School for scandal is considered the most enduringly popular comedies in the English language. it is a play graced by sparkling dialogue, a cast of memorable characters, and a complex plot that combines elements of high comedy, intrigue, and genuine feeling. Most discussions of the play, in fact, have focused less on literary analysis than on the question of Sheridan’s success in rebelling against the sentimental comedies of his day and in recovering the spirit of such earlier Restoration comedies as William Congreve’s The Way of the World. Unfortunately, when measured against these earlier plays, The School for Scandal has usually been found inferior—a comedy, as one critic trenchantly put it, in which the Restoration is unrestored. The School for Scandal is not simply a Restoration comedy, it is another kind of comedy altogether—moral rather than satiric, basically humane and optimistic rather than hard edged. It is a comedy written for an audience whose basic assumptions about art, theater, and human nature made it radically different from the audience of Congreve’s day. The School for Scandal has been called a middle-class morality play, and in a sense that description is accurate. At play’s end, good characters are rewarded and bad are routed, thus providing the audience with two useful object lessons: Honesty and benevolence will, in the end, win out over duplicity and selfishness, and, as the surname of the brothers Charles and Joseph suggests, surface appearances are not always trustworthy indicators of inner character. It would be wrong, however, to assume that Sheridan was a moralist using comedy merely to deliver his message. His primary goal in The School for Scandal was, without doubt, comic delight rather than moral instruction. Creating interesting characters and placing them in situations that compel them to respond shows the inconsistency in human