The School For Scandal - a Synopsis

The School for Scandal opens in the London home of Lady Sneerwell, who is meeting with Mr. Snake. Lady Sneerwell admits that her greatest pleasure in life is reducing the reputation of others. Snake is her instrument of destruction. Her new goal is to attack the growing attachment between Charles Surface and Maria, the ward of Lady Sneerwell's neighbor, Sir Peter Teazle. Lady Sneerwell confesses to Snake that she and Charles' older brother, Joseph, have been plotting to separate the couple. Lady Sneerwell herself is interested in Charles even though she describes him as an extravagant libertine. At the same time, Joseph seeks to capture Maria's regard.

Joseph Surface is widely perceived to be an honorable and trustworthy gentleman. Lady Sneerwell has discovered another side of Joseph, which is revealed to none but Snake. Lady Sneerwell's home is the gather-ing place for anyone interested in gossip. Characters such as Mrs. Candour, Mr. Crabtree and his nephew, Sir Benjamin Backbite, all come to her for the latest society news. One new piece of information is that Joselph and Charles' uncle, Sir Oliver Surface, is on his way back to London after having been in India amassing a fortune.

Next door to Lady Sneerwell's is the home of Sir Peter, an older man who married a much younger wife. Lady Teazle thinks she has to adopt the extravagant ways of the other society women she meets so that she will not seem like a country mouse.

Sir Peter, like most of society, believes in Joseph's worth and disparages Charles. Sir Oliver decides to test his two nephews. He will offer Charles financial assistance in disguise as a broker. Accompanied by Moses, a moneylender, Sir Oliver finds Charles at home drinking. Charles seeks his support by holding himself out to be his uncle's heir. Charles offers to sell many items in his house but will not sell an old pic-ture of his uncle.

Joseph Surface tries to gain Maria's affection, but she rebuffs him even though she is disgusted by some of Charles' purported excesses. Joseph is also pursuing Lady Teazle for an illicit relationship. While Lady Teazle is in Joseph's home, her husband arrives. She hides behind a screen. Peter becomes aware that Joseph has a woman hidden but is told it is a "French milliner." When Charles arrives unexpectedly to see Joseph, Peter hides in the closet. Upon hearing the ensuing conversa-tion, realizes that he has misjudged Charles. Charles and Peter discover Lady Teazle behind the screen. Hearing everything, she refuses to support Joseph. Sir Peter finally realizes that Joseph is a villain.

When Sir Oliver, in disguise this time as a poor relation seeking a loan, meets Joseph, he is not impressed with this nephew's lack of charity. He finds Joseph insincere, and decides to support Charles. Once Joseph's true nature has been exposed, Charles wins Maria. The Teazles are reunited, and London society moves on to other items of scandal.

(Source - The Georgia Shakespeare Festival 1997)    www.gashakespeare.org

A Century of Excess

If London was not the center of the western world in the late eighteenth century, those who lived there did not know it. It was a city of commerce and culture and thought, but also of great dichotomies; great wealth lived alongside severe poverty, manners and taste went hand in hand with extreme vulgarity. The German observer Baron von Archenholz perhaps put it best when he said of Georgian London, "every thing is in extremes." Looking back with a modern eye, we are alter-nately amused and appalled by these juxtapositions, and by the great display of excess by a small, tight-knit world, the world that Sheridan so adroitly celebrates and lampoons, the very patrons in the expensive boxes at Sheridan's Drury Lane Theatre: the world of Society.

Though it was an age of revolution, great oratory and well-reasoned philosophy, most people's attention was elsewhere. The poor and working class had barely enough time to work, eat, sleep and work some more. In the world of Society however, there seemed to be no end of time and money to spend. Appearance was, to some, the only consideration. Expensive velvet, silk, damask, lace, satin and linen clothing covered unwashed (twice a year at most), vermin-ridden bodies. Wiring and padding changed the shape of women's cleavage and men's calves. Ladies' powdered wigs grew to immense proportions, often adorned with knick-knacks and glass figurines. In one account, a beer keg fell from a theatre balcony on to a woman below, who only escaped injury due to the enormity of her wig.

Traveling to an acquaintance's home for dinner, one would, unfortunately, have to pass through the London streets, which were filled with a stinking stew of horse manure, butcher's offal, urine, stagnant water, the carcasses of dogs and cats and, in the seedier parts of town, a human body or two. Above, an acrid cloud of coal smoke hung thick over the city. (The streets were, however, well lit.)

Instead of walking, one would take a coach which could pull up right next to the front steps of the house, so one could dart directly from the house into the coach. One could also take a sedan chair, which could actually enter the home, and one could avoid stepping outside all together.

Dinner would be an elaborate spread, including soup, salad, four or more courses of meat and fowl, one or two fruits and vegetables, fish and shellfish, puddings, cheese and desserts. To wash it all down, each diner might consume four or five bottles of port. When nature called, the ladies might retire to the privy (if there was one) but for the men, less eager to leave the food, drink and conversation, the fireplace or chamberpots brought to the table would suffice.

Leisure activities abounded. One could go to the theatre or the pleasure garden Vauxhall, watch a public hanging, or visit Bedlam to be entertained by the insane. Blood sports of all kinds were popular—boxing, dogfights, bull baiting, and cock fights, all revolving around the most popular pastime of all—gambling. Fights, races, dice, cards, political races, births, deaths—anything that could be bet on, was. Great sums of money changed hands at cockpits and gaming tables. Gentleman might easily lose five hundred pounds in one evening, one hundred times what he would pay one of his maids in a year.

