t secret, but we have yet to take the final step. We
have yet to realize that, in truly great drama, the foreknowledge
possessed by the audience is not a disadvantage with certain incidental
mitigations and compensations, but is the source of the highest pleasure
which the theatre is capable of affording us. In order to illustrate my
meaning, I propose to analyse a particular scene, not, certainly, among
the loftiest in dramatic literature, but particularly suited to my
purpose, inasmuch as it is familiar to every one, and at the same time
full of the essential qualities of drama. I mean the Screen Scene in
_The School for Scandal_.

In her "English Men of Letters" volume on Sheridan, Mrs. Oliphant
discusses this scene. Speaking in particular of the moment at which the
screen is overturned, revealing Lady Teazle behind it, she says--

"It would no doubt have been higher art could the dramatist have
deceived his audience as well as the personages of the play, and
made us also parties in the surprise of the discovery."

There could scarcely be a completer reversal of the truth than this
"hopeless comment," as Professor Brander Matthews has justly called it.
The whole effect of the long and highly-elaborated scene depends upon
our knowledge that Lady Teazle is behind the screen. Had the audience
either not known that there was anybody there, or supposed it to be the
"little French milliner," where would have been the breathless interest
which has held us through a whole series of preceding scenes? When Sir
Peter reveals to Joseph his generous intentions towards his wife, the
point lies in the fact that Lady Teazle overhears; and this is doubly
the case when he alludes to Joseph as a suitor for the hand of Maria.
So, too, with the following scene between Joseph and Charles; in itself
it would be flat enough; the fact that Sir Peter is listening lends it a
certain piquancy; but this is ten times multiplied by the fact that Lady
Teazle, too, hears all that passes. When Joseph is called from the room
by the arrival of the pretended Old Stanley, there would be no interest
in his embarrassment if we believed the person behind the screen to be
the French milliner. And when Sir Peter yields to the temptation to let
Charles into the secret of his brother's frailty, and we feel every
moment more certain that the screen will be overthrown, where would be
the excitement, the tension, if we did not know who was behind it? The
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