CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

When Congreve, a teenager of nineteen, left Ireland for England in the spring of 1689, he may have intended to become a lawyer, for he enrolled as a student at the Middle Temple, though, as his friend Charles Gildon observed shortly afterwards, he had ‘a wit of too fine a turn, to be long pleased with that crabbed, unpalatable study; in which the laborious, dull, plodding fellow, generally excells the more sprightly and vivacious wit’.¹ This ‘wit’ made its first appearance with the publication of his short novel Incognita (probably written while he was still a student at Trinity College, Dublin)² but, more importantly for his future career, it was during his early days in London that he became acquainted with the great literary figure of his day, John Dryden, a man then in his sixties. Quite how they first met is unknown, though by 1692 Congreve had contributed a verse translation of Juvenal’s eleventh satire to the translations of Juvenal and Persius that were largely the work of Dryden himself, and this initial collaboration quickly developed into a firm friendship, for by the middle of the following year, Dryden, in a letter to his publisher Jacob Tonson, wrote that he was ‘Mr Congreve’s true lover and desire you to tell him, how kindly I take his often remembrances of me’.³ It is to Dryden especially that credit must be given for encouraging Congreve to turn playwright.

In 1698, when Congreve was replying to Jeremy Collier’s attacks upon his plays,⁴ he wrote that his first play, The Old Bachelor, was composed some years before it was acted and that it was largely undertaken ‘to amuse myself in a slow recovery from a fit of sickness’.⁵ This may well have been in the spring of 1689, when he was staying with his grandfather at Stretton Manor in Staffordshire shortly after his arrival from Ireland; the manuscript was then probably shown to Dryden in 1692 who, with typical generosity, declared that he had never seen ‘such a first play in his life, but the author not being acquainted with the stage or the town, it would be a pity to have it miscarry for want of a little assistance: the stuff was rich indeed, it wanted only the fashionable cut of the town’.⁶ Quite what suggestions Dryden and others, such as the playwright Thomas Southerne, who was also consulted, had to make have not been recorded but, according to Gildon, they were largely to do with the order of the scenes and the length of the play.⁷ Once revised, the play was accepted by the only company then playing in London, the United Company,⁸ and was probably in rehearsal by the closing months of 1692; the murder of one actor, William Mountfort, and the death of another, however, delayed the opening at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, until the March of 1693. As in any young playwright’s fondest fancy, it proved a triumphant success and had, for those times, an extraordinary run of fourteen days.⁹

Congreve’s knowledge of what Dryden calls ‘the town’ and indeed of the theatre in general must have been somewhat limited if he first wrote the play when he was only nineteen, though, in addition to his own reading, he had access to the theatre while at Trinity College, Dublin, through the performances given at the Smock Alley Theatre. However, The Old Bachelor is probably best approached as a play in which a young, talented writer is content to re-explore the comic territory earlier mapped out by writers such as Etherege and Wycherley, but in so doing, is able to bring to that material a freshness and distinctiveness of accent that makes his first play something more than merely routine.

This is in part achieved through a graceful vigour in the writing that is established as early as the opening exchanges between Bellmour and Vainlove in which Bellmour, a typical rake, explores the familiar theme of the superiority of pleasure over business:

Moreover, Congreve also demonstrates in his first play his ability to give every character his or her own individual speech pattern. It is probably going too far to say, as some have, that even without the prefixes one could assign each speech to the appropriate character, but there is certainly no denying that there is a welcome variety in a play which includes, to name but a few, the breathless, fragmented speeches of Belinda, the snarling periods of Heartwell and the cloying babytalk of the Fondlewifes when, nominally at least, Laetitia is at her most loving.

Grace and charm may be displayed by the dialogue, but these are not necessarily the attributes of the world that dialogue reveals. The reference to the hawk and the lure in the quotation above is only a starting point for a series of references that suggest that ‘civilized’ as the social world may initially appear, there is something more brutal lurking not far below the surface. This emerges, in part, from the portrayal of women as creatures to be hunted.¹⁰ Vainlove, for instance, sees them as ‘hares’ which he disturbs so Bellmour can ‘course’ them (p. 41), or as ‘hares’ which, given his strange sensibility, disappointingly do not flee but run into the mouths of the hounds (p. 83). Bellmour likewise sees them as ‘partridges’ which, once having been ‘set’ by Vainlove, he can then ‘cover’ (p. 44). Women, as well as being creatures to be hunted, are also seen as something to be eaten or devoured. Laetitia, for instance is ‘a delicious morsel’ (p. 41) for Bellmour, and Sharper describes Araminta to Vainlove as ‘a delicious melon, pure and consenting ripe, and only waits thy cutting up’ (p. 83). No doubt Bellmour’s description of himself as a ‘cormorant’ (p. 42), a sea bird noted for its voracious appetite, could be connected with this set of references as well. Man may be the hunter, but he is likewise ‘brutified’, to use Fondlewife’s splendid verb, at a number of points in the play. Vainlove is referred to as an ass, Bellmour an ape, Heartwell is described as an old fox that Silvia has successfully trapped and men generally can be stags whose horns, of course, suggest those of the cuckolded male. As Virginia Ogden Birdsall has suggested,¹¹ Sir Joseph’s reference to the two best-known beast stories – Aesop’s Fables and Reynard the Fox – may well provide a context for viewing much of what goes on in the play.

