48 pages • 1 hour read
Richard Brinsley SheridanThe School for Scandal
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1777A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Discrepancy Between Public Virtue and Private Vice
As a comedy of manners, The School for Scandal targets the behavior and social norms of the upper class, mocking the hypocrisy of the elites in 18th-century society. Sheridan highlights high society’s formality and superficial morals, such as half-hearted greetings, unfulfilled promises, and the air of superiority that is often undermined by hidden secrets and vices. In doing so, he explores the discrepancy between public virtue and private vice.
The characters in the play are caricatures of wealthy people who pretend to be charitable and honorable, but who are actually immoral and deceitful. This theme is best explored through the Surface brothers, Joseph and Charles, who each embody one element of Sheridan’s proposed hypocrisy. Joseph pretends to be moral while hiding his deceits; Charles, by contrast, displays his vices openly while hiding his morals instead.
Joseph’s goal in the play is to convince everyone that he is an upstanding young man who is well-suited to marry Maria. However, Joseph most clearly displays his personal sense of pretending to be moral in his seduction of Lady Teazle, in which he tells her: “What is it makes you negligent of forms, and careless of the world’s opinion? Why, the consciousness of your innocence” (428). In this moment, Joseph is trying to convince Lady Teazle that having an affair would rid her of her sense that she must maintain the appearance of malice, but he is also revealing his own method for hiding his vices. Knowing he is immoral, Joseph dedicates himself to crafting an appearance that completely hides his immorality. Since he is free of the “consciousness” of innocence, he can more fully pretend that same innocence.
Critically, this method is the same as that which Charles employs, except with the opposite aim. Charles is comfortable with his own shortcomings, much like Joseph, but instead of hiding them as Joseph does, he displays them openly. For example, Charles openly tells Premium that he is “extravagant” and a “blockhead,” adding, “Plain dealing in business I always think best” (419). Charles is thus frank and open about his business, drinking and gambling in plain sight, while also displaying his inner moral sense by refusing to sell Oliver’s portrait and sending money to Stanley.
Sheridan’s point regarding these characters is that the vices one shows to everyone often indicate an open morality, while those who emphasize their supposed morality are likely hiding immorality. Thus, in The School for Scandal, Sheridan criticizes the superficiality and hypocrisy of high society, suggesting that people are not always quite what they seem.
The Destructive Nature of Gossip and Scandal
A critical facet of Sheridan’s opposition to gossip and scandal is the material consequences of spreading rumors. In the 18th century, there was a boom of newspapers and pamphlets spreading personal information and misinformation, and for many people, their reputation was crucial to their status in society. In satirizing the characters’ scheming and backstabbing ways, Sheridan exposes the destructive nature of gossip and scandal.
When characters like Peter reference their “character” being killed, they mean a kind of social death. Discussing Miss Nicely, Candour notes, “why, to be sure, a tale of scandal is as fatal to the credit of a prudent lady of her stamp as a fever is generally to those of the strongest constitutions” (393), linking social death to physical death in terms of severity. For those in the upper classes of the 18th century, reputation meant as much as physical health and life, and gossip and scandal threatened to take that life away.
The play depicts various characters who are actively complicit in perpetuating gossip, despite the harms it brings. In an early scene, Lady Sneerwell explains her perspective when she confesses to Snake: “I am no hypocrite to deny the satisfaction I reap from the success of my efforts. Wounded myself, in the early part of my life, by the envenomed tongue of slander, I confess I have since known no pleasure equal to the reducing others to the level of my own injured reputation” (387). Prior to the events of the play, Sneerwell was a victim of scandal, but she dedicates herself to ruining the reputations of others without remorse instead of learning from her own experience. Lady Sneerwell thus represents someone who chooses to continue the harmful cycle of gossip instead of opposing it.
Lady Teazle also learns the consequences of gossiping firsthand, as Lady Sneerwell betrays her in Act IV. As Lady Teazle complains to Joseph, “my friend Lady Sneerwell has circulated I don’t know how many scandalous tales of me! and all without any foundation, too—that’s what vexes me” (428). She does not know that the reason behind Lady Sneerwell’s actions is both to destroy Lady Teazle’s reputation and to push Charles away from Maria. However, the critical element of this complaint lies in the betrayal Lady Teazle feels, not realizing that she, too, has made other people feel this way through her own gossiping. Lady Teazle is appalled by the lack of truth in the rumors she hears about herself, yet she does not consider how many rumors she has also spread without truth or reason.
By the play’s end, however, Lady Teazle has renounced her gossiping ways, urging the audience in the Epilogue to follow her example. Sheridan suggests, through Lady Teazle’s closing speech, that while gossip may appear amusing at first glance, it is better to forgo engaging in it to avoid bad consequences for oneself and others.
The Moral Conflicts of Human Nature
At the root of Sheridan’s satire is the question of whether morality is an innate part of human nature, or something consciously developed by choice. This exploration centers upon the hypocrisy of the play’s upper-class characters: While some characters seem moral or immoral by nature, like Peter and Joseph, others highlight how morality can be developed or influenced by others.
Lady Sneerwell, for example, notes how her own misfortune with gossip led to her immorality, while characters like Snake frame immorality as a mere business arrangement. Characters like Maria and Oliver appear to have an advanced intuition, which allows them to see through performances to detect the truth of someone’s morals, implying that there is a metaphysical relationship between self and morality. However, Lady Teazle’s development as a character shows how, like Lady Sneerwell’s past, morality is often a choice that one must make.
When Oliver arrives, he addresses the issue of the Surface brothers’ morals to Peter, who assures Oliver that Charles is immoral, while Joseph is moral. However, Oliver is suspicious, indicating that Charles can be extravagant and moral, while Joseph’s moral appearance could easily hide his immorality. As Oliver explains, “if he salutes me with a scrap of morality in his mouth, I shall be sick directly. But […] don’t mistake me, Sir Peter; I don’t mean to defend Charles's errors” (407). In other words, a hypocritical moral display is offensive to Oliver’s intuition, while immoral displays leave room for further investigation. In Oliver’s view, morality cannot be determined by appearances alone: Joseph’s outwardly upstanding behavior cannot be taken at face value, while Charles’s extravagance provides no clues on whether Charles is truly good or bad in his core.
Lady Teazle’s journey provides the most provoking question of human nature, as Peter relies on Lady Teazle’s country upbringing to defend his perception of her morals. In his view, the town corrupted Lady Teazle, bringing out an immoral side to her that would not have existed without Sneerwell’s influence. Though Lady Teazle admits to this corruption in the Epilogue, framing her time in town as filled with immoral “revels” (454), the town did not corrupt Lady Teazle so much as it provided an opening for her to experiment with her morality.
Once Lady Teazle’s immoral gossiping comes back to destroy her, she forsakes it, turning back to the morality she knew in the country. The play’s closing thus suggests that morality is ultimately a matter of choice, as both Lady Teazle’s renunciation of gossip and Charles’s intention of reforming his extravagant ways speak to the possibility of moral growth.
