School For Scandal Research Articles

Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820. Ed. David O’Shaughnessy.

<i>Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820</i>. Ed. David O’Shaughnessy.

Tatyana Tolstaya’s Automyth

The article analyses the character of the automyth, created by T. Tolstaya, and its dependence on the creative roles, chosen by the writer (journalist, professor, TV-presenter, blogger). Common features of the writer’s automyth and its particular components, which vary according to the chosen creative role, are revealed. As a journalist, Tatyana Tolstaya creates an image of a harsh, contemptuous writer, who expresses her opinion dogmatically. This image has a major impact on her literary reputation and remains in the following creative roles, bur becomes more variable and multiple. In the TV-program “School for Scandal” Tatyana Tolstaya appears to be, on the one side, arrogant, contemptuous and rude, and on the other side, truly concerned about her interlocutor. However, the writer is interested in daily routine and meanwhile she is concerned with questions of the world order, which subsequently will be important for her autobiographical heroine. In blogs (on Facebook and LiveJournal) the writer’s image is equally ambivalent: on the one side, she exists in everyday life, but also sees the worlds, which adjoin the ordinary reality, and interacts with them. On the other side, her image is sarcastic and openly provocative. As a professor, Tatyana Tolstaya has no orientation to negative perception, which comes naturally to this social role. The analysis concludes that the automyth construction is not only an important part of the writer’s creative strategy, but also a way to create the new prose, which is autofictional.

School for Scandal

This article examines three novels by the popular Flemish youth author Gie Laenen, written between 1975 and 1982, in which the theories and practices associated with progressive education in the 1970s are key elements of the narrative. It argues that Laenen, who was convicted in 1973 and again in 2008 of serial sexual abuse of teenage boys, used progressive education as a narrative trope both to suggest to his young readers that close attachments between young boys and adult men were harmless and to provide an exculpatory defence for his own acts. Through narratological analysis and a contextualisation of the novels within the educational culture of the time, the article shows how Laenen – by drawing upon the ideas of progressive education, using these ideas to shape his narratives, and suggesting parallels between himself (as author) and several main characters – effectively appropriated the ideals of progressive education for ulterior purposes to justify his own abusive behaviour.

Women on Southern Stages, 1800–1865: Performance, Gender and Identity in a Golden Age of American Theater by Robin O. Warren

Reviewed by: Women on Southern Stages, 1800–1865: Performance, Gender and Identity in a Golden Age of American Theater by Robin O. Warren Karin Maresh Women on Southern Stages, 1800–1865: Performance, Gender and Identity in a Golden Age of American Theater. By Robin O. Warren. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016. vii + 267 pp. $35 paper. Women on Southern Stages provides the field of theatre history with one of the few studies focused specifically on the contributions of women to southern [End Page 336] theatres in nineteenth-century America. In fact, a few of the southern stock actresses Warren examines, such as Charlotte Wrighten Placide and Mary Maury Squires Ludlow, have received scant attention by historians as anything other than the actress-wives of their theatre-managing husbands. Additionally, Warren asserts that these regional actresses, managers, and playwrights "occupied influential public roles through which they complicated gendered identity," as well as race, and "made a significant contribution to the antebellum South" (7). Women on Southern Stages is a welcome addition to the publications about early US theatre and demonstrates that a wealth of material remains in this area for historians to uncover and contextualize. Warren's eight chapters are organized by general topic, such as repertory and theatres, rather than by location or individual artist. Chapter 1, cleverly titled "The Cast," provides biographical summaries of about twenty women, most following the family business, who earned recognition during the antebellum period for their theatrical endeavors. One such example is Eliza Arnold Hopkins Poe, whose successful acting career in DC, Virginia, and Maryland began before her twentieth birthday. The future mother of Edgar Allen Poe impressed critics with her "sweetly melodious voice" (12) as Maria in Sheridan's The School for Scandal and, as was common for the period, in some twenty-five other roles. Other actresses helped establish theatres in frontier regions in the South. Julia Drake Fosdick Dean's British acting family made their way to Kentucky via Boston and Albany, New York, making them "the first professional actors to play west of Pittsburgh" (15). Warren argues that this public recognition and mobility enjoyed by Julia Dean and her sister-in-law, Frances Denny Drake, endowed them "with independence that other southern women lacked" (15). Not all the actresses included in Women on Southern Stages are as obscure, especially to scholars of feminist theatre and gender studies. Adah Isaacs Menken, aka "The Menken," is most often mentioned by historians in reference to her scandalous performances of Mazeppa in New York, but, as Warren demonstrates, Menken began her career in New Orleans and toured with a stock company in Los Angeles and Texas before rising to fame in the northern states. The inclusion of Menken is also notable because, unlike most of the women in this study, Menken created a successful career by thwarting convention on and off the stage, playing risqué roles and flouting nineteenth-century traditions of marriage. The following two chapters, "The Theaters" and "The Repertory," offer detailed descriptions, visual evidence, and summaries of the important theatre buildings and plays, respectively, connected to the women examined in the first chapter. Much of the South remained rural and focused on agriculture [End Page 337] throughout the antebellum period, but permanent theatres and acting troupes entertained audiences in the urban centers that did develop as places of commerce. Beginning with the Douglass-Hallam company's Douglass Theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia, Warren explores how the spread of repertory companies throughout the Southern states and territories resulted in the construction of permanent playhouses such as the twelve-hundred-seat Charleston Theatre, in Charleston, South Carolina, built by Thomas Wade West and Thomas Bignall in 1793. This theatre, Warren notes, "reflected the growth of theater in the early republic" (38). The plays that one would expect to see included in a study of antebellum theatre are present—Anna Cora Mowatt's Fashion, Aiken's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Guy Mannering, one of the plays included in Charlotte Cushman's repertoire—but Warren leaves no doubt that Southern actresses of the time performed in a wide variety of heroic melodramas, sensational melodramas, Shakespearean plays and adaptations, and even Confederate-themed dramas during the Civil...

