Play: The Rivals

Overview
Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) is a high-spirited comedy of manners set in the fashionable spa town of Bath, where romance, parental authority, and social pretension collide. Sheridan lampoons the sentimental novels and overwrought passions of the day while celebrating wit, theatricality, and humane common sense. The play introduced the immortal Mrs. Malaprop, whose blunders in diction gave the English language the word malapropism.

Setting and Premise
Bath serves as a marketplace of reputations and illusions, a place where letters, masquerades, and gossip shape destinies. Lydia Languish, a wealthy heiress addicted to romantic fiction, yearns to defy her guardian Mrs. Malaprop and elope with a poor soldier in order to prove the purity of her love, even at the cost of her fortune. Unbeknownst to her, her adored “Ensign Beverley” is actually Captain Jack Absolute, the well-born son of Sir Anthony Absolute, who disguises himself as a humble officer to satisfy Lydia’s fancy.

Principal Characters
Jack Absolute balances sincere affection with intricate deception, passing between filial obedience and rakish invention. His friend Faulkland is a study in anxious sensibility, in love with Julia, Lydia’s cousin, yet chronically testing her constancy. Mrs. Malaprop, Lydia’s guardian, polices her niece’s reading and correspondences, mangling polysyllables with brisk authority. Sir Anthony Absolute represents irascible patriarchal will. Rival suitors for Lydia include the vainglorious country squire Bob Acres and the hot-blooded Irish duelist Sir Lucius O’Trigger, both entangled by Lucy, a mercenary maid who carries letters and sells secrets to all sides.

Plot Summary
Sir Anthony determines that Jack must marry a suitable heiress, ironically, Lydia herself. To maintain his disguise as Beverley, Jack pretends to resist the match, provoking splendid tirades from his father. Meanwhile, Mrs. Malaprop strives to steer Lydia away from love and “improper” books, yet she herself is lured into a clandestine epistolary flirtation with Sir Lucius under the poetic alias “Delia,” a confusion engineered by Lucy’s profitable misdeliveries.

Lydia clings to the dream of romantic poverty and resists any sanctioned proposal. Jack, trapped between his masquerade and his father’s plan, arranges a meeting as Beverley, while rivals circle. Sir Lucius goads Acres into challenging Beverley to a duel; Acres blusters in public and quails in private. Faulkland, consumed by jealousy and self-doubt, repeatedly torments Julia with tests of fidelity, transforming her calm affection into pain.

The comic knots tighten at the appointed duel on the North Parade. Acres confronts Beverley, only to discover his opponent is Captain Absolute. He instantly withdraws. Sir Lucius, spoiling for combat, tries to force a quarrel, but the arrival of Sir Anthony, Mrs. Malaprop, Lydia, and others explodes all disguises. Letters reveal that Sir Lucius’s “Delia” is Mrs. Malaprop herself, at which he recoils with mortified gallantry. Lydia, realizing her beloved Beverley is Jack Absolute, denounces the deceit because it drains her romance of its cherished adversity. Jack persuades her that sincerity, not theatrical hardship, proves constancy, and her anger softens.

Themes and Satire
Sheridan skewers fashionable sensibility, the cult of refined feeling that prizes suffering as proof of virtue, through Lydia’s novel-fed fantasies and Faulkland’s corrosive suspicion. Language itself is a comic battlefield: Mrs. Malaprop’s verbal misfires expose the vanity of empty learning, while crisp repartee rewards clarity and candor. The play targets dueling culture, mercenary matchmaking, and the brisk commerce of scandal, yet it grants its characters enough warmth to change.

Style and Legacy
Combining Restoration sparkle with a more humane comic spirit, The Rivals helped pivot English comedy away from mawkish sentiment toward sharper social observation. After an initially mixed reception and swift revision, it became a staple of the stage. Its enduring pleasures lie in the buoyant plotting, vivid types elevated into individuals, and dialogue that turns folly into delight. The reconciliations suggest that genuine feeling survives best when stripped of posturing, a wit-inflected defense of sense against sensibility.