Setter’s name alone would connect him with this area of the play, but more importantly he is one of a group whose success lies in their ability to present themselves convincingly as something they are not. The theme of deceit and disguise, of con-man and conned, is of course not new with Congreve, but it is something which he portrays in The Old Bachelor with youthful zest and, at times, almost dizzying complexity. It is Laetitia’s letter to Vainlove, with its suggestion of an appropriate disguise, that first prompts Bellmour to temporarily abandon his ‘half a score [of] mistresses’ (p. 42) and disguise himself as Spintext. Of course, Laetitia soon sees through the disguise (though she is far from disappointed by what her discovery reveals), as does Fondle wife once he discovers that it is not a prayer book that Spintext has brought along with him but a copy of Scarron’s The Innocent Adultery, but his continuing role as Spintext is important for the denouement, for it is as Spintext that Bellmour performs the fake marriage between Heartwell and Silvia. If Bellmour is, in a sense, a substitute for Vainlove when he first visits Laetitia, then Sharper likewise is a substitute for Bellmour, for it is as Sir Joseph Wittol’s rescuer (Bellmour in actuality) that Sharper presents himself when he first meets Sir Joseph, a substitution that the foolish Sir Joseph believes, along with the story of the lost £100. If Sir Joseph cannot see through Sharper, no more can Heartwell see through Silvia, for it is her convincing performance of child-like innocence that lures him into a hasty marriage. Not even Vainlove is as clear-sighted as one might expect, for he believes for a while that the letter from Araminta is genuine, whereas in fact it has been concocted by Silvia and Lucy. The only performance that nobody ever believes (except possibly Sir Joseph) is that of Bluffe as a figure of military valour, and the genuine heroes that he alludes to, such as Hannibal and Scipio Africanus, only serve in his case to underline the substantial gap between the fake and the real.

In a world of such shifting surfaces, there is at least one constant and that is money. Araminta and Belinda are contrasted in a number of ways: Araminta is loftily serious about love, while Belinda is not; Araminta is usually grave while laughter punctuates many of Belinda’s speeches; Araminta is relatively honest and straightforward while a curious affectation tinges much of what Belinda has to say. But in one thing they are identical and that is in their fortunes. They are both seemingly free from any control by parents or guardians and so have within their own hands the not inconsiderable sum of £12,000 each. Bellmour announces at the outset that he is ‘damnably in love’ (p. 42) with Belinda, but how much that love is based on a realization of her wealth is a question raised quite early on in the play. In reply to Sharper’s charge that Belinda is ‘too proud, too inconstant, too affected, and too witty, and too handsome for a wife’, Bellmour replies:

But she can’t have too much money. – There’s twelve thousand pound, Tom. – ’Tis true she is excessively foppish and affected, but in my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers anybody else to rail at me. Then, as I told you, there’s twelve thousand pound – hum – why, faith, upon second thoughts, she does not appear to be so very affected neither, (p. 43)

Of course Bellmour and Belinda do agree to get married by the end of the play – though the manner is curiously offhand – but how much the match should be seen as the successful outcome of fortune-hunting on Bellmour’s part is never really made clear.

Silvia’s misfortune is that while she has the capacity for love, she apparently does not have the cash. Before the opening of the play, she has fallen in love with Vainlove but she has also succumbed to the physical attractions of Bellmour. Her love for Vainlove, once rebuffed, sours into a cry for ‘vengeance’ (p. 65) but in passages like this, as with similar speeches from Mrs Loveit in Etherege’s Man of Mode, there is the uncertainty of whether we are witnessing a character driven beyond the conventional comic boundaries or a character comically elevating herself on tragic stilts. She is, however, not readily at home in the world of deceit and disguise and it is only Lucy’s promptings that persuade her to play the role of simple innocence that Heartwell desires. In consequence, Bellmour’s curt dismissal of her as simply a ‘whore’ – he presumably bears some responsibility for her condition – and therefore an unsuitable partner for his ‘friend’ Heartwell (p. 101), seems unduly harsh and the provision of Wittol for her as a substitute husband a dubious reward indeed.

