William Congreve World Literature Analysis
Congreve has become known as the most brilliantly witty of the group of Restoration dramatists that included Dryden, Sir George Etherege, and William Wycherley. Restoration drama is a comedy of manners showing a metropolitan society in pursuit of pleasure. It takes a satirical view of the hypocrisy, sexual freedom, and moral degradation of the sophisticated class of people that would have formed its audience. Congreve’s characters are variations on Restoration stock types: On one side, there are the fools, including “coxcombs,” “fops” (vain, self-deluded followers of fashion), and dullards pretending to wit. In this category also are the predatory old men and women who set their sights on handsome young spouses. On the other side of the fence are the people of sense—characters who carry the audience’s sympathy because they have a higher degree of awareness of self and others and a genuine wit.
The desired outcome in these plays is the marriage between a young couple of sense and their secure possession of the fortune due to them. Working against this desired outcome are schemes engineered by the old, deluded, or wicked against the young couple. The prizes at stake are a young and handsome spouse and the fortune. Sometimes the fortune is already in the possession of the young person, becoming part of the prize. More often, it is still in the control of the old and foolish and will only descend to the young person at the old person’s discretion.
The Double-Dealer and The Way of the World are remarkable among Restoration comedies; though they feature many brilliantly caricatured schemers driven by folly and weakness, such characters are not the primary engineers of trouble. Instead, the seeds of evil are sown and tended by villains of almost tragic status—Maskwell in The Double-Dealer and Mrs. Marwood (and, to a less intense degree, Fainall) in The Way of the World. Characters such as Lady Touchwood and Lady Wishfort, powerful though they be in their ability to frustrate the desired outcome, are instruments in the hands of these grand destroyers of happiness.
Many of Congreve’s characters are drawn with a complexity and insight not seen in other plays of the type. The witty “whirlwind” character of Millamant in The Way of the World remains a challenge for any actress. Foolish characters evoke pathos even as they do laughter—for example, Lady Wishfort in The Way of the World, with her hopeless attempts at reconstructing her long-lost beauty by artificial means, and Sir Paul Plyant in The Double-Dealer, nightly swaddled in blankets that prevent him from fathering the son for whom he longs. More than any other Restoration dramatist, Congreve saw the tragedy underlying the ridiculousness of his subjects.
In the world of Congreve’s plays, values are inverted, and characters pretend to be the opposite of what they really are. Mirabell’s epigrammatic couplet at the end of the first act of The Way of the World summarizes this unnatural moral condition: “Where modesty’s ill-manners, ’tis but fit/ That impudence and malice pass for wit.” Hence, in The Double Dealer, Brisk’s obsession with his “wit” belies his true status as a “pert coxcomb”; Lady Plyant’s harping on her “honour” as she capitulates without much resistance to Careless’s seduction reveals her promiscuity. The constant abuse of such terms by hypocritical or foolish characters makes them gain ironic weight at every repetition. The pointedness and brilliance of Congreve’s wit have remained unrivaled, except possibly in the plays of Oscar Wilde three centuries later. Congreve’s dialogue has a rhythm, cadence, and rhetorical structure at times approaching the status of poetry.
The Double-Dealer
(This entire section contains 2213 words.)
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The Double-Dealer
First produced: 1693 (first published, 1694)
Type of work: Play
In a sophisticated social circle of fops, wits, fools, and hypocrites, two schemers try to foil the intention of a young couple to marry.
The action of The Double-Dealer is governed by the Machiavellian schemes of Maskwell and the manipulative Lady Touchwood, with whom he is in league. Maskwell and Lady Touchwood both want to break the intended match between the innocent couple Cynthia and Mellefont—Maskwell, because he wants Cynthia for himself, and Lady Touchwood, because she wants Mellefont for herself. Most of the characters’ lives revolve around hidden motives, secret intrigues, and deception. Nobody, except Mellefont and Cynthia, is what he or she seems. Sir Paul and Lady Plyant pretend to the world to be the happiest married couple; Lady Plyant pretends to her husband that she is too chaste to grant him her sexual favors, while enthusiastically pursuing intrigues with others. The fop Brisk sets himself up as a wit; the giggling Lord Froth affects solemnity; the vacuous Lady Froth sees herself as a writer of heroic epic poems.
