Sheridan and the Publicity of Playwriting

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.

... As for the little puny critics, who scatter their peevish strictures in private circles, and scribble at every author who has the eminence of being unconnected with them ... there will always be found a petulance and illiberality in their remarks, which should place them so far beneath the notice of a gentleman, as their original dulness had sunk them from the level of the most unsuccessful author.
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan, preface to “The Rivals” (1775)

Sheridan, one of the sharpest wits of his age, seems to put his finger on something here. He distinguishes three settings, publics, or modes of publicness: the immediate “representation” subjected to the gaze of the theatrical public, the critical and intellectual analysis performed by the “cooler tribunal of the study,” and the wretched criticism of “peevish strictures in private circles.” None of these modes is surprising in and of itself. But each of them adds a dimension, and a layer of complexity, to the facts that serve as the basis for our understanding of the public sphere.

Most of the existing frameworks are not immediately adequate for connecting these three modes. Sennett's vision of the eighteenth-century public self relies on a continuity between the theater, the street, and the coffee house. But here, it seems as if the faculties and presuppositions at play in the representational mode are different, and belong to a different audience, than the sober intellectualism of those who will read the play rather than watch it. Similarly, Habermas sees criticism as a major wellspring of the public sphere; but here, the critics are maligned as private, as unabstracted from personalities. Furthermore, Sheridan is offering his play to two publics simultaneously: the reading public that will peruse the preface, and the public in representation that will determine the form of the printed play. There is hardly any normative difference between them; in Sheridan's expostulation, the two modes play off each other, each making the other possible. Mocking critics has been a favorite artistic pastime since, probably, Aeschylus; but the critics of the third mode are posed as a foil to the more “liberal” critics of the first two, and therefore Sheridan is clearly still adhering to some normative concept of publicness. But what, precisely, is it, if it isn't rational-critical nor merely aesthetic?

I think the most significant dynamic at play in this work of Sheridan's is not the creation of a debate, but the consumption of texts. His own characters—Lydia Languish, defined by her reading matter in the form of romantic novels, and the famous Mrs. Malaprop, who can't quite translate her vocabulary into adequate usage—are defined by this consumption. Sheridan's readers are offered the chance to constitute themselves as a market for his text, just as Lydia is part of a demographic that reads romances. In this way, a “counterpublic”--in scare quotes because there's neither an opposition nor, really, any broader discourse to be resisted—is formed, as Michael Warner has suggested, as a interpretive community of readers, shaped by their responses to texts. There is no broader public that can judge Sheridan's play in the mode of representation, because, as he points out in the preface, the audience of the first nights is unique:

It is usual, I believe, to thank the performers in a new play, for the exertion of their several abilities. But when (as in this instance) their merit has been so striking and uncontroverted, as to call for the warmest and truest applause from a number of judicious audiences, the poet's after-praise comes like the feeble acclamation of a child to close the shouts of a multitude. The conduct, however, of the principals in a theatre cannot be so apparent to the public.

The mode of critical analysis is thus necessarily removed from the action; it is forced to judge a case already decided. It is in the close-knit counterpublic environment that the real evaluation takes place. Perhaps, then, counterpublics, or the diverse and exclusive markets of textual consumption that made up a large part of eighteenth-century culture, go first, before any of the public sphere's rational-critical resources can be brought to bear, and should therefore possess some comparable analytic priority.