Sheridan, The School for Scandal, and aggression.

Thompson, James

For a canonical play, one that was extremely successful from the start and has occupied a regular place in the repertory ever since the 1770s, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal elicits no consensus from playgoers or readers about what it means or even how it works. Indeed, response is divided on both issues. In proposing to resolve these interpretive problems, I should admit from the start that I have never found The School for Scandal a particularly appealing play; it lacks the warmth and physicality of Sheridan's first play, The Rivals, and in its casual, throwaway anti-Semitism, it epitomizes much that is repugnant about late eighteenth-century British culture. It is, moreover, a poorly, or at least a very loosely, constructed play, with two separate plots clumsily grafted together--that of the Teazles or Slanderers and that of the Surface brothers. Theater historians praise Sheridan for working so closely with his Drury Lane Company and adapting parts to the apparently limited talents at his disposal, (1) though this is hardly a feature that endures over time. And finally, not surprisingly, this is not a play that has attracted particularly interesting commentary, which consists too often of old school praise of witty dialogue as a throwback to Restoration comedy. (2)

I don't propose to offer a bold new reading that will either resolve the divisions or rehabilitate Sheridan's play, but I would like to suggest a generic reconsideration. We understand the long eighteenth century as a period of unusual generic instability and experimentation. Our attention tends to be absorbed by the emergence and normalization of the novel, but there is also considerable generic flux, albeit without the appearance of new forms, in the playhouse as well. Just to pick some obvious examples, we have self-defined tragedies such as Congreve's The Mourning Bride, that end with prosperous protagonists, just as we have self-described comedies that end with their protagonists miserable, such as Otway's Friendship in Fashion. Satire and comedy are terms that appear to be used interchangeably on the title pages of plays throughout the period. And while this does not exactly constitute legitimate historical evidence, the bewildering range of categories and subcategories that J. Douglas Canfield used in his anthology of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama indicates the grievous difficulty we have in making sense out of the types of these plays. (3) Nowhere are generic classifications more vexed than with sentimental comedy and its aftermath, a body of serious comedies that quite self-consciously exhibit many of the characteristics of tragedy. In short, Aristotle is of no help in understanding eighteenth-century British drama. In the standard histories of drama, Oliver Goldsmith's 1772 "Essay On The Theatre; Or, A Comparison Between Laughing And Sentimental Comedy" has come to function as that libratory modernization text that delivers us from the mess of early modern generic indistinction, driving a stake through the heart of sentimental comedy and restoring the power of aggression and the pleasures of ridicule to comedy: "The principal question therefore is whether, in describing low or middle life, an exhibition of its follies be not preferable to a detail of its calamities?.... [A]s tragedy displays the calamities of the great, so comedy should excite our laughter, by ridiculously exhibiting the follies of the lower part of mankind." (4)

I want to read Sheridan's 1777 The School for Scandal as a text marked by parallels to Goldsmith's "Essay," for it too repeatedly, even obsessively asks in scene after scene, line after line, What's funny? What is the relation between comedy and ridicule, comedy and aggression? Given the nature of much late eighteenth-century literature from Frances Burney's The Witlings to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, it is not surprising that most readings of Sheridan's play find their resolution in the domestic portions of the plot--those elements that formally repudiate the public sphere and its addiction to gossip, slander, and aggressive competition. The Teazles' reconciliation, the union of Maria and Charles, along with the humiliation of the slanderers, Joseph Surface, Lady Sneerwell, and Snake, all point to a privileging of the private and familial over the public and social, much as in sentimental fiction where the public sphere is too cruel for the sensitive soul. If comedy of manners, in Ronald Paulson's fingernail definition, involves two modes of life and a protagonist who spans them both, in the late eighteenth century, from Burney to Goldsmith to William Godwin and Austen, writers inevitably endorse the simple, retired and rural over urban sophistication and wit. (5) The School for Scandal does not simply dramatize the usual triumph of the heartfelt and simple, but rather repeatedly stages an indecisive contest between sophistication and simplicity, scandal and sentiment. (6)