The supreme embodiment of deception is Maskwell. He pretends to be Mellefont’s loyal friend, defending him against Lady Touchwood’s plotting and supporting the marriage with Cynthia. In fact, he is using every weapon in his armory to discredit Mellefont in the eyes of his uncle and benefactor-to-be, Lord Touchwood, and his bride’s parents, Sir Paul and Lady Plyant. Such is Maskwell’s skill that he prevails upon the unwitting Mellefont to conspire in his own undoing: In a seeming effort to put an end to Lady Touchwood’s activities, Maskwell suggests that Mellefont appear in her bedroom at a time calculated to compromise her; Maskwell, however, ensures that it is Mellefont who is compromised and risks the wrath of Lord Touchwood. Neither Mellefont nor anyone else sees through Maskwell’s guise until Cynthia points out a discrepancy in his instructions to her and Mellefont toward the end of the play. Others are also fooled: Lord Touchwood almost disinherits Mellefont in favor of Maskwell; and, ironically, Lady Touchwood herself mistakenly believes that Maskwell is motivated by his attachment and obligations to her.
Maskwell creates a labyrinth of confusion, symbolized by the many references to private stairs, hidden passages, and back ways and put into words by the baffled Mellefont: “I am confounded in a maze of thoughts, each leading into one another, and all ending in perplexity.” Maskwell’s controlling genius lies in his ability to play upon the desires and weaknesses of his dupes. As he says, those who want to be deceived will be, “and, if they will not hear the serpent’s hiss, they must be stung into experience, and future caution.” The theme of willful self-deception is strong. Even when Sir Paul has written evidence of his wife’s intended infidelity thrust into his hands, he is eager to swallow the hastily engineered explanation provided by her and Careless. Once again Sir Paul submits to being swaddled in blankets in the marital bed.
The unpopularity of The Double-Dealer in and af ter Congreve’s time may have been attributable to unease at the extreme nature of the evil represented in it. Maskwell’s coolness and single-mindedness in plotting evil, his flawless mask of honesty and loyalty, and his unrepentant silence after his villainy is finally unmasked recall William Shakespeare’s villain Iago in Othello, the Moor of Venice (pr. 1604, pb. 1622) and place him beyond the conventions of Restoration comedy. Lady Touchwood, too, attains a sinister status beyond that of a hot-tempered woman scorned; in the scene with Mellefont in her chamber at the end of act 4, against all odds she makes herself appear innocent and Mellefont appear the criminal in Lord Touchwood’s eyes. As she leaves, she turns and smiles malevolently at Mellefont—a truly spine-chilling image.
That this uncompromising sense of evil was intentionally created by Congreve is suggested by constant references to witchcraft, possession, and the devil used in connection with Maskwell and Lady Touchwood. The good-evil polarity is reinforced by the strong visual symbolism of the final expulsion of Maskwell and Lady Touchwood by Mellefont and Lord Touchwood dressed in parsons’ costumes. The schemers are undone by their own machinations, in the absence of any conscious campaign on the part of the good characters, and the young couple are free to marry. As Brisk says, Love and Murder will out—in the unfoldment of time and by the workings of Providence.
The Way of the World
First produced: 1700 (first published, 1700)
Type of work: Play
A deceiver in league with his lover plots to prevent the marriage between Mirabell and Millamant and to secure Millamant’s fortune.
The Way of the World is generally viewed as the supreme example of its genre. Its characters—the vengeful and ultimately pathetic Lady Wishfort, the sparring lovers Mirabell and Millamant, the dark and devious Mrs. Marwood—remain in the mind long after the play is over. The complexities and subtleties of relationships are observed with a keen psychological insight: the domineering nature of Lady Wishfort turning to abject dependence on her mentor Mrs. Marwood; the carefully manipulated shifts of power between Fainall and Mrs. Marwood; and the passionate attraction between Mirabell and Millamant, disguised beneath a covering of mockery and indifference.
