The School for Scandal
[SHERIDAN, Richard Brinsley.]
The School for Scandal. A Comedy. As it is acted at the Theatre, Smoke-Alley, Dublin. [Dublin], Printed for the Booksellers, 1793.
8vo in 4s, pp. 123, [5 (blanks and epilogue)], with two plates, both here bound before the title-page but often at pp. 73 and 93 where they refer to the text; slight offset to title; else a very good copy in modern marbled boards.
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The School for Scandal. A Comedy. As it is acted at the Theatre, Smoke-Alley, Dublin.
First separate illustrated edition of Sheridan’s highly popular The School for Scandal, which has ‘amused audiences from [its] early, immensely successful performances up to the present day, for Sheridan is one of the great comic writers in English’ (ODNB).
William Hazlitt called it ‘if not the most original, perhaps the most finished and faultless comedy which we have … The scene in which Charles sells all the old family pictures but his uncle’s, who is the purchaser in disguise, and that of the discovery of Lady Teazle when the screen falls, are among the happiest and most highly wrought that comedy, in its wide and brilliant range, can boast’ (Lectures on the English Poets and the English Comic Writers (1870), p. 227). The School for Scandal enjoyed enduring popularity: Jane Austen had played the part of Mrs Candour in a private production in 1812, John Gielgud played Charles Surface in 1937 and directed a Broadway production in 1963, and Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh played Sir Peter and Lady Teazle at the New Theatre.
The plates, newly engraved, are based on plates in A Volume of Plays [by Sheridan and others] performed at the Theatre, Smoke-Alley, Dublin, 1785 and following. They illustrate Act IV, Scene 1 (the Surface family portraits) and Act IV, Scene 2 (the screen scene). The London cast-list here prints ‘Sir Toby Bumber’ correctly; a variant reads ‘Sir Harry Bumber’.
ESTC T60217.