Book reviews in print—newspapers, magazines and journals—and in broadcast media and on the Net, of course, feature new titles on the shelves—it’s the new book releases that earn people’s attention. It decides what people should pick up from book shops. It decides what people should read now. It may be contemporary or historical issues that the books deal with, but they are the ones just published.
But what about the old books, classics and otherwise? Books that were published, say, 300 years ago? And on till, say, 50 to 60 years ago? Books that nourished people of those times, stories that reveal the world of those times. And stories that are verities, stories that are of value to us today, too.
Why don’t publications, in print or on the Net, host a column or space for books published in the past, from more than a couple of centuries ago? This includes both well-known classics and not-so-well-known, nondescript titles also that are worth reading—with great storylines or writing and language styles and expressions.
Recently, I got to reading one of the Harvard Classics featuring English drama. And so, though I had tried to lay my hands on “The School for Scandal” earlier, it was only now that I actually read the play. The playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was, of course, a literary and theatre figure, but he also made a career in politics and was a great orator.
The School for Scandal, Sheridan’s best-known play, is a comedy on English manners! But one wonders if it is really restricted to the British aristocratic milieu of the 18th century.
For what the play revolves around and issues it talks about are innate to human nature, human psychology. The issues are neither temporally restricted nor spatially constrained nor even class based. Scandal. Does scandal need a place, a time or a social position to engage in, to indulge in, to revel in? And the “school” for scandal is just about everywhere.
Scandal and gossip on romance and romantic alliances and dalliances, real and supposed, heard and conjectured, seen and presumed, is enough junk food to feed the scandal foodie robust. But what is interesting in the play by Sheridan is how he portrays this whole phenomenon of scandalous and slanderous gossip in British aristocratic circles. How the men and women engage in it: a total hypocrisy with an exhibited concern and a hidden sadism, a brazen sarcasm and a masked pleasure.
Likewise, elopement, marriage, love affairs of all sorts in their society are thrashed out by the dramatis personae. And if a man given to extravagant living ends up losing his family traditions and inheritance and is willing to lose all to gain the money to cater to his wanton lifestyle, for who should it be a greater shock than his own uncle?
Now the way these issues are presented in acts and scenes makes for the play to be a real lovely read. And so this whole point that books, published even centuries ago, be reviewed so they can be read or re-read today.