Sheridan's rather puzzling School For Scandal

Perople love to ridicule each other. Always have. Most of the news is clearly intended to make one or another group of people look totally ridiculous. Arguably, the entire profession of journalism is primarily about making people look ridiculous, mostly, anyway. Which brings me to Richard Sheridan's rather puzzling play, The School for Scandal, an entire play devoted to its main characters engaging in systematic constant and highly creative ridicule of everyone of their acquaintance. Now, of course, this is inevitably, and for always, going to be a very entertaining and popular play! And, obviously, Sheridan was well aware of this when he wrote it. Nevertheless, the tone of the play is actually somewhat prudish, with the more tedious and virtuous characters regularly expressing their total disgust with all the other more entertaining and "scandalous" characters. Now, nothing particularly awful actually happens to anyone in this play, either the "virtuous" non-scandalous characters, or the "immoral" scandal mongers. It's really just about how they constantly quarrel with each other to pass the time away, and, they do it every entertainingly too, which some of the characters themselves actually comment on! However, beneath all this apparently pointless self amusement, I think Sheridan may have something else in mind. Richard Sheridan was a highly successful liberal politician, at times a senior minister, and a passionate champion of freedom of the press, and of free speech in general. While some of his "virtuous" characters in the play actually say that all the "scandalous" characters should be prosecuted in court for their nasty ways, they never really look through to the implications of such a policy, something I'm quite sure Richard Sheridan had done rather systematically. Because, you see, if you can prosecute someone on the basis that they say nasty things about other people, then, what could possibly be nastier than saying that someone is guilty of a serious crime, simply for saying nasty things! And, so, the prosecutors would logically be compelled to prosecute themselves! This brings up the broader point, that we always claim the right of freedom of speech for ourselves, and our own particular views, but frequently attempt to deny it on various grounds for those we happen to disagree with. Any kind of censorship and denial of free speech is a very slippery slope indeed, because the greater the diversity of acceptable views, the more opportunity we have to arrive at some real approximation of truth, and of reality. #ethics #politics #literature #free-speech #sheridan