Play: A Trip to Scarborough

Background
Richard Brinsley Sheridan's A Trip to Scarborough (1777) is a brisk three‑act refashioning of John Vanbrugh's Restoration hit The Relapse (1696). Sheridan keeps the celebrated intrigue surrounding the brothers Fashion and the fortune of a provincial heiress, while pruning the bawdier, adulterous subplot that had scandalized later audiences. He relocates the action to the fashionable spa town of Scarborough, trims and polishes the dialogue, and softens the coarser edges to suit late eighteenth‑century taste, turning a racy Restoration romp into a comedy of manners calibrated for Drury Lane.

Setting and Premise
The spa at Scarborough supplies a lively social backdrop of promenades, lodgings, and assembly rooms where fortune, title, and appearance mingle and collide. Into this scene come two brothers with opposite fortunes. Lord Foppington, newly ennobled and exquisitely vain, has arranged to cement his status by marrying a wealthy country heiress. His younger brother Tom Fashion, genteel but penniless and irritated by his brother's neglect, sees that union as his only chance to recover means and independence. When Tom learns the bride is guarded by her blustering guardian at a nearby country seat, he resolves to steal a march on his brother by impersonating him.

Plot Overview
Sheridan opens with the contrast between Tom’s sharp need and Lord Foppington’s soft self‑adoration. Foppington lingers over his toilette, treats the match as a transaction for cash and consequence, and shows more ardor for his valet’s compliments than for his unseen bride. Tom, prodded by his quick‑witted servant Lory, turns necessity into stratagem: he will arrive before Foppington at the guardian’s house, claim the name and title, and secure the marriage.

At Sir Tunbelly Clumsy’s fortress‑like country home, suspicion would normally be airtight, but deference to rank loosens every latch. Tom, playing Lord Foppington with just enough hauteur, wins admittance, flatters the guardian, and meets Miss Hoyden. Far from a porcelain innocent, she is eager to escape rural confinement and taste the metropolitan world that a titled husband promises. Their scenes crackle with mutual calculation sweetened by attraction, and a hurried plan emerges: a private wedding under the roof before any rival can interfere.

The trick succeeds. With nurse and chaplain conveniently pliable, Tom ties the knot. Almost on cue, the real Lord Foppington arrives, demanding his fiancée; but Sir Tunbelly, convinced the newcomer is a brazen impostor, has him manhandled out of doors. Only when papers and servants testify does the guardian realize the switch. Fury follows, yet the law and the church have spoken; the marriage is valid, the fortune settles on Tom, and Foppington’s grand design collapses. The fop, nursing his bruises and his pride, consoles himself with style, while Tom claims both bride and security. The curtain falls on a world in which quick wits outpace empty polish and social pretension receives a comic check.

Themes and Style
Sheridan reshapes Vanbrugh’s materials into a satire of fashion, title, and transactional marriage that suits a more decorous age. Lord Foppington embodies the hollowness of rank unbacked by substance; Tom represents intelligent opportunism sharpened by necessity. Miss Hoyden, spirited rather than crude, exposes the mutual bargaining at the heart of genteel alliances. The spa setting lets Sheridan puncture display culture, faces, clothes, and reputations, through nimble repartee and situational irony, while his pruning of Restoration excess foregrounds pace and plot over licentious shock.

Legacy
A Trip to Scarborough preserved one of the stage’s great comic parts in Lord Foppington and offered audiences Sheridan’s sleek alternative to Restoration frankness. Though less famous than The Rivals or The School for Scandal, it stands as a revealing example of eighteenth‑century adaptation, where moral sensibility, theatrical practicality, and a keen eye for social folly meet in a buoyant entertainment.