The School for Scandal

Endnotes

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.”

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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!’ ”

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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 what is called a club, hanging down their shoulders, as white as a baker’s sack” (Pocketbook, 1773, quoted in Mr. T. L. O. Davies’s “Supplementary Glossary”). The name of the macaroni is also preserved in the first stanza of our “Yankee Doodle,” which is almost contemporaneous with Sheridan’s play. ↩
Moore noted the resemblance of this aside to Pope’s line, in the “Rape of the Lock”:⁠—

“At every word, a reputation dies.”

This scandal scene of Sheridan’s had predecessors in the comedies of Congreve and of Wycherley, not to go back as far as the Misanthrope of Molière. Hard and cruel as Sheridan’s scene now seems to us, it is gentle indeed when contrasted with the cudgel-play of Congreve and Wycherley. It is possible that Sheridan owed some of his comparative suavity to the example of Addison, who contributed to No. 17 of the Spectator, a “Fine Lady’s Journal,” in which there is a passage of tittle-tattle more like Sheridan than Wycherley or Congreve. ↩
Geneste, in his History of the English Stage, draws attention to a parallel passage in the Trinummus of Plautus, and suggests that it would furnish a very pat motto for this play:

“Quod si exquiratur usque ab stirpe auctoritas,
Unde quicquid auditum dicant, nisi id appareat.
Famigeratori res sit cum damno et malo:
Hoc ita si fiat, publico fiat bono.
Pauci sint faxim, qui sciant quod nesciunt;
Occlusioremque habeant stultiloquentiam.”

