A COMEDY
A PORTRAIT
First staged at the Drury Lane Theatre on 8 May 1777, The School for Scandal received an enthusiastic welcome from audiences, though it only initially ran for twenty performances in its first season. However, it returned the following season for more than forty performances and by the end of the eighteenth century it had been staged more than two hundred times. The play was well received by critics, as they celebrated the wit and morals of the work. The essayist and critic, William Hazlitt, was effusive in his praise, describing it ‘the most finished and faultless comedy we have’ and stating that, ‘It professes a faith in the natural goodness as well as habitual depravity of human nature’. Similarly impressed was the late nineteenth century poet and critic, Edmund Gosse, who commented in A History of Eighteenth Century Literature that it was ‘perhaps the best existing English comedy of intrigue’.
Sheridan’s most famous play, The School for Scandal is considered one of the greatest comedies of manners in English literature. The drama opens with Lady Sneerwell plotting to break up the romance between Charles Surface and Maria. She is going to disseminate vicious gossip in order to achieve her goal and she is aided in her scheme by Joseph Surface, who wishes to marry Maria. Sir Peter, Maria’s guardian, is an older gentleman who worries over his much younger wife’s extravagant lifestyle and Sir Oliver is a wealthy man that returns to London to determine which of his nephews, Charles or Joseph, is most worthy of inheriting his fortune.