Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) was a late eighteenth-century British playwright of some renown, noted for helping to revive the English comedy of manners during the Restoration. This type of play depicts the amorous intrigues of people in the wealthier segment of society, and the best-known of Sheridan's plays analyze this territory with sharp wit and complex plots. He followed in the footsteps of William Congreve and William Wycherley and satirized his society in highly-polished plays like School for Scandal and The Critic.
The eighteenth century began as a period of relative calm after the ferment and political turmoil of the previous century, and this was marked by the Restoration, the return to a previous order. The political order of the previous century was embodied in Thomas Hobbes' work Leviathan, which could be seen as a justification for the rule of Cromwell and a challenge to the accepted order of royalty. In the eighteenth century, though the monarchy had been restored, power had clearly shifted to parliament to a great degree. Power had in a larger sense started shifting to the people at large, and this was seen in the increase in education and in the growth of a wider reading public than had ever existed before. The growing middle class included people with more and more leisure time, and they along with the upper classes turned more and more to literature as a diversion. New literary forms developed to replace the old, opening the way for satirists such as Alexander Pope, dramatists and poets like John Dryden, and humanists and scholars like Samuel Johnson. Dryden expressed the classical spirit of the age in calling for a universal drama which can transcend the limitations of language placed on it in former times, when translations of the classics were to be avoided and when only those who could read Greek and Latin could read the classics at all. Dryden writes in this regard in a way that shows a lo...