"Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics"
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Sheridan is doing what great playwrights do: puncturing a cherished self-image with a single, neat pin. “Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics” strips two arenas that love to advertise their virtue and exposes the machinery underneath. Gallantry sells itself as moral romance - bravery, honor, protection - but Sheridan treats it as performance, a social script that can be executed perfectly by people with dubious ethics. Politics, likewise, drapes itself in the language of duty and principle, yet often runs on appetite, faction, and calculation. The joke lands because it’s symmetrical: if conscience is irrelevant to politics (a knowing nod to corruption and expediency), why would it suddenly become essential in the theater of masculine honor?
The subtext is less “everyone is bad” than “don’t confuse codes with character.” Gallantry is a code: it polishes desire into something respectable. Politics is a code: it launders ambition into public service. Conscience, by contrast, is inconveniently internal; it doesn’t reward you with applause or votes. Sheridan’s line catches the hypocrisy of a culture that mistakes style for virtue, especially in an 18th-century Britain where parliamentary maneuvering and fashionable manners both functioned as competitive sports.
As a playwright steeped in comedy of manners, Sheridan isn’t preaching from a pulpit. He’s reminding the audience that the most convincing moral language often arrives as costume. The sharper implication: if you want to locate conscience, don’t look at the gestures. Look at what someone will sacrifice when no one is watching.
The subtext is less “everyone is bad” than “don’t confuse codes with character.” Gallantry is a code: it polishes desire into something respectable. Politics is a code: it launders ambition into public service. Conscience, by contrast, is inconveniently internal; it doesn’t reward you with applause or votes. Sheridan’s line catches the hypocrisy of a culture that mistakes style for virtue, especially in an 18th-century Britain where parliamentary maneuvering and fashionable manners both functioned as competitive sports.
As a playwright steeped in comedy of manners, Sheridan isn’t preaching from a pulpit. He’s reminding the audience that the most convincing moral language often arrives as costume. The sharper implication: if you want to locate conscience, don’t look at the gestures. Look at what someone will sacrifice when no one is watching.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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