Today’s Poem: The Literary Lady

Or, The Uncharming, Uncharmable Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan

1799 Playbill from Sheridan’s Drury Lane Theatre (Wikimedia Commons)

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 de…