on a circumstance which the author is informed
has not before attended a theatrical trial, and which consequently
ought not to pass unnoticed.

I need scarcely add, that the circumstance alluded to was the
withdrawing of the piece, to remove those imperfections in the first
representation which were too obvious to escape reprehension, and too
numerous to admit of a hasty correction. There are few writers, I
believe, who, even in the fullest consciousness of error, do not wish
to palliate the faults which they acknowledge; and, however trifling
the performance, to second their confession of its deficiencies, by
whatever plea seems least disgraceful to their ability. In the present
instance, it cannot be said to amou