The question of what dramatic language is appropriate for comedy also briefly arises in connection with Heartwell. He is introduced to us as a ‘pretended woman hater’ (p. 42), so that much of the comedy lies in seeing one who prides himself on his knowledge of the world – ‘I have baited too many of those traps to be caught in one myself’ (p. 46) – being himself deceived by Silvia’s performance. However, it is the teasing of him – one might almost say the tormenting of him – by the other characters in the final act and his response that suddenly make us look at him and them in a less coolly detached way:

How have I deserved this of you? Any of ye? Sir, have I impaired the honour of your house, promised your sister marriage, and whored her? Wherein have I injured you? (p. 11a)¹²

Congreve could no doubt count on Betterton, the Olivier of his day, bringing to such a speech his long experience in more serious roles and it is in speeches such as this that a pointer might be found to the ways in which Congreve would be extending his range in his second play, The Double Dealer, which probably opened in the November of the same year as The Old Bachelor, 1693.

Whereas Congreve had set much of his first play in the streets and parks of contemporary London, he chose in his second to retreat indoors and to set his play, with the exception of the scene in Lady Touchwood’s bedroom, entirely in the ‘gallery’ of Lord Touchwood’s house. The reason for this, as he explains in his somewhat angry preface, was that he wanted to write a ‘true and regular comedy’ in which the three unities of time, place and action were preserved with ‘the utmost severity’ (p. 122). In consequence there is, with the exception noted above, the single ‘gallery’ setting; in place of the variety of incidents in The Old Bachelor, there is a concentration on Maskwell’s plotting and the time that elapses on stage is little more than three hours.

Although Congreve has deliberately confined himself to the portrayal of a single section of the house, he nevertheless very skilfully evokes the sense of a much larger place, so that, although we do not see it, we become very aware of the size of Lord Touchwood’s mansion, of rooms beyond rooms in which the drama continues to unfold, although we, as audience, can be privy to only part of it. The play, for instance, opens not with people in the gallery, but with people drifting into the gallery as they leave the nearby dining-room, and as the play proceeds, we learn of back-stairs and concealed doors, of quarters for the resident chaplain, of a garden large enough for Brisk and Lady Froth to wander unobserved, of stables for a coach and six, of an area for the ladies to take tea and of somewhere else with an ‘inviting couch’ (p. 202) where Lord Froth can sleep out part of the play. Yet for all this marvellous evocation of life in one of the great houses, it remains curiously self-enclosed, the bustle of contemporary London pushed far away beyond its enclosing walls. Perhaps, indeed, it is not even in London, for the one reference we get to an actual place – St Albans – provides no particular geographical location for it at all.

Such a change in setting is entirely appropriate for Congreve’s purposes in The Double Dealer, for he has chosen to portray a far more socially elevated and interconnected group than in The Old Bachelor. Although Sir Paul and Lady Touchwood, because of their temperamental differences, may sometimes seem an odd pair to be brother and sister, it is nevertheless that relationship which provides the tie between the families of the Touchwoods and the Plyants, as well as making Mellefont and Cynthia, through their proposed marriage, the only possible means by which the two families can remain united and their fortunes secure. For in Congreve’s portrayal of this group, there is an air of exhaustion, of impotence even – at least in terms of the older males – that suggests that both families have almost lost the vitality to reproduce themselves. Sir Paul, from his first marriage, has only fathered the one daughter, Cynthia, and if Lady Plyant has her way, will presumably not be producing any further children, and although it is never stated that Lord Touchwood is impotent, there seems little doubt that he has abandoned any hope of fathering children of his own. In consequence, the off-stage dinner party at the beginning of the play, from which people start to emerge slightly tipsy on the fashionably new champagne, is more than a social gathering of old friends; it is a dynastic gathering to ensure, through the signing of two documents, that the families of the Touchwoods and the Plyants have a future as well as a past. For Mellefont is, as Lord Touchwood explains in the final act, ‘the alone remaining branch of all our ancient family’ (p. 191), just as Cynthia is the only heiress for Sir Paul’s ‘good estate in the country, some houses in town, and some money’ (p. 163). Once the legal document making Mellefont Lord Touchwood’s heir has been signed, along with the marriage contract between Mellefont and Cynthia, then the two families can part, secure in the knowledge that their joint affairs are once more on a secure base.

