Today’s Poem: The Literary Lady
Or, The Uncharming, Uncharmable Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan
As evidence that the practice of an art does not lead inevitably to virtue, let us present, as Exhibit A, Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan (1751–1816).
Famous for such plays as The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777), as well as for his service as Treasurer of the Navy (1806–07), Sheridan was infamous as a womanizer, a social climber, and a backstabber. His closest associates mistrusted and despised him, even as they laughed at his jokes.
Everybody knows the weary old trope that bad people can commit good art (and its corollary, that good people are doomed to mediocrity), but Sheridan, with all his gifts of political acumen and dazzling comedy, was in a league of his own. He gambled and lost money. He seduced women and threatened to blackmail them. When they resisted either sort of advance, he assaulted them. One woman described his biting her cheek “so violently that the blood ran down my neck.” On his deathbed, attended by an old lover, he vowed to return and haunt her the rest of her days. Even she was repulsed at this point — the real surprise is that she had shown up at all — and Sheridan died three days later, impoverished in both funds and friends, utterly alone.
Does knowing what the man was like change the way we read “The Literary Lady,” Today’s Poem and our Wednesday light-verse feature? Certainly the poem’s pentameter couplets sparkle with detail and cleverness, as Sheridan’s writing often did sparkle. He gives us a new generation’s vision of the Celias and Julias of the previous century, whose disordered dress so charmed Ben Jonson and his literary sons. Here, in her boudoir, we have Corilla, her name a mashup of the archetypal, pastoral Stellas and Corinnas. Her disorder beguiles all the more because look, she’s trying to write, poor thing.
Perhaps, after all, not knowing what we know about Sheridan, we might still intuit the contempt in the speaker’s voice. Line to line, the particulars are merciless. Silly Corilla, she sets out to write a play and ends in writing a grocery list, while the unpaid bills mount up among the “frippery chaos” on every surface of her room. Her mind, exposed to us without affection, is as scattered and trivial as her surroundings. Even if we didn’t know what we know about the character of her creator, we might still feel how the wind looking in at her window blows cold.
The Literary Lady
by Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan
What motley cares Corilla’s mind perplex, Whom maids and metaphors conspire to vex! In studious dishabille behold her sit, A lettered gossip and a household wit; At once invoking, though for different views, Her gods, her cook, her milliner and muse. Round her strewed room a frippery chaos lies, A checkered wreck of notable and wise, Bills, books, caps, couplets, combs, a varied mass, Oppress the toilet and obscure the glass; Unfinished here an epigram is laid, And there a mantua-maker’s bill unpaid. There new-born plays foretaste the town’s applause, There dormant patterns pine for future gauze. A moral essay now is all her care, A satire next, and then a bill of fare. A scene she now projects, and now a dish; Here Act the First, and here, Remove with Fish. Now, while this eye in a fine frenzy rolls, That soberly casts up a bill for coals; Black pins and daggers in one leaf she sticks, And tears, and threads, and bowls, and thimbles mix.
For all her Bohemian, get up the woman cannot write a play because her head is full of grocery lists. If you read Prudence Allen’s The Concept of Woman, satirical misogynist verse is effectively a subgenre of its own. Usually very funny in a nasty way. Often the authors come to a sticky, well deserved end.