The Story Archive

The School for Scandal

Richard Brinsley Sheridan · 1777 CE · Play · English · Enlightenment

A London circle that manufactures reputations for sport goes to work on the two Surface brothers — the sober one everybody praises, the spendthrift everybody has written off — while their rich uncle comes back from India unannounced and tests each of them in disguise. Sheridan stages the whole moral argument in a single room, where a screen, a picture auction and a wife's silence do the work of the plot. The last great comedy of manners in English, and still the most reliably revived.

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Attributes

Genre
ComedySatire
Theme
Appearance vs RealityBetrayalWealth & GreedVanity & Beauty
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
TricksterAnti-Hero
Plot structure
Comic ResolutionMistaken Identity
Symbol / motif
The MaskThe PortraitThe Screen
Conflict
vs Societyvs Person
Mode / tone
ComicSatiricalIronic
Culture / tradition
English

Closest analogues