School for Scandal, Image is Everything

Richard SheridanRichard Sheridan

School for Scandal, which I’m currently teaching, was reportedly George Washington’s favorite play. It remains relevant today. For one thing, it gets at problems with our “image is everything” society.

Here’s the plot. Joseph passes himself off as a “man of sentiment” but in actuality is a cunning villain. He has his eyes on the young Maria although he doesn’t mind seducing Mrs. Teazle at the same time. Teazle’s husband is taken in by Joseph and also is critical of Joseph’s brother Charles, an irresponsible but good-natured spendthrift who has captured the heart of Maria. The “school for scandal” is a club whose goal is to dig up and propagate malicious gossip. For instance, it speaks with admiration of a Mrs. Clackit who

“has been the cause of six matches being broken off, and three sons being disinherited of four forced elopements, as many close confinements, nine separate maintenances, and two divorces;–nay, I have more than once traced her causing a Tete-a-Tete in the Town and Country Magazine, when the parties perhaps had never seen each other’s faces before in the course of their lives.”

Accomplished as she is, however, Mrs. Clackit is a bit crude and lacks “that delicacy of hint, and mellowness of sneer” that distinguishes the play’s female villain, Lady Sneerwell. Sneerwell has her eyes set on Charles.

The play goes on to become wonderfully tangled and very funny, with characters pretending to be persons they are not and hiding in closets and behind screens to overhear conversations. No surface is to be believed, and truth is only got at through roundabout ways.

Joseph and the scandal school are opposite sides of the same coin: he tries to maintain a surface while they try to penetrate surfaces, but both are motivated by malicious intent. Their club threatens to corrupt Lady Teazle while he tries to seduce her.

Fortunately, genuine sentiment wins out in the end. Lady Teazle and her husband develop mutual respect, Charles reveals that young people are more grateful than their elders believe, and true loves wins out. But it’s a close call.

The play translates to modern times almost too easily. On the one hand, we have our own non-stop school for scandal, as is clear to anyone looking at the magazines in a checkout line. We assume every star, every public figure, is hiding some scandal and eagerly seek it out.

Maybe we do so in part because the our society is becoming ever more sophisticated in constructing surfaces. Individuals, products, even countries hire public relations firms to create images for them. Oil companies and agribusinesses advertise on National Public Television (note how shrewd a venue that is for them) about how they have “gone green” or are “saving the world.” Politicians craft seemingly impromptu moments of genuine feeling. They are the 21st century’s versions of Sheridan’s “man of sentiment.”

So, can we listen behind closed doors to hear the real story? Can we assume disguises and catch a villain in a lie? Or is the idea that the truth will emerge and route the hypocrites a remnant of an earlier age and a simpler society? Today it seems that, once a company or individual are exposed, they metamorphose and return to business as unusual in short order.

I worry that my love of School for Scandal reflects a naïve belief that gratitude and decency and love will win out in the end. Fortunately, those qualities are valued in our culture, even though one wouldn’t always know it by watching the news. The play just reminds us that Joseph Surfaces lurk all around us and we must be on the lookout.

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