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The Critic: or, a Tragedy Rehearsed is a satire by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The last of his plays, it was first staged at Drury Lane Theatre in 1779. It is a burlesque on stage acting and play production conventions, and Sheridan considered the first act to be his finest piece of writing. One of its major roles, Sir Fretful Plagiary, is a comment on the vanity of authors and in particular a caricature of the dramatist Richard Cumberland.

Based on George Villiers' The Rehearsal, it concerns misadventures that arise when an author, Mr Puff, invites Sir Fretful Plagiary and the theatre critics Dangle and Sneer to a rehearsal of his play The Spanish Armada, Sheridan's parody of the then fashionable tragic drama.

In 1911, Herbert Beerbohm Tree mounted a star-studded production of The Critic at Her Majesty's Theatre starring George Alexander, Cecil Armstrong, George Barrett, Arthur Bourchier, C. Hayden Coffin, Kenneth Douglas, Lily Elsie, George Graves, George Grossmith, Jr., Edmund Gurney, John Harwood, Charles Hawtrey, Helen Haye, Laurence Irving, Cyril Maude, Gerald Du Maurier, Gertie Millar, Edmund Payne, Courtice Pounds, Marie Tempest, Violet Vanbrugh and Arthur Williams.

References

• "Sheridan, Richard Brinsley." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 7 July 2007 <http://search.eb.com/eb/article-6614>.
• "Critic, The, or a Tragedy Rehearsed", The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Ed. Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer. Oxford university Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. 7 July 2007 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t54.e1490>

External links

• The Critic, Free e-text at Project Gutenberg