At its heart, The School for Scandal is a satirical comedy. Sheridan’s play humorously holds a mirror up to the audience, ridiculing his contemporary society’s fixation on status, wealth, hierarchy, and social posturing. In particular, this play is a satire of ridicule itself—a satire of the very act of gossip. Throughout the play, Sheridan asks his audience to consider where the line might exist between harmless fun and cruelty. The issue of whether gossip can ever be neutral is repeatedly questioned, as Sheridan explores a range of different types of rumors. For example, Mrs. Candour poking fun at Miss Vermillion and Lady Sneerwell’s self-serving manipulation of the gossip mill exist along a spectrum of severity that invites spectators to examine the instinct behind their impulse towards wit.
Sheridan’s satire works in part because he is so good at mapping out the ridiculous lifespan of rumors. Take the following passage from the very first scene of the play, in which Mr. Crabtree, with hilarious and extreme detail, recounts the unfortunate love life of a neighbor. In his story, a young woman mentions that Miss Letitia Piper had a sheep that gave birth to twins, and then he outlines a misunderstanding that followed from this anecdote:
“What!” cries the Lady Dowager Dundizzy (who you know is as deaf as a post), “has Miss Piper had twins?”—This mistake, as you may imagine, threw the whole company into a fit of laughter. However, ’twas the next morning everywhere reported, and in a few days believed by the whole town, that Miss Letitia Piper had actually been brought to bed of a fine boy and a girl; and in less than a week there were some people who could name the father, and the farmhouse where the babies were put to nurse.
The out-of-control spiral effect of rumors that Crabtree describes in this quote is later replicated during Act 5, Scene 2, when he and the other gossips become so spun up in their own frenzy that they invent a fictitious duel between Sir Peter and one of the Surface brothers.
At the same time, however, it should be noted that some of the joke of the play seems to be on the more benign and innocent-seeming characters (i.e. Maria and the Teazles). For example, later in that same conversation with Crabtree in Act 1, Scene 1, Maria is so scandalized by the gossips that she flees the room, lamenting that “their malice is intolerable.” Her obvious goodness is not nearly as entertaining as the sheer spectacle of the gossip she abhors—even if she is right, her time on stage is dry and dull by comparison. Thus, she and the other innocents become almost insufferable in their commitment to propriety and are thereby transformed into caricatures, parodies of those who overly moralize. In this way, Sheridan’s play satirizes both the gossips and the innocents, exposing the hypocrisy of all.