Rich and important as these two families may be, Congreve’s portrait of both them and their friends is far from a flattering one. Although not unintelligent or unlearned – Lady Froth, for instance, may know some Greek and can rattle off at least the names of the fashionable French critics – the constant striving for wit that never quite comes off and the literature that they produce reveals a triviality of mind that runs through much of the group. Lady Froth is perhaps the best example, for she is at work on what the seventeenth century would consider one of the noblest productions of the human mind, an epic or ‘heroic’ poem, but from the extracts that we are allowed to hear, it will clearly be an unintentional parody of that genre. Its dubious puns (Lord Froth is to become Spumoso), its tired classicism (the dairymaid is to be transformed into Thetis) and its broken-backed metre will require more than Brisk’s commentary and notes to disguise its utter vacuity. Brisk, as well as being a commentator, is also a writer, though a writer who has difficulty in classifying his own work, for he is unclear about whether to define the one poem we hear as an ‘epigram’ or an ‘epigrammatic sonnet’ (p. 168), though he does attempt to allay any doubts by claiming it is ‘satire’. The Froths, we are told, wrote excessively during their courtship, but Lord Froth seems to have now undertaken the role of the theatre critic who displays his insightfulness by going to comedies but never laughing in the hope that he may thereby ‘mortify the poets’ (p. 134). Even the chaplain, Saygrace, is not immune to this literary fever, for when Maskwell calls upon him in the final act he is valiantly struggling over the last line of an acrostic.

Literature may be the major preoccupation of at least one of the ladies in the play but most of them are preoccupied with something else as well. Jeremy Collier, in his Short View of the Immorality and Prophaneness of the English Stage, remarked that ‘there are but four ladies in this play, and three of the biggest of them are whores’¹³ and, blunt as this may be, it is also reasonably fair. Lady Plyant, for instance, is superficially concerned with her ‘honour’, and her ‘niceness’ is almost her husband’s despair, for she has him nightly bundled up in blankets before being put to bed, but in the past, we are given to believe, this has not been the fate of other men, and it well might not have been for two of the men in the play. She is all too ready to believe that Mellefont is in love with her, and although protesting that her honour is ‘infallible and uncomatible’ (p. 149), she leaves exactly the opposite impression, and once persuaded that the rumours of his passion entail no more than ‘profound respect’ (p. 134), she is quite prepared to transfer her affections to Careless and to demonstrate them once they are concealed in the wardrobe. The passionate love of the Froths is related to us early on in the play, but this forms no barrier to her dalliance with Brisk and their withdrawal to the garden for star-gazing and ‘couplets’. Yet, for all Lord Touchwood’s ponderous moralizing in the closing lines of the play, they remain unexposed and unpunished; that is reserved for Lady Touchwood and Maskwell alone.

Lady Touchwood is in many ways a natural member of such an aristocratic group, but an extended fissure runs through this play which places Maskwell and her on one side and the rest on the other. For Maskwell, it must be remembered, is neither titled nor a customary associate of titled people in the way that Careless and Brisk undoubtedly are. His actual position in the Touchwood household is unclear, but from what we hear of Mellefont’s earlier kindness to him and from Lady Touchwood’s reference to him as once being ‘in the nature of a servant’ (p. 137), it seems that he is somebody who has risen within the household without ever becoming a fully fledged member of it. In a private way he has, of course, since he is now Lady Touchwood’s lover; the action then, from Maskwell’s point of view, can be seen as the upwardly mobile young man’s attempt to finally and publicly break into that golden circle by replacing Mellefont both as Lord Touchwood’s heir and Cynthia’s husband.

From Maskwell’s desire for the money and the girl, from his energy and his delight in disguise, may well come a reminder of certain aspects of earlier Restoration comic ‘heroes’ such as Etherege’s Dorimant, but instead of being presented for our sardonic amusement, he is depicted as a diminished Iago of the bedroom and boudoir.¹⁴ There are echoes of Othello as in Lord Touchwood’s demand for ‘ocular proof’ (p. 184); a number of the soliloquies are given to Maskwell; he, like Iago, can be seen as a kind of dramatist within the play and references to ‘hell’, ‘fire’ and ‘damnation’ can readily be found. In counterpoint to this, the dramatic language of Lady Touchwood, while not deriving from Shakespeare, can be seen to have an uneasy relationship – be it parody or echo – to the heightened language of Restoration tragedy writers such as Lee or even Dryden. It is Maskwell and Lady Touchwood alone who, amidst a flurry of disguised parsons, are dragged on stage, publicly exposed and condemned as ‘strumpet’ and ‘villain’ (p. 204). Yet all this takes place before the Froths, the Brisks, and the Plyants, who, in many ways, have behaved little differently, though, unlike Lady Touchwood, they have had the decency to confine their activities to members of their own circle.