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In 1777 a committee of the House of Commons was appointed to inquire into the laws concerning usury and annuities; and on its report in May, the month in which this play was first acted, a bill was brought in and passed, providing that all contracts with minors for annuities shall be void, and that those procuring them and solicitors charging more than ten shillings per cent shall be subject to fine or imprisonment. ↩
The traditional business of the scene is for Sir Peter and Lady Teazle here to take each other by the hand and to repeat, in unison, “Never! never! never!” ↩
In the original draft of the several scenes which Sheridan finally combined into the School for Scandal, this phrase, “bags and bouquets,” was said to Sir Peter as he was complaining of Lady Teazle’s extravagances. This utilization at last of a phrase at first rejected elsewhere is highly characteristic of Sheridan. ↩
Sheridan has been accused, justly enough, of making his servants talk as their masters; but this is an old failing of writers of comedy, although few of them would have risked this accurate use of the legal phraseology which Sheridan at all times affected. But there is in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (Act III., Scene II.) a speech of Knowell’s servant, Brainworm, in which we find the very same technical term as we have in the text: “This smoky varnish being washed off, and three or four patches removed, I appear your worship’s [servant] in reversion, after the decease of your good father, Brainworm.” Sheridan’s Trip and Fag recall the amusing personages of High Life Below Stairs, suggested by a paper of Steele’s, “On Servants,” in the Spectator, No. 88. ↩
It has been asserted (in Notes and Queries, 5th S., ii., 245, and elsewhere) that Sheridan derived this song from a ballad in Suckling’s play, the Goblins; but a careful comparison of the two songs shows that there is really no foundation for the charge. The music to Sheridan’s song was composed by his father-in-law, Thomas Linley, who had been his partner in The Duenna. ↩
In Foote’s Minor, there is a spendthrift son, whose father visits him in disguise to test him; and in Foote’s Arthur, a father returns in disguise, and, to his great delight, hears his son disclose the most admirable sentiments; but there is no real likeness between either of Foote’s scenes and this of Sheridan’s, the real original of which is perhaps to be found in his mother’s Sidney Biddulph, in which an East Indian uncle returns to test a nephew and a niece. Yet there is possibly a slight resemblance between “little Premium the broker,” and “little Transfer, the broker,” in the Minor. ↩
An erring tradition authorizes Moses to interpolate freely and frequently throughout the rest of the scene a more or less meaningless “I’ll take my oath of that.” As the part of Moses is generally taken by the low comedian who also appears as Tony Lumpkin, this gag may be a reminiscence of the comic scene in She Stoops to Conquer, in which Tony offers to swear to his mother’s assertion that Miss Hardcastle’s jewels have been stolen. ↩
The absurdity of an auction with only one bidder has been commented upon often, but surely Sheridan never intended the auction to be taken seriously. The pretence of an auction is surely a freak of Charles’s humour and high spirits. ↩
The School for Scandal was one of the plays performed by the English actors on their famous visit to Paris in 1827⁠—a visit which revealed the might and range of the English drama to the French and thereby served to make possible the Romanticist revolt of 1830. Victor Hugo was an assiduous follower of the English performances; and it may be that this scene of the School for Scandal suggested to him the scene with the portraits in Hernani. ↩
In a note to an anonymous pamphlet biographical sketch of Sheridan, published in 1799, there is quoted a remark of a lady which is not without point and pertinency: “Mr. Sheridan is a fool if he pays a bill (of which, by the by, he is not accused) of one of the tradesmen who received his comedy with such thunders of applause. He ought to tell them in the words of Charles, that he could never make Justice keep pace with Generosity, and they could have no right to complain.” ↩
It has been often objected that the hiding of Lady Teazle behind the screen put her in full view of the opposite neighbour, the maiden lady of so curious a temper; but it must be remembered that it is Joseph who makes this remark and has the screen set, and it is Lady Teazle who unwittingly rushes to hide behind it. ↩
The late Abraham Hayward, in his Selected Essays (i. 400), calls this “the recast of a fine reflection in Zadig,” and quotes, in a footnote, Voltaire’s words: “Astarte est femme, elle laisse parler ses regards avec d’autant plus d’imprudence qu’elle ne se croit pas encore coupable. Malheureusement rassuree sur son innocence, elle neglige les dehors necessaires. Je tremblerai pour elle tant qu’elle n’aura rien a se reprocher.” ↩
Boaden, the biographer of Kemble, has the hyper-ingenuity to discover in the fall of the rug in Molly Seagrim’s bedroom, disclosing, the philosopher Square, in Tom Jones, the first germ of the fall of the screen in the School for Scandal. ↩
Nowadays most Sir Peters take this situation to heart as though the School for Scandal were a tragedy, but the play is a comedy, and this scene is, and is meant to be, comic, and not tragic, or even purely pathetic. It is the vanity rather than the honour of Sir Peter in which he feels the wound. If he is as deeply moved as Othello, the following speech of Charles is unspeakably heartless and brutal;⁠—and so, indeed, it is, as it is delivered by most comedians. ↩
The rupee and the pagoda were coins current in Hindustan. The rupee is of silver and is equivalent to about two shillings sterling. The pagoda was either gold or silver, and its value varied from eight to nine shillings sterling. The avadavats mentioned in an earlier speech are birds of brilliant plumage. ↩
“Segoon” is a corruption of segunde, the Spanish form of the French fencing term seconde. Mr. Walter Herries Pollock kindly gave me this information, sought elsewhere in vain. A thrust in segoon, he writes, is “a thrust delivered low, under the adversary’s blade, with the hand in the tierce position, that is, with the knuckles upwards, and the wrist turned downwards. The parry is now more frequently used than is the thrust of seconde, and is especially valuable in disarming; but the thrust is very useful in certain cases, and particularly for one form of the coup d’arret. A lunge in seconde which goes through the lung is nowadays an odd thing to hear of; but such a result might come from the blade of the man using the thrust in seconde being thrown upwards by a slip on the adversary’s blade, arm, or shirt.” ↩
The Montem was a triennial ceremony of the boys at Eton, abolished only in 1847. It consisted of a procession to a mound (ad montem) near the Bath Road, where they exacted money from those present and from all passersby. The sum collected, sometimes nearly £1,000, went to the captain or senior scholar, and served to pay his expenses at the university. There is an interesting account of the Montem in Coningsby. ↩
Tradition formerly authorized Mrs. Candour to interpolate here a query as to whether the postage had been paid or not; but this seems to be carrying the joke a little too far. ↩
In the first draft of the play this speech of Snake’s was in one of the earliest scenes. The anonymous writer of a pamphlet, “Letter to Thomas Moore, Esq., on the subject of Sheridan’s School for Scandal” (Bath, 1826), declares that “this is but boyish composition, and quite too broad even for farce. It might have been said to Snake by another, but is out of even stage-nature or stage-necessity, as coming from himself” (p. 16). ↩
Bayes was the hero of the Duke of Buckingham’s Rehearsal, and was a caricature of John Dryden. At the time this epilogue was written the Rehearsal had not yet been driven from the stage by the Critic. ↩
In the game of ombre, at its height when Pope wrote the “Rape of the Lock,” and still surviving when Colman wrote this epilogue, “Spadille” was the ace of spades, “pam” was the knave of clubs, and “basto” was the ace of clubs. ↩