Preparing Oneself for Theater

WARNING: This is one of those "gee-whiz, isn't the Internet dreamy?" kinds of digressions. If your aversion to this sentiment makes you ill, please skip this post. So, I am going to the Shakespeare Theater to see Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals (1775). I have always wanted to see Mrs. Malaprop be compounded in her circumablution (e.g., "As headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile," from Act III, sc. 3). Not only can I find out some information about the author (his grandfather was a friend of Jonathan Swift and his father wrote a biography of Swift), I can read the full text of the play (see above) and look at portraits of the author and his wife (that by Gainsborough to the left below, that by Reynolds to the right). Isn't this cool?