School for Scandal

School for Scandal

A Transatlantic Dialogue: Affective Considerations in Sheridan's The School for Scandal and Royall Tyler's The Contrast

This essay intervenes in scholarly debates over Anglo-American performance and eighteenth-century dramatic sensibility by enacting a new reading of the dramatic relation between Royall Tyler's The Contrast (1787), as the first play of so-called ‘American Genius’, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal (1777). Prioritizing theatrical and philosophical notions of ‘promissory consideration’, comedy, and character writing, this article assesses the manner in which Tyler's Contrast achieved a new brand of affective ridicule as a stage-and-page response to Sheridan's British dramatic forms. Arguing that Tyler constructs an original Comedy of Right Feeling by means of an ‘English’ transatlantic exchange, Cook demonstrates Tyler's deft refiguring of stock types for early US comedy.

A Transatlantic Dialogue: Affective Considerations in Sheridan's &lt;em&gt;The School for Scandal&lt;/em&gt; and Royall Tyler's &lt;em&gt;The Contrast&lt;/em&gt;

A Transatlantic Dialogue: Affective Considerations in Sheridan's &lt;em&gt;The School for Scandal&lt;/em&gt; and Royall Tyler's &lt;em&gt;The Contrast&lt;/em&gt;

A Pragmatic Study of Gossip in Richard Brinsely Sheridan’s The School for Scandal

This paper is mainly concerned with investigating the pragmatic perspective of gossip, away from sociological, psychological or any other non-linguistic tackling. Hence, its major appeal is to find out the different pragmatic stages through which gossip passes. This is done by analyzing various situations taken from Sheridan’s comedy, on the basis of a model of analysis developed by the study itself to serve this very purpose. The analysis of the data has yielded that the existential presupposition represented by the proper noun is the only kind employed to engender gossip. Moreover, it has been found out that knowledge, which is to be pejoratively evaluated, is the most common function of gossip.

