The Rivals

The Rivals is a five-act comedy of manners by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. first performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, London, on 17 January 1775. It was his first play.

The plot concerns a young couple, Jack Absolute and Lydia Languish, and the complications of their courtship. They are finally united despite the unhelpful interventions of Jack's father, Sir Anthony, and Lydia's aunt, Mrs Malaprop, as well as two further suitors of Lydia's – a bellicose Irishman and an English country bumpkin. A sub-plot depicts another young couple – Julia Melville and her fiancé, Jack's friend, Faulkland – whose romance is disrupted by Faulkland's obsessive jealousy, but has a similarly happy ending. The best-known character in the play is Mrs Malaprop, known for her ludicrous confusion of similar sounding words, who has given her name to malapropisms.

The play was not well received at its premiere and was taken off after a single performance. Sheridan thoroughly revised it and when it was staged shortly afterwards it became and has remained a success.

The Rivals was Sheridan's first play. At the time, he was a young newlywed living in Bath. After their marriage his wife, Eliza (born Elizabeth Linley), gave up her successful career as a singer. She could have continued to earn a substantial income but she disliked performing in public and Sheridan, who was class-conscious, thought it unbecoming for a gentleman's wife to sing for money. Thomas Harris, the manager of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, invited him to write a play, and having read Sheridan's script he predicted great success and at least £600 in royalties for the author.

The play, set in Bath, draws on works written by Sheridan's mother – a novel, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, and an unfinished play, A Journey to Bath, in which the word-mangling Mrs Tryfort is a forerunner of Mrs Malaprop. Sir Anthony Absolute resembles Sir Sampson Legend in Congreve's Restoration comedy Love for Love, and according to the biographer A. Norman Jeffares has echoes of "a father as domineering and opinionated as Sheridan's own".

The Rivals was first performed at Covent Garden on 17 January 1775. The first night audience rejected the play. It was criticised for being derivative of earlier comedies, for its excessive length, for its crude comedy, for its excess of malapropisms and for the character of Sir Lucius O'Trigger, an unpalatably harsh caricature of an Irishman. The acting was not good: according to The Morning Post, Edward Shuter as Sir Anthony "did not know any two lines together, and wherever he was out, he tried to fill the interval with oaths and buffoonery", and John Lee as O'Trigger also did not know his lines, and his Irish accent was "a horrid mixture of discordant brogues, an uncouth dialect, neither Welch, English nor Irish".

In addition to the perceived faults of the play and the inadequacy of some of the acting, the performance was hampered by the presence in the audience of a vociferous anti-Sheridan claque, inspired by a rival playwright. The play was withdrawn immediately after the debacle of the premiere and Sheridan revised it in eleven days.

Sheridan's second version of the play opened at Covent Garden on 28 January 1775. The text differed substantially from that of the first night. Revising it, Sheridan strove to refine it. He removed all indelicate jokes and offensive terms such as "whore"; he confined malapropisms to Mrs Malaprop herself; and he softened the satire of the Irish, making O'Trigger a proud patriot rather than an unscrupulous fortune hunter. The Morning Chronicle commented that the original had "some imperfections" and had subsequently "undergone some alterations" with the result that "the play in its present state has received such marks of general approbation" that it called for a detailed account of the piece. David Garrick, who ran the rival Drury Lane theatre, was at the first night of the rewritten play and commented at the end, "I see this play will run".