Dramatist, politician, entrepreneur, philanderer, duelist, and revolutionary (or traitor), Richard Brinsley Sheridan was a man of many contradictions: an English-educated Protestant actor who cared about the civil rights of the Irish Catholic peasantry; a playwright who in his time was best known as a politician; a true believer in sincerity yet a role-playing chameleon; a radical who masterminded the monarchy's crisis following the madness of King George; a member of Parliament who associated with armed insurrectionists against the Crown. This unusual Irish-English life has been captured by Fintan O'Toole, in an innovative work that opens up a radical new perspective on a great writer. A Traitor's Kiss is also an evocation of Britain and Ireland in a violent, revolutionary age. Whether he is writing about the uproarious nighttime world of the eighteenth-century theater or the grim aftermath of the Irish rebellion of 1798, O'Toole is precise, vivid, and economical, an excellent narrator of a life that dramatizes so many of the issues which are still resonant in relations between the Irish and the English today. He shows that Sheridan must be understood as an Irish writer and dissident, a complicated man who walked a thin line between success in London and extreme danger as a supporter of democratic reform and Irish independence.