Prof. Cecil Price, head of English at Swansea University, edited Sheridan's letters and his complete dramatic works for Oxford before producing this scholarly paperback edition of the plays for advanced students. It features impeccable scholarship, minimal notes, a useful 20-page introduction and a helpful one-page chronology of Sheridan's life. Included with Sheridan's lesser known works are his three best and most popular plays: The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The Critic (1979). These comedies of manners deserve their place between Moliere and Wilde and alongside Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer as among the best of the genre.

Sheridan's first dramatic accomplishment, The Rivals was "not well received" when first enacted. But after a quick revision in which the author shortened it and toned it down, it has been a notable success for centuries, not only for its familiar plot of a high-born lover (Capt. Jack Absolute) pretending baseness to woo his beloved (the sentimental Lydia Languish), but for the marvelously misspeaking Mrs. Malaprop, the most delightful misuser of language since Shakespeare's Dogberry. Despite other Shakespearean echoes from Lear, Macbeth, Falstaff, and Hamlet, in the end the titular rivals avoid tragic bloodshed from dueling just as in Much Ado and Twelfth Night to allow the appropriate heteronormative romantic couplings to flourish. Making the play more difficult for a modern audience are its story's class-ist, sexist and racist foundations. ( )

The origin of Mrs. Malaprop.