Much if not all Sheridan criticism has been absorbed in this contest, laying stakes on one side or the other. Mark S. Auburn argues that there are basically two schools of interpretation of The School for Scandal, and they correspond to the two original halves of the play: those that endorse the wit of the Slanderers; and those that endorse the domestic (and didactic) resolution of the Teazles. (7) In this, Auburn is at one with John Loftis, who contrasts readings that emphasize the wit versus readings that emphasize the fable of the play--scandalous but witty and amusing dialogue versus a plot and a moral that demand we disapprove and repudiate the gossips' wit. (8) Though they do not pose this in discursive or professional terms, what is at stake for both critics is the manner in which the play is read: by literary critics or by theater historians. Both Auburn and Loftis endorse the latter, that is, plays understood in terms of the specifics of production history and theatrical fashion. Drama is a form of mass media with mass appeal and can be read properly only in terms of the company, the season, and the immediate demands of theatrical taste. Literary critics, they argue, deal with read, not produced, plays, and are driven by the dictates of canon and elite judgments about the best that was thought and written. Literary criticism and literary history have little use for Georgian drama beyond Goldsmith and Sheridan, and except for these two, the canon runs from George Etherege, William Wycherely, and William Congreve straight to Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Such criticism privileges above all the highly literary (and often revised for print) dialogue of Congreve's The Way of the World. (9) But both Auburn and Loftis argue that if we are to read The School for Scandal properly, we should place it within the company of plays by the likes of George Coleman rather than those by William Congreve, and we would see more clearly the value of the prosaic virtues of candor. (10) As Auburn puts it, "Like Sir Peter, The School for Scandal's Lady Teazle is a character not of the harsher Restoration mold but of Sheridan's eighteenth century" (117).

Auburn and Loftis's claims are eminently reasonable, and because the field of literary study is still so powerfully driven by a priori historicist assumptions, their argument is hard to refute--we are just not viewing The School for Scandal within the right historical perspective. Nonetheless, their historicist argument depends upon minimizing the problem that many viewers then and now find the slanderers extremely amusing and the Teazles terribly tepid. As biographer James Morwood puts it in his The Life and Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan:

 If in the theater the scenes of the gossip appear the most
 entertaining in the play and Joseph its most diverting character,
 it is hard to view the work as straightforward condemnation of
 vice.... The scandal is in fact more entertaining than harmful or
 cruel, and when Joseph says of the gossip-mongers to an indignant
 Maria that "they appear more ill natur'd than they are--They have
 no malice at heart" (2.2.183-84), there is no reason to disbelieve
 him. (11)

Moreover, the remote connections with Congreve are not in themselves unambiguous. Eric Rump points out, "The most daring move that Sheridan made in the opening months of his first season at Drury Lane was the revival of three of the four comedies of Congreve." (12) Rump goes on to note:

 The effectiveness of Sheridan's successful restoration of Congreve
 can, in part, be seen in the reviews of The School for Scandal
 which opened on 8 May 1777, only a few months after Sheridan had
 completed his Congreve series with The Way of the World. With one
 or two exceptions, the reviews were all glowingly congratulatory,
 and, significantly, some of the reviewers displayed their
 enthusiasm for the play by expressly linking Sheridan to Congreve.
 (67-68)

From the opening reviews onward many viewers and readers have been captivated, not by the warmly moral reconciliations, but by the wicked and mean-spirited exchanges of the slanderers precisely because they are so inventive and unexpected. The urbane, witty, sophisticated, and scandalous often manifests itself in The School for Scandal in what Joseph Surface refers to as "the licence of Invention." (13) This late early modern version of prose copia animates scene after scene, with a generative and amusing fictionality:

