A Traitor's Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, by Fintan O'Toole, Granta, 468pp, £20 in UK
This is not only an absorbing and often dazzling biography, but a conscious work of reclamation. The glamorous life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan has been written about regularly since Tom Moore produced the first Memoirs of his compatriot, but that was the first and last "Irish" treatment of Sheridan. He figures regularly in belleslettres treatments of late-Georgian and Regency London, emphasising his runaway marriage to the singer Elizabeth Linley, his close friendship with the Prince of Wales, his management of the Drury Lane Theatre, the brilliance of his own plays there, his hectic gambling and complex infidelities, his eventual decline to a debt-ridden death. But this is the side of his life astutely compared by Claire Tomalin to a bitter Mozartian comic opera. What O'Toole has restored is a sense of Sheridan the innovator, the subversive, the political radical - even Sheridan the putative Irish revolutionary.
It is true that the Mozartian edge is there: glittering surfaces, secret in securities, class differences reversed or ignored, public protestations of affection masking private betrayals. However, O'Toole's meticulous but passionate treatment restores the sense of danger not only to Sheridan's career as a theatrical innovator, but to his increasingly radical politics. Both are related to a sense of Irish marginalisation which enabled him to play dangerous games with the language of theatre, and brought him very near the edge of revolutionary politics in the late 1790s, while simultaneously living at the top of the London political and social world.
It is an arresting case to make, since Sheridan after his early youth never visited Ireland. However, O'Toole convincingly demonstrates his hero's commit ment first of all to the pro-Irish policies of Foxite Whiggery, and then his close associations with United Irish emissaries and - eventually - revolutionaries: not just Lord Edward Fitzgerald (with whom Mrs Sheridan had a fatal love affair) but, less expectedly, Arthur O'Connor, the Reverend Jackson, Peter Finnerty and other committed insurrectionists.
Whether he actually endorsed revolution is another matter: several establishment politicians went near the flame without singeing their wings. But taken with his close attachment to contemporary British reformers, his opinions about the French Revolution, and his generally consistent refusal to enter political alliances which would compromise his beliefs, the pattern is striking: in some ways he appears as the last Georgian radical, living on into the era of post-Waterloo Tory repression.
But other commitments were more compromising, and in some ways the operatic thread in this story recalls Verdi rather than Mozart. In his palmy days, Sheridan had more influence with the Prince of Wales (eleven years his junior) than anyone else; their friendship transcended shared tastes for gambling, claret and women, and the potential power of the Prince during the recurrent crises of George III's illness was great. The possibility of the Prince and Sheridan organising the government of Ireland swam occasionally into view, and Sheridan played a leading part in the secret marriage to Maria Fitzherbert and the Regency crisis of 1789. By his death in 1816, however, recurrent political disagreements had relegated him to playing Falstaff to the increasingly reactionary Regent's Henry; as he lay dying, Sheridan's house was thronged with baliffs and debt-collectors, playing cards and staring at the occasional grandees who came to take their leave of a legendary survivor fallen on hard times.
Placing this story against an Irish background brings an edge to the moral tale of great social success and precipitate decline, to the abandonment of high-ranking friends, most of all to the equivocal position of the playwright-manager aspiring to the highest offices of the land. Moreover, O'Toole consummately demonstrates concealed autobiographical impulses in the work. He shows the absurdism and fantasy of The Rivals mirroring the author's own life, as well as parodying the entire contemporary genre of popular plays, and he links Sheridan's deliberate revival of Congreve to the iconoclastic reversals of The School for Scandal. Forgotten plays like Pizarro are not only placed in contemporary context but read as an allegory of politics. Warren Hastings's impeachment is treated with appropriate bravura, showing how Sheridan's great denunciation pictured Hastings as the archetype of Joseph Surface in The School for Scandal. Time and again we see the arriviste Sheridan using Westminster as a theatre, and Drury Lane as a political arena.
In the end, the collapse of Sheridan's life mirrors the end of aristocratic radicalism and the abandonment of Ireland: one of the issues which separated Sheridan from the Prince was Catholic Emancipation, in which he passionately believed. A Traitor's Kiss is beautifully articulated: the early chapters on background, heredity and Irishness stress the cult of Ossian in Sheridan's youth, while at the end we see him transfixed by the Waverly novels of Walter Scott, and idolised by Byron. The linking themes of romanticism, marginalisation and inspirational spezzatura speak for themselves. Byron told Tom Moore, as he sat down to write his Sheridan biography, to bear in mind that his subject was "an Irishman and a clever fellow". Readers of this newspaper have no need to be reminded that the same is true of Fintan O'Toole, and this book declares it triumphantly in every line.
Roy Foster's latest book is The Apprentice Mage, first volume of a biography of W.B. Yeats