School for Scandal at the Folger

Is it possible that the eighteenth-century stage offered more adventurous female possibilities than our own can imagine? Or is it that we can’t imagine that they imagined them? These questions run through my mind nearly every time I see an eighteenth-century play on stage—or as the public radio commercial for the recent Folger Theater production of R. B. Sheridan’s School for Scandal would have it, a “Restoration comedy.” First let me say that