 Crab: Why, one evening, at Mrs. Ponto's assembly, the conversation
 happened to turn on the breeding Nova Scotia sheep in this country.
 Says a young lady in company, I have known instances of it; for
 Miss Letitia Piper, a first cousin of mine, had a Nova Scotia sheep
 that produced her twins. "What!" cries the Lady Dowager Dundizzy
 (who you know is as deaf as a post), "has Miss Piper had twins?"
 This mistake, as you may imagine, threw the whole company into a
 fit of laughter. However, 'twas the next morning everywhere
 reported, and in a few days believed by the whole town, that Miss
 Letitia Piper had actually been brought to bed of a fine boy and
 girl: and in less than a week there were some people who could name
 the father, and the farm-house where the babies were put to nurse.
 (1.1)

I focus on this moment for its satiric energy and invention, its accumulation of ridiculous detail, but also because it instantiates the essential pattern of The School for Scandal: in every scene--from the screen scene to the portrait auction, from every exchange between Sir Peter and Lady Teazle to every scene with Maria and the slanderers--comic dialogue is staged before a range of characters, some of whom find it entertaining and others who find it appalling and immoral. While one might think that this is a technique reminiscent of the contrast between wits and the witwoulds or between city sophistication and rural imbecility, The School for Scandal lacks a clearly privileged figure to guide the audience's response; there is no Horner or Mirabel, but only again and again in scene after scene, a bifurcation of response. I want to argue that cumulatively The School For Scandal sets up an anarchic ridicule against stuffy moralism, the whiney Sir Peter and tedious ingenue Maria, against the deliciously inventive slanders of Crabtree and Sir Benjamin Backbite, an opposition that comes to a climax in the competition for the most detailed and amusing version of Sir Peter's duel with Charles or possibly with Joseph:

Sir Ben: Sir, says Sir Peter, immediately after the discovery, you are a most ungrateful fellow.

Mrs. Can: Ay, to Charles--Sir

Ben: No, no--to Mr. Surface--a most ungrateful fellow; and old as I am, sir, says he, I insist on immediate satisfaction.

Mrs. Can: Ay, that must have been to Charles; for 'tis very unlikely Mr. Surface should fight in his own house.

Sir Ben: Gad's life, ma'am, not at all--giving me immediate satisfaction.--On this, ma'am, Lady Teazle, seeing Sir Peter in such danger, ran out of the room in strong hysterics, and Charles after her, calling out for hartshorn and water; then, madam, they began to fight with swords--

Enter CRABTREE

Crab: With pistols, nephew, pistols! I have it from undoubted authority.

Mrs. Can: Oh, Mr. Crabtree, then it is all true! Crab: Too true, indeed, madam, and Sir Peter is dangerously wounded--

Sir Ben: By a thrust in segoon quite through his left side--

Crab: By a bullet lodged in the thorax.

Mrs. Can: Mercy on me! Poor Sir Peter!

Crab: Yes, madam; though Charles would have avoided the matter, if he could.

Mrs. Can: I told you who it was; I knew Charles was the person.

Sir Ben: My uncle, I see, knows nothing of the matter.

Crab: But Sir Peter taxed him with basest ingratitude--

Sir Ben: That I told you, you know--

Crab: Do, nephew, let me speak!--and insisted on immediate--

Sir Ben. Just as I said--

Crab: Odd's life, nephew, allow others to know something too! A pair of pistols lay on the bureau (for Mr. Surface, it seems, had come home the night before late from Salthill, where he had been to see the Montem with a friend, who has a son at Eton), so, unluckily, the pistols were left charged.

Sir Ben: I heard nothing of this.

Crab: Sir Peter forced Charles to take one, and they fired, it seems, pretty nearly together. Charles's shot took effect, as I tell you, and Sir Peter's missed; but, what is very extraordinary, the ball struck against a little bronze Shakespeare that stood over the fireplace, glanced out of the window at a right angle, and wounded the postman, who was just coming to the door with a double letter from Northamptonshire.

