Play: The School for Scandal

Overview
Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1777 comedy The School for Scandal is a sparkling satire of fashionable London society, where reputation is currency and rumor the fiercest weapon. Premiered at Drury Lane, the play skewers the moral pretensions of the age by contrasting public virtue with private vice, and positions gossip as both social glue and corrosive acid. Its tight plotting, epigrammatic wit, and two famous set pieces, the “portrait auction” and the “screen scene”, made it a landmark of the comedy of manners.

Plot
At the center sit two brothers, Charles and Joseph Surface, wards of the generous Sir Oliver Surface, long absent overseas. Charles, amiable but spendthrift, is widely condemned as a libertine. Joseph carefully cultivates a reputation for prudence and sentiment, winning the approval of many, including Sir Peter Teazle, an older gentleman recently married to the lively and extravagant Lady Teazle. Sir Peter’s ward, Maria, loves Charles, but Joseph schemes to win her and her fortune.

The town’s scandal-mongers, Lady Sneerwell, the poetaster Sir Benjamin Backbite, his uncle Crabtree, and the tireless busybody Mrs. Candour, feed and circulate rumors, abetted by the hireling Snake. Lady Sneerwell and Joseph conspire to blacken Charles’s name and alienate Maria from him. Meanwhile, Sir Oliver returns in disguise to test his nephews’ characters rather than trust appearances. As “Mr. Premium,” a moneylender introduced by the honest broker Moses, he visits Charles, who, pressed by debts, proposes to raise cash by selling his family portraits. In a brilliant comic auction, Charles cheerfully parts with the ancestors but refuses to sell Sir Oliver’s portrait, declaring he will never part with the old man’s image. Sir Oliver, moved, judges Charles generous at heart. In a second test, Sir Oliver calls on Joseph as “Mr. Stanley,” a needy relation. Joseph, protecting his fortune and reputation, refuses assistance and reveals a mean-spirited core beneath his virtuous veneer.

The plots converge in the “screen scene.” Joseph attempts to seduce Lady Teazle, who has flirted with fashionable impropriety, when Sir Peter arrives. Joseph stashes Lady Teazle behind a screen and preaches his own virtue to the cuckold-anxious Sir Peter, only for the screen to fall and reveal Lady Teazle. The exposure punctures Joseph’s façade and shocks Sir Peter into a reckoning with his wife’s motives. Lady Teazle, remorseful, rejects Joseph and sides against the scandalmongers.

Characters and Dynamics
Sir Peter and Lady Teazle’s marriage anchors the play’s emotional core, contrasting generational expectations and the lure of fashionable excess. Charles and Joseph are complementary studies: one flawed but openhanded, the other correct but calculating. Maria’s steadfastness counterbalances the frivolity of the salon, while Rowley, Sir Oliver’s faithful agent, and Moses offer moral ballast amid the chatter. Lady Sneerwell’s coterie functions as a chorus of rumor, demonstrating how reputation is constructed and weaponized.

Themes and Tone
Sheridan satirizes the cult of sensibility by showing how professions of feeling can mask self-interest. He explores the gap between surface and substance, asking whether character can be known in a society obsessed with appearances. Gossip appears as performative theater, with the screen itself a literal emblem of concealment and revelation. The language is brisk and epigram-packed, the humor sharp yet humane, and the moral resolution favors generosity, candor, and reconciliation over punitive severity.

Resolution and Legacy
Snake’s confession unmasks Lady Sneerwell’s intrigues, Joseph is disgraced, and Sir Oliver rewards Charles, who is reconciled with Maria. Sir Peter and Lady Teazle repair their marriage with clearer eyes. The School for Scandal endures for its buoyant wit, finely etched characters, and theatrical ingenuity, a defining exemplar of eighteenth-century stage comedy that still cuts to the quick of modern celebrity and rumor culture.