The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy ed. by Brian Corma

Reviewed by: The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy ed. by Brian Corma Melvyn New The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy, ed. Brian Corman. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2013. Pp. xxiv + 587. $36.95. Broadview Press published a large forty-play anthology of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, edited by Douglas Canfield, in 2002, and a “concise” twenty-play anthology, culled from the first version, in 2003, with a corrected version in 2004. Limiting his selection to comedy, Mr. Corman has produced a ten-play anthology, nine of which are taken from the earlier versions, the remaining one from Peter Sabor and Geoffrey Sill’s edition of Burney’s The Witlings (Broadview, 2002). While one suspects a purposeful manipulation of the used book market, Mr. Corman’s anthology finally has it right: no one teaches forty or even twenty plays in a semester, and if one aims at an undergraduate audience, one should put forward the age’s best face, comedy. The introduction provides a brief and coherent history of the stage from 1660 to the end of the next century, along with useful appreciative comments about each play; [End Page 116] these are then supplemented by headnotes written by each different editor for each play—Mr. Corman, for example, edited Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode, Dianne Dugaw, Beggar’s Opera. The primary achievement of this anthology, however, is the selection of plays: in addition to Dryden’s and Gay’s works, the collection includes The Country Wife, Man of Mode, The Rover, The Way of the World, The Conscious Lovers, She Stoops to Conquer, The School for Scandal, and The Witlings. The resistance to a selection conforming to present-day demands for political correctness is to be admired; one might argue, certainly, for Vanbrugh’s The Relapse and Farquhar’s Beaux’ Stratagem over Behn and Burney, but it is still gratifying to see the old masters not being too quickly replaced by Pixes and Centlivres and Trotters. This collection certainly confirms what we have long suspected: we cannot expand the canon. If Behn and Burney are included, two canonized figures must be defrocked. The texts are modernized, the footnotes primarily define words and phrases, and literary and cultural allusions that would puzzle undergraduates; they are thin. The appendix of “Critical Texts,” the defining feature of Broadview editions, rounds up the traditional suspects: pieces each by Dryden, Shadwell, Dennis, and Congreve, and, of course, excerpts from Collier’s A Short View. Less expected, perhaps, are Richardson’s comments on theater-going in his Apprentice’s Vade Mecum and Johnson’s Rambler 125. John Hill and Colley Cibber are also excerpted, and Goldsmith’s essay comparing “Laughing and Sentimental Comedy” (1773) is given in full. The common packaging of contextual materials perhaps should be examined. Teaching by excerpt leads to a belief that having read five pages of an author, one is quite knowledgeable—even poor Jeremy Collier is not so easily mastered. Melvyn New University of Florida Copyright © 2015 Roy S. Wolper, W. B. Gerard, E. Derek Taylor, and David F. Venturo

A Critical School for Scandal?

A Critical School for Scandal?

Reading Modern Drama ed. by Alan Ackerman (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Modern Drama ed. by Alan Ackerman Stefka Mihaylova Reading Modern Drama. Edited by Alan Ackerman. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012; pp. 320. Alan Ackerman’s edited collection Reading Modern Drama resumes the conversation about modern drama’s embattled status in the North American academy that Ric Knowles, Joanne Tompkins, and W. B. Worthen began nine years earlier in their coedited collection Modern Drama: Defining the Field (2003). That volume examined how globalization, interculturalism, and new approaches to performance challenged the definition of modern drama established in the 1950s. Responding to interculturalism’s call for pluralism, the editors advocated an open range of definitions coined in rigorous cross-disciplinary conversations. Conversely, Ackerman argues for a single definition—one that will give drama a unified identity without foreclosing interdisciplinary dialogue. To do so, he turns to new criticism, the method that dominated literary studies for much of the past century. Ackerman is fully aware of the controversial nature of this turn and carefully tackles the obvious counterarguments. Defining drama as literature and its medium as language, he explains, does not imply that a play has a single meaning independent from the contingency of performance. And reading drama, just like participating in performance, can be an event with important political and social consequences. In short, he argues for the benefits of re-admitting literary approaches to scholarly conversations about performance. In his view, their exclusion, caused by disciplinary struggles among English, theatre, and performance studies, impoverishes our accounts of the relationship between dramatic language and other aspects of performance. Indeed, Ackerman’s introduction is a passionate defense of close reading—new criticism’s signature procedure—which, he claims, can only deepen our understanding of the social aspects of culture, including race, gender, and class. Seven of the twelve essays in the collection, all previously published in the journal Modern Drama during Ackerman’s tenure as editor, eloquently demonstrate the uses of close reading in illuminating historically specific social phenomena. Joseph Roach combines close readings of A Doll House, The School for Scandal, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and the scandal press of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to argue that in modern dramas, gossip ensures the social cohesion that myth provides in ancient tragedies. Just as the circulation of money affects modern characters’ financial credit, the circulation of gossip establishes their social credibility. Noting the parallel relationship among [End Page 622] money, gossip, and language in Ibsen and Sheridan, Roach suggests moving the beginning of the modern dramatic canon back to the late eighteenth century. Tanya Thresher and Bilha Blum read silence as meticulously as Roach reads gossip. In their respective essays, they show how characters use silence to negotiate social hierarchies, with Thresher attending to the relationship among women, language, and power in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and Blum examining Lorca’s use of silence as a form of social protest in his rural tragedies. Both essays support Ackerman’s claim that a close attention to language can illuminate rather than obscure art’s social and ideological investments. In the same vein, Myka Tucker-Abramson and Nicholas Crawford use close reading to explore Suzan-Lori Parks’s and J. M. Synge’s racial and ethnic politics. In an analysis of Topdog/Underdog, Tucker-Abramson shows how Parks’s characters rely upon the language of late capitalism to define black masculinity, arguing that while Booth and Lincoln attempt to assert the prerogatives of liberal individualism in an economy that denies them agency, their language, uncritically repeating liberal-individualist rhetoric, prevents them from articulating a livable masculinity. Crawford’s close reading of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World finds in its hybrid of English and Gaelic an alternative masculinity that empowers the Irish to resist British assimilation. The political uses of dramatic language are further explored by Hana and W. B. Worthen in their examination of The Pillowman. They argue that in Martin McDonagh’s play, allegory is not a technique for simplistic propaganda, but an effective tool for political criticism, demonstrating that Katurian’s violent stories pose ethical questions without prescribing ethical behavior. As the other characters struggle to interpret these open allegories, the...

