# The School for Scandal — Character guide

> Key figures in The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

- [Sir Peter Teazle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters/sir_peter_teazle.md): Sir Peter Teazle is the aging baronet whose late marriage to a young wife has made him a fixture of the very society he distrusts. He rails against Lady Sneerwell's circle as 'coiners of scandal and clippers of reputatio
- [Lady Teazle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters/lady_teazle.md): Lady Teazle has traded rural obscurity for the drawing rooms of Lady Sneerwell, where she abuses her acquaintance 'out of pure good humour' and assumes they do the same to her. She spars daily with Sir Peter, whom she ma
- [Joseph Surface](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters/joseph_surface.md): Joseph Surface has built a career on being spoken well of: Sir Peter calls him a 'youthful miracle of prudence, good sense, and benevolence,' and Maria's guardian trusts him implicitly. In private he conspires with Lady 
- [Charles Surface](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters/charles_surface.md): Charles Surface is the brother everyone has written off: his debts mount, his house is under execution, and he sells his ancestors' paintings with a bow and a joke. But when old Rowley arrives with the money, Charles imm
- [Sir Oliver Surface](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters/sir_oliver_surface.md): Sir Oliver Surface has spent years in the East amassing the wealth that keeps his nephews in credit, and he comes home determined to test their characters rather than trust their reputations. Posing as the needy Mr. Stan
- [Lady Sneerwell](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters/lady_sneerwell.md): Lady Sneerwell presides over the play's gossip economy, boasting that she can 'do more with a word or look' than others manage with laborious detail, and admitting she takes no pleasure equal to 'reducing others to the l
- [Crabtree](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters/crabtree.md): Crabtree haunts Lady Sneerwell's circle as the school's most tireless inventor, forever arriving breathless with fresh particulars of Sir Peter's duel or some other catastrophe he has half-heard and wholly embellished. H
- [Sir Benjamin Backbite](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters/sir_benjamin_backbite.md): Sir Benjamin moves through Lady Sneerwell's salon as both suitor to Maria and licensed wit, his malice dressed in the polished verse he composes for the company. He and his uncle Crabtree compete to narrate the same rumo
- [Mrs. Candour](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters/mrs_candour.md): Mrs. Candour arrives at Lady Sneerwell's with protestations of good nature and a fresh crop of stories—Miss Gadabout's elopement, Mrs. Festino's affair—each offered as something she would never repeat if it were not her 
- [Rowley](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters/rowley.md): Rowley serves as Sir Oliver's guide and confidant, arranging the disguises by which the old uncle will test his nephews and gently puncturing Sir Peter's faith in Joseph's benevolence—'Charity begins at home,' he observe
- [Moses](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters/moses.md): Moses is the practical man of the play's financial underworld, coaching Sir Oliver through the mechanics of extortion—forty or fifty percent, or double if the borrower is desperate—with the calm of a man who has seen eve
- [Snake](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters/snake.md): Snake opens the play at Lady Sneerwell's dressing table, having copied scandalous paragraphs in a feigned hand and set the machinery of slander in motion. He is her confidant and accomplice, listening as she confesses he
- [Maria](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters/maria.md): Maria moves through Lady Sneerwell's circle as the one young woman who refuses to trade in other people's reputations, and her composure under Mrs. Candour's prying makes her the play's moral counterweight. She is caught
- [Servant](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters/servant.md): Generic household servants who deliver messages and announce visitors.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_school_for_scandal_se/characters