Money not lost at dice might be spent on prostitutes, opium or alcohol. Lots of alcohol. For those who could afford it, the drinking of beer, port, punch, cider and champagne was pretty much a full-time activity. (The drink of the poor was gin.)

And, of course, they gossiped. Salons and conversaziones provided almost daily opportunities for the trading of innuendo and scandal. Eighteenth-century precursors to the National Enquirer and People magazine glutted the taverns and coffeehouses of London. Publishers included blank pages to allow readers to write in their own tid-bits before passing the papers on to friends. Writing about the aristocracy of the time, T.H. White observes:

Great thoughts and large political or moral issues were absent. The nature of the "bootikins" worn by Horace Walpole for his gout, or the problem of what Dr. Johnson used to do with his dried orange peel were the core of the age.(The Age of Scandal)

Then, as now, anyone in the public eye was fair game, and Sheridan himself was frequently the subject of slanderous paragraphs in the newspapers (though in his case, they were sometimes true).

Though The School for Scandal focuses on the non-working wealthy (work being anathema to the world of Society), Sheridan does include a few outsiders, people who actually have to earn their livings: servants, the steward Rowley, and the money-lender Moses. Sheridan betrays the anti-Semitism and social dictates of his age in his portrayal of Moses, but his personal transactions with moneylenders (of which the deeply indebted Sheridan probably had many) may account for the relatively sympathetic characterization. (Sheridan, in fact, had been sued for 2000 pounds by a broker named Moses, but whether he was trying to attack his former debtor or make amends is not clear.) The servants, with one exception, scurry around the edges, making possible the luxury their employers are accustomed to, becoming the invisible agents that masters of all periods want their servants to be.

Those in the expensive boxes at the opening of The School for Scandal would have recognized the characters on the stage as people like themselves wealthy, well-placed men and women of style, taste, and extravagance. Sheridan, who had grown up a poor son of a Dublin actor, used his wit to fight his way into this London elite. The virtuosity of his art is that of a juggling act; he created a scathing satire of a hypocritical society without offending the very people on whose hospitality and money he had come to depend. How much did Sheridan sense the extremes of his age, the gap between the have's and the have not's, the irony of gold and brocade covering disease-ridden bodies? Probably no more or less than we recognize the ironies of contemporary life. And so, despite the lapse of two hundred years, The School for Scandal still works as satire, still celebrates and scolds its audience, and still makes us laugh. It is a brilliant fireworks display designed for the end of one century, that continues to seem dazzling and appropriate for the end of our own.

Christopher Baker, Dramaturg.

(Source - Shakespeare Theatre playbill - Washington DC)   www.shakespearedc.org

Much of the information in this article comes from Daily Life in Johnson's London by Richard B. Schwartz and The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, edited by Cecil Price.

The School for Scandal - Notes

"A School for Scandal!" tell me, I beseech you, Needs there a school this modish art to teach you?" from the Prologue, by David Garrick

The London audience may not have needed any instruction in scandal- mongering, but Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his theater company at Drury Lane certainly needed their "School" to be successful. In 1777, in his first season as theater manager, the young Sheridan had overseen what the London Magazine called "empty benches, and the silent con-tempt and desertion of the town." Not only was the theater losing money, but Sheridan, as always, was heavily in debt. Rather than allow his wife to return to her former career as a singer, Sheridan resumed work on the play he had been devel-oping for several years. All the best comic actors of the Drury Lane company were cast, and David Garrick, the greatest English actor of the century, offered advice at rehearsals. On May 8,1777, the first performance of The School for Scandal inspired terrific applause. A young journalist passing outside "heard such a tremendous noise over my head, that, fearing the Theatre was proceeding to fall about it, I ran for my life." Sheridan's reputation and the Drury Lane's profits were immediately restored.

Reputation, as Sheridan knew very well, is a fragile construction, easily bruised or broken. In eighteenth-century parlance, "character" and "reputation" were nearly synonymous; a person whose reputation was blotted had lost his or her "character," or public moral identity. In the "scandalous college" of Sheridan's play, fashionable gossips try out new rumors and improve on their malicious style. At eighteenth-century salons like Lady Sneerwell's, ladies and gentlemen gathered to sip "scandal-broth" (tea) and read the "scandal-sheets" (newspapers). Sheridan himself had provoked a fair amount of scandal as a young man when he ran off to France with a glamorous young singer, fought two duels with her rival suitor, and married her without her father's consent. Although he became a successful businessman and eventually a member of Parliament, Sheridan never entirely escaped the nets of gossip and intrigue that described his drinking, debts and womanizing.

Since 1777, The School for Scandal has been a consistent favorite with audiences. Recent twentieth-century productions have alluded to our own "scandal-sheets." Paul Marcus' 1988 production in California showed Lady Sneerwell and Sir Benjamin Backbite reading the National Enquirer, and Peter Wood's 1990 production at the National Theatre in London presented Joseph Surface as a con-man in the guise of advertising agent. Contemporary scandals— such as Charles and Diana, Donald Trump or Dick Morris—are easy to spot, and television spreads stories about the lives and loves of the rich and famous not just to one drawing-room, but to millions. Scandal is alive and well in our time, and so is Sheridan's witty eye for the "surfaces" and "sentiments" that we hide behind.

Perhaps we can join in with the wish of the English critic William Hazlitt, who in 1815 sighed with nostalgia, "Why can we not always be young, and seeing The School for Scandal?"

Dr. Julia Matthews Department of Theater Kennesaw State University Kennesaw, Georgia

(Source - The Georgia Shakespeare Festival 1997)    www.gashakespeare.org