The School for Scandal - Richard Brinsley Sheridan (reading strategies book txt) 📗

To the audience.

You can, indeed, each anxious fear remove,
For even Scandal dies, if you approve.

By Mr. Colman

Spoken by Lady Teazle

I, who was late so volatile and gay,
Like a trade-wind must now blow all one way,
Bend all my cares, my studies, and my vows,
To one dull rusty weathercock⁠—my spouse!
So wills our virtuous bard⁠—the motley Bayes29
Of crying epilogues and laughing plays!
Old bachelors, who marry smart young wives,
Learn from our play to regulate your lives:
Each bring his dear to town, all faults upon her⁠—
London will prove the very source of honour.
Plunged fairly in, like a cold bath it serves,
When principles relax, to brace the nerves:
Such is my case; and yet I must deplore
That the gay dream of dissipation’s o’er.
And say, ye fair! was ever lively wife,
Born with a genius for the highest life,
Like me untimely blasted in her bloom,
Like me condemn’d to such a dismal doom?
Save money⁠—when I just knew how to waste it!
Leave London⁠—just as I began to taste it!
Must I then watch the early crowing cock,
The melancholy ticking of a clock;
In a lone rustic hall forever pounded,
With dogs, cats, rats, and squalling brats surrounded?
With humble curate can I now retire,
(While good Sir Peter boozes with the squire,)
And at backgammon mortify my soul,
That pants for loo, or flutters at a vole?
Seven’s the main! Dear sound that must expire,
Lost at hot cockles round a Christmas fire;
The transient hour of fashion too soon spent,
Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content!
Farewell the plumed head, the cushion’d tête,
That takes the cushion from its proper seat!
That spirit-stirring drum!⁠—card drums I mean,
Spadille⁠—odd trick⁠—pam⁠—basto⁠—king and queen!30
And you, ye knockers, that, with brazen throat,
The welcome visitors’ approach denote;
Farewell all quality of high renown,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious town!
Farewell! your revels I partake no more,
And Lady Teazle’s occupation’s o’er!
All this I told our bard; he smiled, and said ’twas clear,
I ought to play deep tragedy next year.
Meanwhile he drew wise morals from his play,
And in these solemn periods stalk’d away:⁠—
“Bless’d were the fair like you; her faults who stopp’d,
And closed her follies when the curtain dropp’d!
No more in vice or error to engage,
Or play the fool at large on life’s great stage.”

In the original draft of this scene, now in the possession of the Sheridans of Frampton Court, Dorchester, the person with whom Lady Sneerwell is conversing is a Miss Verjuice, and it is only later in the scene, after the entrance of Joseph Surface, that we find a reference to “Snake, the Scribbler.” In revising the scene, Sheridan found that one character might suffice for the minor dirty work of the plot; and to this character he gave the dialogue of Miss Verjuice and the name of Snake. The name Sneerwell is to be found in Fielding’s Pasquin. ↩

In A Journey to Bath, an unacted comedy by Mrs. Frances Sheridan, three acts of which are preserved in the British Museum (MS. 25, 975), there is a Mrs. Surface, “one who keeps a lodging-house at Bath.” She is no relation to either of the Surfaces in the School for Scandal; yet it may be worth noting that she is a scandalmonger who hates scandal. See Mr. W. Fraser Rae’s edition of Sheridan’s Plays as He Wrote Them (London: Nutt, 1902). A Journey to Bath is also included. ↩

Rowley is one of the many faithful stewards, frequent in comedy. Perhaps the first of them was Trusty in Steele’s Funeral. ↩

In 1777, when Sheridan wrote, only people of the highest position and fashion made their footmen powder their hair; so Sir Peter is here reproaching Lady Teazle with her exalted ambitions. ↩

Professor Ward, in his History of English Dramatic Literature, draws attention to a parallel passage in Fletcher’s Noble Gentleman (Act II., Scene I.), in which Marine threatens to take his fashionable wife home again:

“Make you ready straight,
And in that gown which you first came to town in,
Your safe-cloak, and your hood suitable,
Thus on a double gelding shall you amble,
And my man Jaques shall be set before you.”

↩

It seems as though John G. Saxe may have remembered this speech of Sir Peter’s when he wrote his epigram, “Too Candid by half”:

“As Tom and his wife were discoursing one day
Of their several faults, in a bantering way,
Said she: ‘Though my wit you disparage,
I’m sure, my dear husband, our friends will attest
This much, at the least, that my judgment is best.’
Quoth Tom: ‘So they said at our marriage!’ ”

↩

The reading of this epigram by Sir Benjamin Backbite is perhaps another of Sheridan’s reminiscences of Molière; at least there is a situation not unlike it in the Precieuses Ridicules, in the Femmes Savantes, and in the Misanthrope. In the final quarter of the eighteenth century, there arose a species of dandy called the macaroni, much as in the final quarter of the nineteenth century there arose a variety called the dude.

“The Italians are extremely fond of a dish they call macaroni, composed of a kind of paste; and, as they consider this the summum bonuni of all good eating, so they figuratively call everything they think elegant and uncommon macaroni. Our young travellers, who generally catch the follies of the countries they visit, judged that the title of macaroni was applicable to a clever fellow; and, accordingly, to distinguish themselves as such, they instituted a club under this denomination, the members of which were supposed to be the standards of taste. They make a most ridiculous figure, with hats of an inch in the brim, that do not cover, but lie upon, the head; with about two pounds of fictitious hair, formed into