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

day to this it has never ceased to hold a first place among acting plays. It became at once the standard by which other successful plays were to be measured. Comedies were announced as “equal to the School for Scandal, or to any play of the century, the School for Scandal not excepted.” This sort of “odorous comparison” continued to obtain for many years, and when some indiscreet admirer likened Mrs. Mowatt’s Fashion to Sheridan’s comedy, Poe took occasion to point out that the general tone of Fashion was adopted from the School for Scandal, to which, however, it bore, he said, just such affinity as the shell of the locust to the locust that tenants it, “as the spectrum of a Congreve rocket to the Congreve rocket itself.” It does not, however, need a cruel critic to show us how unfair it was to compare Mrs. Mowatt’s pretty but pretentious play with the Congreve rockets and the Congreve wit of Sheridan’s masterpiece. That the School for Scandal was the favourite play of Washington, who was fond of the theatre, has been recorded by Mrs. Whitelock (the sister of Sarah Siddons and of John Kemble, and for a time the leading tragic actress of America). And in one point in particular are these last-century performances in this country of especial interest to the student of American dramatic literature. On April 16, 1786, was first acted in this city the Contrast, a comedy in five acts, by Royal Tyler, afterward Chief Justice of Vermont. It was the first American play performed on the public stage by professional comedians. It contained in Jonathan, acted by Wignell, the first of stage Yankees, and the precursor, therefore, of Asa Trenchard, Colonel Mulberry Sellers, and Judge Bardwell Slote. Perhaps a short extract from the play, which was published in 1790, will show its connection with the School for Scandal. Jonathan, green and innocent, and holding the theatre to be the “devil’s drawing room,” gets into it, however, in the belief that he is going to see a conjurer:⁠— Jenny Did you see the man with his tricks? Jonathon Why, I vow, as I was looking out for him, they lifted up a great green cloth and let us look right into the next neighbour’s house. Have you a good many houses in New York made in that ’ere way? Jenny Not many. But did you see the family? Jonathon Yes, swamp it, I seed the family. Jenny Well, and how did you like them? Jonathon Well, I vow, they were pretty much like other families; there was a poor, good-natured curse of a husband, and a sad rantipole of a wife. Jenny But did you see no other folks? Jonathon Yes; there was one youngster, they called him Mr. Joseph; he talked as sober and as pious as a minister; but, like some ministers that I know, he was a sly tike in his heart, for all that; he was going to ask a young woman to spark it with him, and⁠—the Lord have mercy on my soul⁠—she was another man’s wife!

It was in America also that two of the most noteworthy incidents in the career of the School for Scandal occurred. One took place during a visit to this country of Macready, who, early accustomed to enact the heavy villains of the stage, took a fancy to the part of Joseph, and, not finding it as prominent as he liked, sought to rectify this defect by boldly cutting down the other characters; and thus with the excision of the scandal-scene, the picturescene, and several other scenes, the School for Scandal, reduced to three acts, was played as an afterpiece, with Macready, very imperfect in the words of the part, as Joseph, dressed in the black coat and trousers of the nineteenth century. It may be remembered that Macready’s greater predecessor as the chief of English tragedians, John Philip Kemble, was also wont to act in the School for Scandal; but he chose to appear as the more jovial and younger of the Surfaces, and his performance of the careless hero was known as “Charles’s Martyrdom.”

The second noteworthy incident was the performance of the School for Scandal, on the centenary of its first production, on May 8, 1877, at the Grand Opera House, Toronto, in the presence of the Governor General of Canada, Lord Dufferin, the greatgrandson of the author.

In the same year that this memorable performance took place in a former French province, Miss Genevieve Ward, an American actress, appeared as Lady Teazle in Paris in a French version; and the foremost of Parisian dramatic critics, Francisque Sarcey seized the opportunity for a most interesting appreciation of the play. He considered it one of the best of the second class, and, as in his view the first class would contain few plays but those of Shakespeare and Molière, this is high praise. He ranked the School for Scandal with the Mariage de Figaro, and instituted the comparison of Sheridan with Beaumarchais, which Taine had already attempted. But Sarcey held a more just as well as a more favourable opinion of the School for Scandal than Taine. An earlier French critic, Villemain, who edited a close translation of the play for the series of foreign masterpieces, declared it to be one of the most amusing and most wittily-comic plays which can anywhere be seen, and he hit upon one of its undoubted merits when he pointed out that its “wit is so radically comic that it can be translated, which, as all know, is the most perilous trial for wit possible.” Sarcey informed us that the School for Scandal is now and has been for years, used as a textbook in French schools, and that he himself was taught to read English out of Sheridan’s play. Such was also the opinion of M. Hégésippe Cler, who published a French translation of the School for Scandal in