The Columbia Manuscript of

The School for Scandal

CECIL PRICE

'HEN the great authority on Sheridan's work, the
late George H. Nettleton of Yale, produced with
A. E. Case British Dramatists from Dry den to
Sheridmz (Harrap, 1939), he noted that The School for Scandal
presented "more formidable textual and biographical problems
than any other drama" in the volume.

The reason for this set of difficulties is to be found in the char¬
acter of Sheridan himself. It is typical of him that he should declare
"what I write in a hurry I always feel not to be worth reading,
and what I try to take pains with, I am sure never to finish". The
early drafts of The School for Scandal have all the appearance of
hurried work; and even when Sheridair took pains to fill out the
play, the numerous alterations, deletions and improvements gave
the manuscript a strangely unfinished look. Then it was copied
out by the prompter's office at Drury Lane Theatre, submitted to
the Lord Chamberlain, and given its first performance on 8 May,

1777-

Sheridan liked to go on tinkering with a text. The most obvious
improvement he ever made was to The Rivals, and one has only to
compare the Larpent version with the standard text to see how
much the play gained when the dramatist recast it in the fight of its
first performance and the attendant criticism. He never altered
The School for Scandal in such drastic fashion, but extant manu¬
scripts show that he did make minor emendations to its text. Late
in the eighteenth century, he told Ridgway, the publisher, that he
had been nineteen years trying to satisfy his own taste in the play,
and still had not succeeded. Ridgway declared that after hearing
this reply, he teased Sheridan no more for a corrected copy.

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