The play finds its nominal centre in Mellefont and Cynthia, but with Maskwell assuming much of the energy of the earlier comic heroes – or even Bellmour in Congreve’s first play – Mellefont’s role is confined to one of trusting honesty, a combination of the good man and the gull. Unlike earlier comedies too, the courtship of Mellefont and Cynthia is over before the play begins, and although they attempt some of that witty raillery often associated with such comedies, as in their comparison of marriage to a game of bowls, it has an autumnal feel about it, as though its energy is almost depleted. Cynthia is clear-sighted – for much of the play indeed she has little to do beyond shrewdly observing what is going on around her – and Mellefont is kind-hearted, if slightly dull. Presumably it is in qualities such as these that we are directed to place our trust at the end of this experimental, ‘serious’ comedy.

If it was an experiment on Congreve’s part, an experiment in a rather different sort of comedy, then it was one that was not received with the enthusiasm which greeted Congreve’s first play. Dryden observed in one of his letters that it was ‘much censured by the greater part of the town’, though quickly added that it was ‘defended only by the best judges, who, you know, are commonly the fewest’.¹⁵ It was perhaps because of this public reaction that Congreve, in his third play, Love for Love,¹⁶ returned to a somewhat more conventional comic structure.

The return, in part, can be seen in the creation of Valentine, who has connections both with the witty rakes of earlier Restoration plays and the figure of Bellmour in Congreve’s own first comedy. However, for Valentine, much of that libertine life now lies in the past; it is only the introduction of the nurse with his child – as well as his unnerving remark about smothering it – that brings it to our attention at all. For, unlike Bellmour, he cannot start the play by making a choice between ‘business’ and ‘pleasure’, for he has almost completely run out of cash and credit, and is now bleakly confined to his rooms with only his servant, Jeremy, for company. His world is no longer the fashionable world of London’s parks and playhouses but a world of deprivation and confinement; the deprivation under-lined by Jeremy’s spirited enlargement on the theme of famine and the confinement by the bailiff’s remark that, in addition to Valentine, they have ‘half a dozen gentlemen to arrest in Pall Mall and Co vent Garden’ (p. 224). All that is now left to him are his books – significantly he is now reading the Stoic Epictetus – and his ‘wit’, which he promises to display, to Jeremy’s horror, by turning playwright. It is this concept of plays and playwrighting and all the attendant associations – role-playing, disguise etc. – that not only provides a context in which to view Valentine’s development, but also that of a number of other characters as well.

For much of the social world that we see during the course of the play is rooted in the concept of acting out a role, the dynamics of which are perhaps most clearly seen in the relationship between Prue and Tattle. Prue is in some ways a younger version of Wycherley’s Margery Pinchwife and, like her, is fresh from the country when we first encounter her as she bounds vigorously on stage to display to her step-mother the gifts that Tattle has given her. Once Tattle has her alone, he commences not only her seduction but also her education. He explains that her honesty and straightforwardness must be abandoned; that to be considered ‘well bred’ she must start lying as ‘all well-bred persons lie’ (p. 250), and somewhat in the manner of a director with an actor, he coaches her in her part until he feels she has got it right. Prue is a ready learner and takes on her new role with enthusiasm, but the play she thinks she is in is a rather old-fashioned one which will conclude with her marriage to Tattle. This is not the ending achieved, but although disappointed in her hopes of Tattle, there is no sense that she will revert to her former country ways.

Prue’s male counterpart in the play is Ben; if she, in Mrs Frail’s words, is a ‘land-monster’, then he is a ‘sea-beast’ (p. 230). Congreve may have had Ben in mind when he wrote in his essay ‘Concerning Humour in Comedy’ (1695) that ‘one may almost give a receipt [sc. recipe] for the composition of such a character’, but if so, he was being a little too dismissive of his own art, for Ben has more to do than merely provide the play with a little local colour. Like Prue, he is completely ignorant about city life, but unlike her he is in no way fascinated or attracted by it. His most appealing quality is his honesty, his inability to play roles, or, as he puts it, ‘to look one way and to row another’ (p. 262). He is straightforward in his dealings with Prue; he is ready to believe in Mrs Frail’s affection for him; his promises of fidelity to her can be readily believed and though finally rejected by her once she knows he will not inherit Sir Sampson’s estate, it is a rejection that allows him to return unscathed to his natural element. Throughout he behaves, as Maximillian Novak has pertinently suggested, like a sort of ‘noble savage’ suddenly let loose on the drawing-rooms of London.¹⁷ Although he himself does not say so, it may have reinforced his growing conviction about the madness of the urban world when he sees two of that world’s seemingly most accomplished role-players, Tattle and Mrs Frail, mistakenly getting married to one another while one is disguised as a friar and the other as a nun.

