An Irish actor, theater manager, and educator, Thomas Sheridan was husband to Frances Sheridan and father to Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In addition to his other pursuits, he delivered a series of lectures on elocution, which he then published in 1762, and a series on reading, published 1775.

Though few in number, some of R. B. Sheridan's plays are still well remembered. His more important work includes The Rivals (1775), The Duenna (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), The Camp (1778), and The Critic (1779).

Playwright and novelist Frances Sheridan was wife to actor and theater manager Thomas Sheridan and mother of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, one of the eighteenth century's most important playwrights, who was influenced by his mother's work. Frances Sheridan published the novel Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph in two parts in 1761 and 1767. Her play The Discovery (1763) is worthy of at least as much attention as any of her fiction.

Writer and longtime friend of Richard Graves. Shenstone published his first poetical volume, Poems upon Various Occasions (1737), anonymously. It contained his most important work, The Schoolmistress, revised versions of which were published in later years. His later writings included The Judgement of Hercules (1741), addressed to George Lyttleton.

Most famous as the author of Frankenstein (1818) and wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley was daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. She authored a significant body of travel narrative, biographical essays, and some literary criticism as well as numerous novels, novellas, and tales. In addition to Frankenstein, her novels include Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837).

Though his life was short, Percy Bysshe Shelley was a prolific poet, authoring a list of works far too extensive to name in full in a brief note. Some of the more important of them include the Gothic novel Zastrozzi (1810); The Necessity of Atheism (1811), a treatise that caused him to be expelled from Oxford; a variety of political pamphlets; Queen Mab (1813); Alastor (1816); Adonais (1821); Julian and Maddalo (1824); The Masque of Anarchy (1832); and many sonnets, odes, and other shorter poems. Among his verse dramas, The Cenci (1819) and Prometheus Unbound (1820) stand out.

While Shakespeare work is so widely known and biographies and criticism so abundant that a brief sketch can only be redundant, it is useful to be reminded that through the work of the eighteenth-century British literary history and criticism establishment, Shakespeare had by the later part of the century attained the status of the most exemplary of British writers, a national treasure and incontestable proof of Britain's supposed cultural superiority over the rest of the world. Dramatic productions include Henry VI, parts 1, 2, and 3 (c. 1589-1592), Richard III (c.

British philosopher and historian whose emphasis on feeling in his writing on history, moral philosophy, and aesthetics helped to establish the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility. His most important work is Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711).

The best known of the Italian improvisational poets, Sgricci performed to large audiences and great acclaim. His method was to memorize prefabricated sentences, which he put together quickly to achieve the effect of spontaneity, dazzling huge audiences and gaining him wealth, prizes, fame, and eventually a place among the nobility. His celebrity enabled him to live semi-openly as a homosexual, protected in part by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had also granted Sgricci a pension after witnessing him improvise a full-length verse tragedy on Mary, Queen of Scots.

The Sforza was an Italian family that came to power in the mid-15th century through a marriage with the Visconti family. The family ruled Milan for nearly a century.