Sir Ben: My uncle's account is more circumstantial, I confess; but I believe mine is the true one, for all that. (5.2)

If this were Laurence Sterne, we could easily understand it as novel novelistic parody, an exaggeration of verisimilitude to the point of absurdity. Neither of the competitors' accounts is plausible, but as each one grows in particularity it grows ever more inventive and amusing, climaxing with the intricate trajectory of a fanciful projectile. This extraordinarily self-conscious and self-reflexive language is not so much that of the incipient realist novel as it is the aesthetic of the Liars Club, where he or she who can tell the most extravagant and implausible story wins. In the absence of a reliable and sensible figure such as Captain Absolute or Kate Hardcastle, there is no one onstage to mediate versions of the event or appropriate responses to the slanderers appropriation of the narrative.

Compare Crabtree's rhetoric of the circumstantial not with the emergent novel but rather with Tony Lumpkin's misleading Hasting and Marlow in Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer: (14)

Tony: It's a damn'd long, dark, boggy, dirty, dangerous way. Stingo, tell the gentlemen the way to Mr. Hardcastle's! (Winking upon the Landlord.) Mr. Hardcastle's, of Quagmire Marsh, you understand me.

Land: Master Hardcastle's! Lack-a-daisy, my masters, you're come a deadly deal wrong! When you came to the bottom of the hill, you should have crossed down Squash Lane.

Mar: Cross down Squash Lane!

Land: Then you were to keep straight forward, till you came to four roads.

Mar: Come to where four roads meet?

Tony: Ay; but you must be sure to take only one of them.

Mar: O, sir, you're facetious.

Tony: Then keeping to the right, you are to go sideways till you come upon Crackskull Common: there you must look sharp for the track of the wheel, and go forward till you come to farmer Murrains barn. Coming to the farmer's barn, you are to turn to the right, and then to the left, and then to the right about again, till you find out the old mill--

Mar: Zounds, man! we could as soon find out the longitude! (15)

In The School for Scandal comic circumstantiality is privileged over abstract morality, as it is in The Rivals and in She Stoops to Conquer. Tony knows the local landscape and the city boobs do not, even if he is making this all up. The comedy here and in all his other scenes lies in his ability to embroider and expand.

Tony Lumpkin and Benjamin Backbite's capacity to exfoliate is not just about the emergence of an aesthetic of detail, but it is also about the rejection of sentimentality as ineffective moral aphorism, as Jonathan Lamb argues so persuasively in his study of Job stories. (16) If the serious and moral are lodged in abstraction, the categorical imperative or universal rule, the comic is lodged in specificity and individuation. The consequence of Sheridan's systematic disentangling of the two in The School for Scandal is a reinvestment in the power of ridicule and abjection, inevitably directed at the single figure with a proper name, Miss Letitia Piper or Sir Peter Teazle or Moses the Jew. And here, once again, Sheridan's understanding runs parallel to Goldsmith's: sentimental comedy, shorn of its aggression, is toothless and humorless. Comedy depends on the judicious deployment of meanness, for in the absence of a humiliated comic butt, we are left with nothing but threadbare morality.

In the end, I think that over the course of interpretations of Sheridan's The School for Scandal, from the earliest reviews to contemporary criticism, the one who gets it most nearly right is Charles Lamb, whose reminiscence of having seen the play years before is at once deeply nostalgic but also slyly resistant to current productions. Lamb describes the play as a mixture of old and new: "This comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherely, but gathered some alloy of the sentimental comedy which followed theirs." (17) But his purview is entirely proleptic, because he remembers the original production as profoundly ambiguous, and current (nineteenth-century) productions as insistently didactic and domestic. Now, Lamb writes, "We must love or hate--acquit or condemn--censure or pity--exert our detestable coxcombry of moral judgment upon everything. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a downright revolting villain--no compromise" (139). But he remembers his first, original Joseph Surface as much more appealing:

