The School for Scandal on the Georgian stage

Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comic masterpiece The School for Scandal premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in May 1777. The play was an immediate success earning Drury Lane, which Sheridan owned and managed an enormous amount of money. The School for Scandal explores a fashionable society at once addicted to gossip and yet fearful of exposure. Jokes are had at the expense of aging husbands, the socially inexpert, and, most of all, the falsely sentimental. There are over a dozen surviving manuscripts of The School for Scandal, each different in some particular way. There are two reasons for this plethora. First, Sheridan’s inveterate tinkering, which led him to revise his play without ever committing to a final version. Secondly, manuscripts were required by theatre professionals who worked to make the play work as live theatre, and made adjustments and innovations. These professional efforts left their mark on the manuscripts revealing, almost inevitably, a great deal about how theatres used texts as tools.

Theatre historians and textual scholars tend to be dismissive, or at least suspicious, of alterations made by anyone other than the author, wary that they might over value a line of dialogue or a stage direction that lacks authorial sanction. There are good reasons for this caution, but when I began to examine one of the manuscripts of The School for Scandal held at the Houghton Library at Harvard, this view seemed restrictive.

The manuscript, known simply as MS Thr 5.1, consists of four booklets, these are in a pretty shabby condition and one (the booklet for Act V) is missing. Nor did they immediately appear to be connected. The first booklet is in the hand of William Powell, who was the prompter at Drury Lane from 1793, giving it some authority. The other three have ‘Portsmouth 1779’ emblazoned on their covers, which queries their provenance; but it was also intriguing. Portsmouth was a bustling naval port during the eighteenth century, especially so during the American War of Independence (1775-1783). Compelled, I visited Portsmouth to find out more. Once there, I scanned every surviving newspaper; read all the local histories I could find; and looked through albums of wonderful playbills. There was no mention of The School for Scandal to be found, save one small paragraph in the Hampshire Chronicle (21 May, 1779) which announced that The School for Scandal would be performed in Arundel. Arundel is not so far from Portsmouth, and probably shared its theatre company with Portsmouth.

Unable to build an archival context for MS Thr 5.1, it was necessary to return to the manuscript itself and see what could be found on its pages. The first task was to check the ‘Portsmouth’ manuscript against better known versions of the text. It compared very well, even containing variations which had been made to other manuscripts by Sheridan himself. More fascinatingly, the text has been amended and altered, certainly by several people, probably at different times.

Mostly the adjustments were made to facilitate performance. There were many prompter’s marks, identifying entrances and exits, requirements for props and scenes. Surprisingly these did not seem to relate to productions at the same theatre. Some clearly referred to Drury Lane (because they mentioned that theatre’s famous stage doors), while others related to some other, unidentified theatre. Cuts had also been made, partly to keep the play fresh by dropping lines that were no longer topical, but other adjustments revealed a desire to introduce some suspense and mystery, tactics Sheridan had deliberately eschewed.

Among the several hands that had changed the ‘Portsmouth’ manuscript, one seemed crucial. It was large and somewhat clumsy. During Act II, when Sir Peter Teazle argues with his younger wife, it had added ‘Mr Wheeler to go round Mrs Grey Mrs Mattocks’. The note indicated how named cast members, as opposed to characters, were to act on stage. This hand had also added the name “Wheeler” to the dramatis personae against the key character of Sir Peter Teazle. The name of the manager of the Portsmouth theatre in 1779 was John Wheeler. It is probable that he added his own name to the booklet to indicate his ownership of the part and the text, connecting the manuscript to Portsmouth. More than that, Wheeler had written his name on the booklet completed by Powell as well as on the ‘Portsmouth’ portion, even though they appeared to stem from separate scribal moments. This was a real breakthrough. It meant that Wheeler had used this manuscript in at least two locations. His adjustments were, moreover, evidence of the ways in which a Georgian theatre company operated. These changes might not be what Sheridan had wished, but they were a record of how his play text was translated into practice.

Examination of this manuscript raises broader questions about which texts historians and critics should take seriously. It does not, perhaps tell us much about Sheridan’s sense of the play, but it does reveal a great deal about how theatres used texts as tools. The many amendments made to MS Thr 5.1 display the workings of the theatre, its artisans and professionals, all of whom shaped the text as it was acted. A more complex sense of authority begins to emerge once the role of theatre workers is discovered within the archive. If theatre history is to explore the histories of performance and production beyond the work of the playwright, then these altered and adjusted texts deserve their place alongside more ‘authorial’ versions of a text.

Featured image credit: Thomas Rowlandson, Drury Lane. The School for Scandal, Google Art Project. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.