The School for Scandal, Sir Peter and Lady Teazle have hardly had fair attention. Mr. Sanders has, indeed, suggested a certain similarity between Joseph Surface's relations with Lady Teazle and Maria and Maskwell's relations with Lady Touchwood and Cynthia in Congreve's The Double-Dealer. Since, however, Maskwell has already wronged Lady Touchwood's honor prior to the commencement of the play,1 since Maskwell has already "lost all appetite to her," 2 and since Lady Touchwood herself arranges a further assignation which the reluctant Maskwell takes care to have interrupted by her nephew, Sheridan's immediate debt in this instance can scarcely be deemed excessive. If Restoration Comedy must be made to furnish the original for the Lady Teazle-Sir Peter plot, the suggestion may be ventured that the same situation, in Wycherley's indescribably brutal hands, may be found in the Mr. and Mrs. Pinchwife of The Country Wife. Both Lady Teazle and Mrs. Pinchwife are launched into the same sea of fashionable intrigue, and Lady Teazle is rescued at the verge of the maelstrom which almost inevitably engulfs the Restoration heroine. Whatever specific borrowings or imitations may be alleged against The School for Scandal, its indebtedness to originals has frequently been grossly exaggerated. There is no reason to doubt the answer made by Miss Lefanu, Sheridan's niece, to Dr. Watkins's charges: "The whole story of the supposed manner in which the play of The School for Scandal came into Mr. Sheridan's hands is perfectly groundless, the writer of these lines having frequently heard him speak on the subject long before the play appeared; many of the characters and incidents related to persons known to them both, and were laughingly talked over with his family." To the same effect Sheridan's father has been quoted as 2 See Ibid., iii,1. 1 See Congreve's The Double-Dealer, i, 3. 3 Alicia Lefanu, Memoirs of Mrs. Frances Sheridan (1824), p. 409. saying, by no means graciously, "Talk of the merit of Dick's comedy, there's nothing in it. He had but to dip the pencil in his own heart, and he'd find there the characters both of Joseph and Charles." 1 Final proof that, in a broad sense, The School for Scandal is essentially original, is furnished by study of the circumstances of its composition. 2. THE COMPOSITION OF THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL Sheridan's first crude sketch, headed THE SLanderers.. A Pump Room Scene, renders most probable the contention that, like The Rivals, The School for Scandal grew out of Sheridan's own knowledge of fashionable Bath. The final transfer of the scene of action from the Pump-Room to the fashionable drawing-rooms of London was merely a change from the miniature world of fashion to the broader setting of its London original. From the first rough hints, jotted down under the title The Slanderers, to the finished comedy, The School for Scandal, is a study in literary evolution traced by Moore in more than a score of pages. Briefly summarized, it is the story of the gradual welding together of two plots - one centering in a group of scandalmongers, the other in an old husband and a young country wife, already plunged in a matrimonial slough of despond. In the former appear Lady Sneerwell, Mrs. Candour, Sir Benjamin Backbite, Maria, and Clerimont (the rough-hewn model of Charles Surface); in the latter, Old Teazle, Mrs. Teazle, Plausible and Captain Harry Plausible (the Surface brothers), and Maria. Side by side with the hammering of the rude ore of dialogue into finely tempered points of sparkling wit went corresponding refinement in the molding of the dramatis personae. Solomon Teazle and his 1 Sanders, Life of Sheridan, pp. 79-80. wife were advanced from the world of London tradesmen to the dignity of rank and title. Less significant, perhaps, but even more indicative of painstaking, were the successive changes by which Clerimont, Florival, Captain Harry Plausible, Harry Pliant or Pliable, young Harrier, and Frank, became ultimately Charles Surface, while through Plausible, Pliable, Young Pliant, and Tom was evolved Joseph Surface. Revision of names and dialogue extended a so to minor characters Spunge became Trip, Spatter became eventually Snake. Even brief summary of Moore's details, then, shows that, contrary to popular impression, Sheridan was by no means a genius who never blotted a line. Moore has made much,1 and others have made still