Hamlet is one of literature’s most famous ‘madmen’ and it is to that role that Valentine primarily turns when he does indeed turn playwright, as he threatened in the first act, and both scripts and performs the part of a madman in the fourth act of the play. The echoes of Shakespeare’s play are there both verbally and visually, for Valentine is discovered in ‘disorderly’ dress, though draped upon a couch which somehow does not quite fit with one’s memories of Elsinore. The casting of Betterton as Valentine may seem strange, for he was then just on sixty,¹⁸ but it had the distinct advantage of allowing the period’s most famous Hamlet to perform a fake Hamlet within the confines of a comedy. Fake though it may be, the performance is good enough to convince a number of the spectators on stage that it is genuine. Valentine’s domineering father, Sir Sampson, is convinced by it, as is the lawyer, Buckram, and Valentine is thereby able to postpone the signing away of his inheritance. The normally perceptive Mrs Frail is convinced by it and is thus tricked into her marriage to Tattle. The one person, of course, that it does not convince is Angelica. Although she may have her doubts about anybody going mad for love, at least in a Restoration comedy, she is nevertheless prepared to believe Valentine until an injudicious wink on Scandal’s part confirms her suspicions that what has been prepared for her is an elaborate masquerade, but a masquerade she decides will be kept going. Valentine may well wish to end the play in the fourth act (’the comedy draws towards an end’) and with that in view to leave ‘acting and be ourselves’ (p. 292), but Angelica is determined that he will in some ways be mad indeed before that can come about.

Angelica’s response to Valentine’s play is to create another one of her own devising. Congreve supplies us with little background information about Angelica, but we do know that by Restoration standards she is very wealthy and that her fortune (£30,000) is in her own control. She has, Valentine tells us, been courted by others besides himself and although she has not encouraged him, it soon becomes clear that what she is doing is testing Valentine in an attempt to discover the sincerity or genuineness of his proclaimed love for her. In consequence, the play she devises is one in which she casts Sir Sampson in the role of her husband-to-be. Others more perspicacious than Sir Sampson might have had some doubts about the appropriateness of such a role, but given his inflated view of himself as somebody of almost heroic stature, it is a role he is easily lured into playing. Once under way in the fifth act, it is a play that the spectators on stage believe in too, including Scandal and Valentine, and it is because Valentine does believe it that he makes his splendid gesture of renunciation by signing away his inheritance for Angelica’s benefit, a gesture that Scandal sees as demonstrating that Valentine is now genuinely mad as it must lead to his ruin. For Angelica, of course, it is the climax she had wished for in what she calls the ‘trial’ of his ‘virtue’ (p. 310), and once that trial has been passed, she can tear up the document, and reward his generosity of spirit with her hand and heart. It is a marvellously satisfying and exuberant conclusion to what is, in many ways, Congreve’s sunniest play. Congreve’s final comedy, The Way of the World – his one tragedy, The Mourning Bride, had appeared to great acclaim in 1697 – was given its first performance in the March of 1700. Whereas in his two previous comedies, The Double Dealer and Love for Love, Congreve had used the relationships between two families as one of the structural means of organizing his drama, in The Way of the World he confines himself to just one. This, in part, explains the ‘complexity’ of the play, for with the exception of Mirabell and Marwood (and Petulant, too, if one wants to include the fools), everybody is in some way related to everybody else. Early on in the first act, Mirabell asks Fainall about his relationship to Sir Wilfull Witwoud, who is about to arrive on a visit from the country, and Fainall replies, in a speech no audience could surely be expected to follow:

… he is half brother to this Witwoud by a former wife, who was sister to my Lady Wishfort, my wife’s mother, (p. 329)

Because of all this consanguinity, the audience, as though present at somebody else’s family gathering, is on the outside and often only dimly aware of some of the underlying tensions, but it does slowly start to emerge that what we are witnessing is a battle for the Wishfort family, with Mirabell on one side and Fainall on the other, and a battle whose outcome will in part determine the nature of that family’s life for the next generation at least. For if Mirabell wins it, there is hope that through his marriage to Millamant a more open and generous structure may emerge; if he loses to Fainall, it will not.

