g. Certainly the characters in the play could together speak the words of the Prologue:
A School for Scandal! Tell me, I beseech you,
Needs there a school this modish art to teach you?
No need of lesson now, the knowing think;
We might as well be taught to eat and drink (Sheridan 187).
The characters, as members of the school for scandal, are revealed in this symbolic context to be varyingly proficient in scandalmongering. The school, then, symbolizes all of scandalmongering humankind.
The characters names are all symbolic of the traits of the characters, although those traits are not as varied as we might find in plays which do not focus so intensely on one issue. In this play, again, rumormongering is the issue, and as might be expected the characters' names reflect aspects of this particular human shortcoming: Teazle, Surface, Backbite
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