Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Richard Brinsley Sheridan was the son of an Irish actor and a novelist who eloped with a singer, fought two duels for her, and at twenty-three wrote The Rivals; at twenty-six he bought Garrick’s share of Drury Lane and wrote The School for Scandal, the last great English comedy of manners, with its screen scene and its scandalmongers. He then gave up writing for thirty years in Parliament, where his speeches at the Hastings trial were thought the finest ever heard there, watched Drury Lane burn, the story goes, from a coffee house with a glass in his hand, and died in debt. He is buried in Poets’ Corner.