At present, much of the control of the family lies in the hands of the comically formidable Lady Wishfort, for her own husband, Sir Jonathan, is dead, as are her two sisters and their husbands. Although her actual appearance is daringly delayed by Congreve until the beginning of Act Three, in a splendid scene in which she is gulping cherry brandy while calling for ‘paint’ for her ageing face, her presence and power are felt from the very beginning through the references made to her by other characters. It is a power or control that she not only exercises in the present but has exercised in the past for some time as well. It has manifested itself in the education she designed for her daughter Arabella (Mrs Fainall) which was largely based on the principle of impressing upon her ‘a young odium and aversion to the very sight of men’ (p. 397). It has manifested itself as well in marriage arrangements, for she points out that Arabella’s first husband, Languish, was her choice, and it is likewise a power she has over Millamant, for half of Millamant’s fortune (a not inconsiderable £6,000) depends upon her marrying with Lady Wishfort’s consent. It expresses itself, too, in the ‘cabal’ which she has set up and over which she presides; a group initially composed only of women, though, as Fainall tells us, they later decided to enrol one token man ‘upon which motion Witwoud and Petulant were enrolled members’ (p. 325). In her social appearance, her sense of herself is expressed in part through her attachment to ‘decorum’, an attachment which often manifests itself linguistically by a desperate search for the delicately appropriate phrase, as when she says to the (fake) Sir Rowland, ‘I hope you do not think me prone to any iteration of nuptials’ (p. 388). Of course there is a blindness in her to her own absurdity; a blindness which enables her to believe that Mirabell’s protestations of affection are genuine and not, as they are, a convenient disguise to enable him to pursue her niece.

Fainall and Mirabell are the first characters we meet in the chocolate house at the beginning of Act One. They have just finished playing cards and Mirabell, perhaps significantly, has lost.¹⁹ In terms 01 tone or attitude, it is difficult to make much distinction between them at this stage, though an early remark by Fainall, to the effect that if Mirabell had been more successful in his deception of Lady Wishfort then things would have remained in the ‘state of nature’ (p. 326), might suggest that, in Fainall’s view, there lies beneath the surface of the nominally civilized world an essentially Hobbesian struggle for power and gratification. It is almost certain that Fainall’s marriage to the then widowed Arabella Languish was prompted by motives no loftier than a desire for her money and his desire for further gratification is depicted through his adulterous affair with Mrs Marwood. That affair, it appears, was again partly motivated by Fainall’s greed, and in a fascinating scene in Act Two, Congreve, no longer needing the heightened language of tragedy to depict their tortured affair, brilliantly extends the range of his art. Fainall’s desires, however, are enlarged beyond Mrs Marwood to a desire for complete control of the Wishfort household, and by threatening to divorce his wife once he has found out about the earlier affair between Mirabell and her, he plans to take over his wife’s fortune, Millamant’s £6,000 and even control of Lady Wishfort herself. It is a threat only thwarted by Mirabell’s production of an earlier deed that Mrs Fainall had given him while still a widow; without it, Fainall might well have had his way.

Although it may be initially difficult to distinguish between Fainall and Mirabell, the characters’ similarities lie more in what we hear about Mirabell’s past than what we see of him during the course of the play. Like some earlier Restoration comic ‘heroes’, he appears to have no family of his own and there may be a suggestion, as in Lady Wishfort’s description of him as a ‘spendthrift prodigal’ (p. 357), that his own financial position is far from secure. More important, perhaps, at least for the modern reader or audience, is his treatment of Mrs Fainall, and, as far as recent commentators are concerned, opinion can range from seeing him as essentially a bounder to seeing him as little short of the perfect gentleman. The two of them, of course, had an affair while Arabella was still a widow, and Mirabell, in reply to her somewhat accusatory question of ‘why did you make me marry this man’ (p. 345), merely says that because of her suspected pregnancy, it was a marriage to save her ‘reputation’. The question of why Mirabell did not save her reputation by marrying her himself, which is the question most of us want to raise, is one that Mrs Fainall herself never asks, nor is it raised by others in the play. At one point Foible refers to her as a ‘pattern of generosity’ (p. 359), and perhaps it is by focusing on that quality and Mirabell’s equal honesty and trust in her in terms of his own affairs, that Congreve invites us to see the difference between them and the devious ways of Fainall and Mrs Marwood.

For in the play itself, Mirabell, far from being a successful schemer, is hardly ever in control of anything. His earlier pose as Lady Wishfort’s languishing lover has been uncovered by Mrs Marwood; his disguising of his servant as his uncle, Sir Rowland, also fails, and his attempts at a steady courtship of Millamant reduce him at one point to feeling that he would be better off courting a whirlwind. The characterization of Millamant has been praised by many as subtle and charming: her playfulness, her rapidly changing moods, can prove as delightful to an audience as they are baffling to Mirabell. Beyond that, however, they may suggest, not just a mercurial temperament, but a wariness on her part, a fear that love, even Mirabell’s love, may prove transient. Her independence is dear to her and she is all too aware that there are losses as well as gains if she does, as she puts it, agree to ‘dwindle into a wife’ (p. 380). In consequence, the famous ‘proviso’ scene in the fourth act not only dramatizes her final acceptance of that process of change or development but also, with its portrayal of the combination of personal commitment and social form, builds into the play a perception of the kind of life they will lead together once they are man and wife. With Mirabell’s mention of ‘breeding’ too, it may also suggest that in the future beyond the play, their own personal fulfilment will find a larger form in the renewal of the Wishfort family as well.

