I was expecting to get round to reading this play, the third on my list, a bit sooner: as it turns out however, the text was harder to find than I anticipated. Things got a bit easier once I worked out that the version performed in 1753 was almost certainly Colley Cibber’s reworking of John…

This is the first play on my list of pieces performed in the 1753-4 season that I hadn’t already read. It was written by David Garrick and first performed in November 1741, before going on to notch up over a hundred performances before Garrick’s death in 1779. An afterpiece of just two acts, it is…

This three-act play by John Gay was one of the runaway successes of the eighteenth century, and was a regular on London stages from its first performance in 1727 right into the mid-twentieth century. It still appears now from time to time. Calling this work a ‘play’ does it a bit of an injustice. Gay…

Left with a bit of spare time after handing in a draft of a conference paper, I decided to refamiliarise myself with some of the plays of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. I’d picked up the Penguin Classics The School for Scandal and Other Plays secondhand in Oxford, on the basis that I probably should own copies…