As in The Double-Dealer, covert motives and hypocrisy govern the action of the play. Old Lady Wishfort has loved Mirabell since he pretended to love her in order to woo her niece Millamant: Her ostensible motivation in opposing the young couple’s marriage is to protect her daughter from a deceiver, but her actual motivation is to avenge herself on Mirabell. Mirabell counters with an equally underhanded plan to foil Lady Wishfort’s plots with a decoy—his servant Waitwell disguised as wealthy suitor Sir Rowland. Waitwell is to prepare to marry Lady Wishfort, and Mirabell is to reveal his servant’s true identity and release her from the match on condition that she release Millamant’s fortune and grant Mirabell her hand in marriage.
Mrs. Marwood, at the center of the scheming, exploits Lady Wishfort’s dislike of Mirabell to pursue her own ends. Her ostensible desire throughout is to protect Lady Wishfort’s interests. Her actual desire, however, is to fan the flames of Lady Wishfort’s fury against Mirabell and to persuade her to disinherit Millamant in favor of Fainall, Mrs. Marwood’s lover. Fainall, meanwhile, means to denounce his wife (Lady Wishfort’s daughter) publicly for infidelity with Mirabell in an effort to blackmail Lady Wishfort into making over Mrs. Fainall’s estate to him. The blatant hypocrisy of his scheme becomes evident in the light of his true motivation: to have his wife’s fortune under the control of himself and his mistress, Mrs. Marwood. Congreve depicts a constant satirical tension between outward self and inward self, between the mask and the face behind it.
Deception is not only an interface between the characters and the world; it also serves to illustrate the characters’ view of themselves. Lady Wishfort’s attempt to turn back the years by painting herself a new face is an image whose symbolism reverberates throughout the play. It is a visual illustration of the affectations in which the foolish characters indulge. In the same vein, Petulant pays prostitutes to hire a coach and call on him in order to give the impression that he is in demand among ladies; and Mrs. Marwood makes a great show of hating men even while her actions are motivated by desire for them. All these characters are, metaphorically speaking, painting their own faces—cultivating appearances that are at odds with reality. Hence, Mirabell’s premarital condition to Millamant—“I article, that you continue to like your own face, as long as I shall, and while it passes current with me, that you endeavour not to new-coin it”—suggests a conscious rejection of the affectation and pretense that characterize the foolish sector of society.
The appearance of the unsophisticated, country-bred Sir Wilful Witwoud shows the extent to which this world has become divorced from the natural order. Lady Wishfort condemns his uncouth manners as barbaric—though shortly afterward she displays true cold-blooded barbarity in her relish at the prospect of Mirabell’s slowly starving to death. The metropolitan Witwoud disowns his brother (Sir Wilful Witwoud) because it is not fashionable to acknowledge relations in town. One treasures Sir Wilful’s ingenuous response to Witwoud’s snub: “The fashion’s a fool; and you’re a fop, dear brother.”
Mirabell and Millamant, with their wit and good sense, stand in contrast to the fops and fools. They embrace the pleasures of the town—indeed, Millamant is uncompromising in her disdain for the country—yet are not blind to its folly. The famous scene in which Mirabell and Millamant barter conditions and provisos for their life together shows a couple who see their world as it is and prefer not to waste time pretending it is otherwise. It is significant that Mirabell’s clear-sighted, if cynical, understanding of “the way of the world” helps him foil the plot against Mrs. Fainall and restore himself to Lady Wishfort’s good graces. Lacking faith in Fainall’s integrity, Mirabell had previously ensured that Mrs. Fainall’s estate was made over to him in trust, making her husband’s claim on it ineffective. Lady Wishfort is happy to offer Millamant to Mirabell in exchange for her daughter’s honor and fortune intact, and the prospect of their marriage makes a satisfying resolution to this complex plot.