# Lady Sneerwell — The School for Scandal character guide

> Lady Sneerwell in The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

**Role:** major

**Also known as:** Lady Sneerwell Ha, Lady Sneerwell Go, Lady Sneerwell True, Lady Sneerwell Ah, Lady Sneerwell O Lud, Lady Sneerwell Ungrateful Charles, Lady Sneerwell Impossible, Lady Sneerwell Heavens, Lady Sneerwell Pshaw, Lady Sneerwell Though, Lady Sneerwell Sir Peter, Lady Sneerwell Poor Charles, Lady Sneerwell Maria, Sneerwell, Exit Lady Sneerwell

**First appearance:** 0005-act-i

## Snapshot

A widow who turned early slander into a lifelong vocation, now engineering other people's ruin with the calm precision of a woman who has nothing left to lose.

## Who they are

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 level of my own reputation.' Wounded by slander in her youth, she now schemes with the hypocrite Joseph Surface to separate Charles from Maria — not for Joseph's sake, but because she wants Charles herself. Her malice is the play's weather: everyone else merely lives in it.

## Links

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