Play: The Critic

Overview
Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Critic (1779) is a three‑act burlesque that skewers the late‑18th‑century theatre world, its puffed‑up critics, insecure playwrights, and stage conventions, through a metatheatrical comedy about a rehearsal that goes spectacularly wrong. The play’s first two acts anatomize the culture of reviewing and patronage; the third act presents a ridiculous tragedy‑within‑the‑play, exposing fashionable bombast and mechanical stagecraft. Drawing on the tradition of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal, Sheridan refreshes the satire for his own Drury Lane milieu, making publicity, newspaper “puffs,” and the vanity of authors his principal targets.

Plot
Mr. Dangle, a would‑be patron addicted to the theatre, and his caustic friend Sneer open the play by discussing the state of dramatic criticism while Mrs. Dangle laments the parade of importunate authors. Their talk is interrupted by Sir Fretful Plagiary, a thin‑skinned dramatist who insists he is indifferent to reviews even as he bristles at every imagined slight. Sheridan uses Sir Fretful’s visit to parade common authorial foibles, plagiarism denied by euphemism, paranoia about actors and managers, and the delusion that every critique springs from personal malice.

Enter Mr. Puff, a genial self‑promoter who makes his living by “puffing”, planting articles and advertisements to manufacture buzz for everything from charity performances to auctions. With comic precision he catalogs his trade’s techniques, from the “puff direct” to the “puff collateral,” revealing how manufactured acclaim shapes public taste. Puff has written a grand tragedy, The Spanish Armada, and invites Dangle and Sneer to its rehearsal.

Act III shifts to the theatre, where Dangle and Sneer observe the rehearsal while Puff hovers, correcting, explaining, and re‑writing on the spot. The tragedy teems with stock devices: expository sentinels, confidants, improbable recognitions, madness scenes, and tableaux. Historical figures such as Queen Elizabeth and Lord Burleigh share the stage with heroic lovers and swaggering foes from the Spanish side. Burleigh’s legendary “nod” is milked as a masterclass in mute eloquence, and a battle at sea is conjured with flags, thunder sheets, and breathless stage directions. Actors miss cues, the prompter intrudes audibly, properties are misplaced, and overwrought speeches pile up until sense collapses under spectacle. Puff demands constant interpolations, songs, dances, and a final catastrophe that satisfies every mechanical expectation, while Dangle and Sneer trade wry asides. The rehearsal ends in triumphant absurdity, with Puff entirely satisfied that the town will be moved.

Characters and Satire
Dangle embodies the meddling amateur patron whose taste is shaped by fashion; Sneer is the lucid but corrosive observer who can puncture any pretension; Sir Fretful is the hypersensitive professional who craves praise yet disavows it; Puff is the entrepreneurial modern who converts publicity into art. Through their interplay Sheridan satirizes the ecosystem of the stage as a marketplace of vanity, where opinion is a currency and art is tailored to the puff.

Themes and Style
The Critic lampoons the machinery of tragedy, its formulaic plots, rhetorical inflation, and dependence on spectacle, while also exposing the emergent media economy that sells such works to audiences. Sheridan’s metatheatrical frame lets spectators see the scaffolding: rehearsals, prompts, rewrites, and the compromises required to please a crowd. Wit, parody, and theatrical in‑jokes crowd the dialogue, yet the targets are broad and durable: the gap between artistic ambition and execution, and the comic human need to appear admired. The result is a brisk anatomy of theatrical illusion that doubles as a timeless comedy about how culture is made.