more, of evidences of haste in the composition of the last five scenes of the play. Fraser Rae, with the heavy hand of fact, has crushed certain airy fabrications, by quoting2 from one of Sheridan's speeches proof that the play was refused a license on the night before its first production evidence that, in some form, it must have been completed for submission to the examiner of plays. The license, withheld at first on the charge that Moses was intended as a satire on Hopkins, the "Court candidate" for the office of City Chamberlain, was finally readily granted to Sheridan by the Lord Chamberlain. The circumstances, therefore, of the composition of The School for Scandal, though disproving the theory that Sheridan struck off his masterpiece at a blow, furnish perhaps equally effective proof of the essential originality of Sheridan's work. Whatever reminiscences of previous authors may have helped him at times in molding plot or refining dialogue, the fact is indisputable that, whether in crude ore or in finished product, The School for Scandal bears always the hallmark of Sheridan. 1 Life of Sheridan, I, 241–2. 2 Sheridan, I, 320. THE CRITIC 1. SHERIDAN'S JUPITER, A FORERUNNER OF THE CRITIC Thorough investigation of the sources of The Critic demands, as a preliminary, some knowledge of Sheridan's earlier burlesque, Jupiter. The general framework of both plays Sheridan derived from The Rehearsal (1671), still a favorite farce in Sheridan's early days, with Garrick in the part of Bayes. The real history of Sheridan's indebtedness begins, then, not with The Critic itself, but with Jupiter. In 1770, Nathaniel Halhed, a Harrow school-friend of Sheridan, submitted to him for criticism and alteration for the stage a farce called Ixion. Sheridan renamed it Jupiter, and recast it largely in the form of a mock rehearsal modeled after The Rehearsal. A sentence from one of Halhed's letters to Sheridan is significant: "I hope you will keep your plan of a rehearsal- it is a very good one, but I can give you no hints." Moore, who saw the manuscript of Jupiter as altered by Sheridan, gives extracts enough to prove his assertion that "in the character of Simile the reader will at once discover a sort of dim and shadowy pre-existence of Puff." He might have added that Simile's companions, who question his dramatic methods before the rehearsal and later interrupt the progress of the play with queries, foreshadow Dangle and Sneer. Jupiter failed to secure a hearing, but it evidently fixed in Sheridan's mind the dramatic possibilities of its general framework. Since Halhed's Ixion was a farce dealing with Ixion's attempted intrigue with Juno in the heavens, while Jupiter, disguised as Amphitryon, makes love to the latter's wife on earth, it bears no relation to Puff's tragedy in The Critic. Brief 1 Fraser Rae, Sheridan, I, 100. 2 Life of Sheridan, I, 18-22. quotation, however, from Sheridan's setting of Ixion in the form of a stage-rehearsal shows strikingly how Jupiter anticipates The Critic in general framework: SIMILE. Sir, you are very ignorant on the subject, — it is the method most in vogue. O'CUL. What! to make the music first, and then make the sense to it afterwards! SIM. Just so. MONOP. What Mr. Simile says is very true, gentlemen; and there is nothing surprising in it, if we consider now the general method of writing plays to scenes. O'CUL. Writing plays to scenes! — Oh, you are joking. MONOP. Not I, upon my word. Mr. Simile knows that I have frequently a complete set of scenes from Italy, and then I have nothing to do but to get some ingenious hand to write a play to them. SIM. I am your witness, sir. Gentlemen, you perceive you know nothing about these matters. SIM. Now for it. Draw up the curtain, and (looking at his book) enter Sir Richard Ixion, zounds, Sir Richard ought - but stay, but, never mind to over-hear Jupiter and his wife quarrelling, these accidents have spoiled the division of my piece. — So enter, Sir Richard, and look as cunning as if you had overheard them. Now for it, gentlemen, you can't be too attentive. Sir Richard Ixion then enters, and after a speech of half a dozen couplets retires. MACD. But pray, Mr. Simile, how did Ixion get into heaven? SIM. Why, sir, what's that to anybody? - perhaps by Salmoneus's Brazen Bridge, or the Giant's Mountain, or the Tower of Babel, or on Theobald's bull-dogs, or who the devil cares how? - he is there, and that's enough. |