To pity, without the power to relieve, is still more painful than to ask and be denied. - Richard Brinsley Sheridan

As I have endeavoured to reproduce the works of Sheridan as he wrote them, I may be told that he was a bad hand at punctuating and very bad at spelling. . . . But Sheridan’s shortcomings as a speller have been exaggerated.” Lest “Sheridan’s shortcomings” either in spelling or in punctuation should obscure the text, I have, in this edition, inserted in brackets some explanatory suggestions.

First staged at the Drury Lane Theatre on 8 May 1777, The School for Scandal received an enthusiastic welcome from audiences, though it only initially ran for twenty performances in its first season. However, it returned the following season for more than forty performances and by the end of the eighteenth century it had been staged more than two hundred times. The play was well received by critics, as they celebrated the wit and morals of the work. The essayist and critic, William Hazlitt, was effusive in his praise, describing it ‘the most finished and faultless comedy we have’ and stating that, ‘It professes a faith in the natural goodness as well as habitual depravity of human nature’. Similarly impressed was the late nineteenth century poet and critic, Edmund Gosse, who commented in A History of Eighteenth Century Literature that it was ‘perhaps the best existing English comedy of intrigue’.

Rosy. Efacks, I can do nothing, but there’s the German quack, whom you wanted to send from town; I met him at the next door, and I know he has antidotes for all poisons. Just. Fetch him, my dear friend, fetch him! I’ll get him a diploma if he cures me.