"I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience - it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere"
About this Quote
Sheridan’s joke is a small act of theatrical vandalism against the swollen habits of “fine writing.” With one blunt sound cue - a clock striking - he claims he can do three things at once: seize the audience’s nerves, locate the action in time (an ungodly four a.m.), and quietly assassinate the stock sunrise description that lesser dramatists would milk for lyrical “gilding” and moral uplift. The wit isn’t just that he’s being efficient; it’s that he’s staging efficiency as a kind of aesthetic virtue, daring you to notice how often art wastes your time while pretending to honor it.
The subtext is combative. Sheridan is signaling allegiance to the theatre as theatre: a place of timing, entrances, effects, and shared attention, not a printed page where poets can luxuriate in dawn metaphors. The phrase “awful attention” is deliciously double-edged: it flatters the audience’s sensitivity while admitting they need a jolt to focus. He’s also letting the audience in on the machinery. By openly celebrating how the clock “saves” description, he breaks the illusion just enough to make you complicit in the trick, which is itself a kind of charm offensive.
Context matters: late-18th-century British stage culture prized polish and sentiment, and Sheridan made his name skewering fashionable affectation. Here, he’s doing it in miniature, turning a technical note into a manifesto: less purple scenery, more precise theatre, and a mistrust of any writer who’d rather paint the sky than move the play.
The subtext is combative. Sheridan is signaling allegiance to the theatre as theatre: a place of timing, entrances, effects, and shared attention, not a printed page where poets can luxuriate in dawn metaphors. The phrase “awful attention” is deliciously double-edged: it flatters the audience’s sensitivity while admitting they need a jolt to focus. He’s also letting the audience in on the machinery. By openly celebrating how the clock “saves” description, he breaks the illusion just enough to make you complicit in the trick, which is itself a kind of charm offensive.
Context matters: late-18th-century British stage culture prized polish and sentiment, and Sheridan made his name skewering fashionable affectation. Here, he’s doing it in miniature, turning a technical note into a manifesto: less purple scenery, more precise theatre, and a mistrust of any writer who’d rather paint the sky than move the play.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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