The School for Scandal as a Social Text

The School for Scandal as a Social Text

School for Scandal

In a comic book presentation Bill Hagerty and Martin Rowson transform Rupert Murdoch’s Wapping headquarters into a darker version of St Trinians to explain the phone hacking saga. It’s billed as ‘a story of bullying, corruption, criminality and deceit.

Evelina , the Rustic Girls of Congreve and Abington, and Surrogation in the 1770s

In Evelina Frances Burney represents characters attending a performance of William Congreve's Love for Love at the Drury Lane Theatre, at a time when Frances Abington, one of the company's principal actors, regularly performed the part of Miss Prue in the play. Joseph Roach's concept of "surrogation" facilitates a reading of this episode that demonstrates how selective memory functions in the culture's search for substitutes in the 1770s. Late in a decade of new Congreve revivals and critical conversation about them, Burney offers her novel as a surrogate for Congreve's kind of comedy. While some characters comment on the play's indelicacy, the episode recalls Congreve's characters, notably the vulgar Miss Prue, whom Burney contrasts with Evelina, a more delicate rustic girl. Illustrating the uncanniness of surrogation, the novelist also suppresses references to Abington, so celebrated for this part that Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her in it. Burney, who had once followed the actress down a London street, was wary of Abington's theatricality on stage and off and so chose another model of conduct for her protagonist and herself as author. Her approach differs from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's exploitation of Congreve's memory and Abington's celebrity through new revivals before offering his own stand-in for the former's plays, The School for Scandal , in which the latter portrayed Lady Teazle, another young woman from the country. Burney's strategy, when juxtaposed with Sheridan's, shows that surrogation may sometimes be a gendered process.

Gossip Girls: Lady Teazle, Nora Helmer, and Invisible-Hand Drama

Sheridan and Ibsen look less odd together as a couple when The School for Scandal (1777) and A Doll House (1879) are read as dramatizations of the social consequences of two circulatory systems that accelerate as they intersect in modern life – information and money. Regulated by Adam Smith's “invisible hand,” these negotiable currencies define the choices open to the blackmailed heroines of each play, producing situations that reappear in many subsequent representations of bourgeois domesticity, including but not ending with I Love Lucy (1951–57). As the historical emergence of the word “credit” implies, the period conventionally assigned to modern drama needs to be revised to accommodate the overwhelming fact that money, so often the subject of gossip, also behaves like gossip, changing hands in the form of fictional markers of value in which modern subjects must agree to believe in order to prosper.

Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama. Matthew S. Buckley . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. vii+191.

Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama. Matthew S. Buckley . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. vii+191.