 Its hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When
 I remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the
 measured step, the insinuating voice--to express it in a word--the
 downright acted villainy of the part, so different from the
 pressure of conscious actual wickedness--the hypocritical
 assumption of hypocrisy,--which made lack so deservedly a favorite
 in the character, I must needs conclude the present generation of
 playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely
 confess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother;
 that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are
 passages,--like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse
 a pittance to a poor relation,--incongruities which Sheridan was
 forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the
 sentimental comedy, either of which must destroy the other but over
 these obstructions Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a
 refusal from him no more shocked you, than the easy compliance of
 Charles gave you in reality any pleasure; you got over the paltry
 question as quickly as you could, to get back to the region of pure
 comedy, where no cold moral reigns. The highly artificial manner of
 Palmer in this character counteracted every disagreeable impression
 which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them
 real, between the two brothers. (137-38)

Not surprisingly, Lamb long ago found the Slanderers much more amusing than the Teazles, as he recalls that "delicious scene that gives the play its name and its zest" (139). Lamb, in short, luxuriates in the pleasure of comedy rather than its morality, and is consistent in finding more pleasure in well-expressed meanness than in earnest kindness. His pleasure in Palmer's acting a sly, manipulative, and wily Joseph is entirely separated from any moral judgment concerning the character's conduct. Joseph and the other slanderers are simply deliciously wicked, as if they (and Lamb) take pleasure or "zest" from energetic and skillful invention. Despite the previous success of sentimental drama, the first audiences must have delighted in exposure and humiliation, for they very plainly loved the Screen Scene. For Lamb, as well as for Sheridan, the spectacle of suffering innocence has no place in comedy except, perhaps, as parody.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

NOTES

(1) Christian Deelman, "The Original Cast of The School for Scandal" Review of English Studies 13 (1962): 257-66.

(2) See, for example, J. R. de J. Jackson, "The Importance of Witty Dialogue in The School for Scandal," Modern Language Notes 76 (1961): 601-07, or Andrew Schiller," The School for Scandal: The Restoration Unrestored," PMLA 71 (1956): 694-704.

(3) J. Douglas Canfield, ed., The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama (Peterborough: Broadview, 2001).

(4) Oliver Goldsmith, "Essay On The Theatre; Or, A Comparison Between Laughing And Sentimental Comedy," quoted in British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan, ed. George Nettleton (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 751.

(5) Ronald Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 266. Compare the popular versions of Sheridan from the Encyclopedia Britanica online: "His plays, notably The School for Scandal (1777), form a link in the history of the comedy of manners between the end of the 17th century and Oscar Wilde in the 19th century" (http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9067314/ Richard-Brinsley-Sheridan; accessed 1 December 2007); and Wikipedia: "His most famous play The School for Scandal (1777) is considered one of the greatest comedies of manners in English" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sheridan; accessed 1 December 2007).

(6) Despite an extraordinary leap in the sophistication with our present readings of sentimentality, we still have a lamentable tendency to assume that, as in our own historical formation, authenticity inevitably trumps irony and satire, despite the example of Sterne and Mackenzie where satire and sentiment lie comfortably side by side in the same text.

(7) Mark S. Auburn, Sheridan's Comedies: Their Context and Achievements (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 105-48.

(8) John Loftis, Sheridan and the Drama of Georgian England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 85-102.

(9) On Congreve's print revisions, see Julie Stone Peters, Congreve, the Drama, and the Printed Word (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

(10) Jack Durant similarly argues that complexity is essentially vicious and honest simplicity essentially virtuous. Jack D. Durant, "The Moral Focus of The School for Scandal" South Atlantic Bulletin 37 (1972): 44-53.

(11) James Morwood, The Life and Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), 76, 79.

(12) Eric Rump, "Sheridan, Congreve, and The School for Scandal" in Sheridan Studies, ed. James Morwood and David Crane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 58.

(13) Richard Brinsely Sheridan, The School for Scandal and Other Plays, ed. Eric Rump (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 1.1. All citations of this play refer to this edition and are here-after cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number.

(14) See John M. Picker, "Disturbing Surfaces: Representations of the Fragments in The School for Scandal" ELH 65 (1998): 637 52.

(15) Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Bantam Books, 1958), 1.2.18-26.

(16) Jonathan Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth-Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

(17) Charles Lamb, "On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century," quoted in Sheridan's Comedies, A Casebook, ed. Peter Davison (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1986), 137.