THE GREAT TRADITION IN COMEDY

7 5 R T H E G R E A T T R A D I T I O N I N C O M E D Y K E N L U D W I G There is a ‘‘Great Tradition’’ in dramatic comedy in English which begins with Shakespeare’s greatest comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It, and continues to the present day. It is a specific form of drama, as defined and ritualized in its way as the Noh drama of Japan or the masked drama of Greek tragedy. It is not social comedy or the comedy of manners. It is not satire, and it is not mere farce. It does not include some of the best comedies ever written, such as The Alchemist in the seventeenth century and Private Lives in the twentieth. The comedies in the great tradition are simply di√erent in kind from other plays and represent a specific way of looking at the world and expressing it on the stage. Following Shakespeare, the great tradition shows up intermittently , sometimes with many decades between sightings. The titles of the plays themselves may not mean much, but let me name them first and then describe what binds them together, thus allowing them to be called a tradition. The first time we spot the great tradition after Shakespeare is at the end of the Restoration period in the works of John Vanbrugh, particularly in his plays The Relapse and The Provoked Wife. These 7 6 L U D W I G Y are followed closely in the early 1700s by two comedies by George Farquhar, The Recruiting O≈cer and The Beaux’ Stratagem. What we see in all these plays is the loosening up of the strict conventions of the earlier Restoration comedies, those ‘‘aren’t-we-terriblywitty -as-we-talk-of-nothing-but-mistresses-and-cuckolding’’ sorts of plays by George Etherege and William Congreve (brittle and brilliant though they certainly are). In Vanbrugh, good nature beginstoreturntothetheater.Therearestillfops,buttheybeginto laugh at themselves and so bring light into the room. And in Farquhar, where the plays are set in the country instead of the town,thereisanewworldofcharacterstoenjoy,fromhighwaymen to rowdy innkeepers. The next notable instances of this comic tradition appear clustered in the last third of the eighteenth century. They begin with David Garrick and George Colman’s buoyant The Clandestine Marriage (which was made into a commercial movie in 2001), and Garrick’s own The Lying Valet, which has gone largely unappreciated for the past two hundred years. It is worth remembering that Garrick was as great a comedian as he was a tragedian and that one of his most famous roles was that of Lord Brute, the man who puts on a dress in Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Wife. Next, in 1773, comes Oliver Goldsmith’s triumphant masterpiece She Stoops to Conquer, followed closely by Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777), then John O’Kee√e’s Wild Oats in 1791. I am not certain if it has ever been appreciated as such, but the thirty-year period from the mid-1760s to the mid-1790s is second only to Shakespeare’s heyday as the high point of dramatic comedy in the English language. (Notice that I did not say ‘‘by English authors’’ since most of the plays were by Irishmen.) This period is followed by a long hiatus until Dion Boucicault wrote the youthful, zesty London Assurance in the early 1840s. His leading character, Sir Harcourt Courtly, is obviously a direct descendant of Vanbrugh’s Lord Foppington and, if anything, is even more hilarious. Then, at the end of the century came George Bernard Shaw – who loved to mock the great tradition and call it hooey while at the same time paying homage to it – and finally Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, which came, saw, and conquered the great tradition and set it on its head. Among T H E G R E A T T R A D I T I O N I N C O M...

"The Fate of Empires": The American War, Political Parody, and Sheridan's Comedies

This essay examines three published but unperformed political parodies of the 1770s: The Duenna (1776) and The Critic; or a Tragedy Rehearsed (1780), both attributed to Israel Pottinger, and The School for Scandal (1779) by the Philadelphian John Leacock. These works, taking their titles from the comedies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, are to all intents and purposes anti-government pamphlets in dramatic form, specific critiques of the British administration's handling of the American War. This piece explores the processes by which Pottinger and Leacock politicize Sheridanian comedy of manners in order to dramatize and interrogate the new cultural technologies, most especially the mass media, engendered or accelerated by the American war.

Meaning of Laughter in The Country Wife and The School for Scandal

Meaning of Laughter in The Country Wife and The School for Scandal

School for Scandal: Sexuality, Race, and National Vice and Virtue in Miss Marianne Woods and Miss Jane Pirie Against Lady Helen Cumming Gordon

In nineteenth‐century Britain, debates on romantic love and friendship between women are inextricably caught up in discussions of feminine virtue and vice, because questions of women’s sexuality, e...