The verve and inventiveness of The Way of the World provides no evidence that Congreve felt that he had exhausted the possibilities of comedy – indeed it leaves just the opposite impression – but at the young age of thirty he was to cease writing comedies. It is true that the play was not as well received as Love for Love but it was far from being a failure and Congreve’s ongoing connection with the stage, as in his sharing with Vanbrugh the management of the new Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket and his writing the text for the opera, Semele, first set by Eccles and later by Handel, might suggest that at the time he did not think of 1700 as the end of his career. His health, indeed, had never been robust and his appointment to the position of Secretary to the Island of Jamaica in 1714 relieved him of any pressing financial reasons for returning to the stage. Collier’s attacks on Restoration drama probably do signal a shift in public attitudes as does the formation of such pressure groups as the Society for the Reformation of Manners. One or more of these facts may have exerted their influence on him but perhaps all such speculation is in the end fruitless and it is best simply to be grateful for what we have.

Eric S. Rump
October, 1984

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply indebted to the many editors of Congreve, both to those who have provided far more detailed editions of single plays, such as those in the New Mermaids and Regents Restoration series, and to those who have produced collected editions of his plays, such as Montague Summers, Herbert Davis and, most recently, Anthony Henderson. To all, my thanks. I would like to thank, too, for their kindness and cooperation, the staff of the British Library and the librarians both at York University, Toronto, and the University of Toronto. I would like to express my gratitude to my own college, Glendon College, York University, for the financial support that has been provided.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

For each of the plays I have based my text on the first quartos located in the British Library as these bring us closer to the original acting texts than the revised versions to be found in the collected Works of 1710. The spelling has been modernized but I have conserved as much of the original punctuation as seemed compatible with modern usage.

FURTHER READING

Virginia Ogden Birdsall, Wild Civility: The English Comic Spirit on
the Restoration Stage (Bloomington, Indiana, 1970).

John C. Hodges, William Congreve the Man: A Biography from New
Sources (London, 1941).

John C. Hodges, William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London,
1964).

Norman N. Holland, The First Modern Comedies (Harvard, 1959).
Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action (Cambridge, 1979).
Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late
Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1976).

Harold Love, Congreve (Oxford, 1974).

Maximillian E. Novak, William Congreve (New York, 1971).

W. H. Van Voris, The Cultivated Stance: The Designs of Congreve’s
Plays (London, 1965).

Aubrey L. Williams, An Approach to Congreve (Yale, 1979).

The Old Bachelor

TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE CHARLES,
LORD CLIFFORD OF LANESBOROUGH¹

My Lord,

It is with a great deal of pleasure that I lay hold on this first occasion, which the accidents of my life have given me of writing to your Lordship: for since at the same time I write to all the world, it will be a means of publishing (what I would have everybody know) the respect and duty which I owe and pay to you. I have so much inclination to be yours, that I need no other engagement. But the particular ties, by which I am bound to your Lordship and family, have put it out of my power to make you any compliment, since all offers of myself, will amount to no more than an honest acknowledgment, and only show a willingness in me to be grateful.

I am very near wishing that it were not so much my interest to be your Lordship’s servant, that it might be more my merit; not that I would avoid being obliged to you, but I would have my own choice to run me into the debt, that I might have it to boast I had distinguished a man, to whom I would be glad to be obliged, even without the hopes of having it in my power ever to make him a return.

It is impossible for me to come near your Lordship in any kind, and not to receive some favour; and while in appearance I am only making an acknowledgment (with the usual underhand dealing of the world), I am at the same time insinuating my own interest. I cannot give your Lordship your due, without tacking a bill of my own privileges. ’Tis true, if a man never committed a folly, he would never stand in need of a protection. But then power would have nothing to do, and good nature no occasion to show itself; and where those virtues are, ’tis pity they should want objects to shine upon. I must confess this is no reason why a man should do an idle thing, nor indeed any good excuse for it, when done; yet it reconciles the uses of such authority and goodness to the necessities of our follies, and is a sort of poetical logic, which at this time I would make use of, to argue your Lordship into a protection of this play. It is the first offence I have committed in this kind, or indeed in any kind of poetry, though not the first made public;² and, therefore, I hope will the more easily be pardoned. But had it been acted when it was first written, more might have been said in its behalf; ignorance of the town and stage would then have been excuses in a young writer, which now almost four years experience will scarce allow of. Yet I must declare myself sensible of the good nature of the town, in receiving this play so kindly, with all its faults, which I must own were for the most part very industriously covered by the care of the players; for, I think, scarce a character but received all the advantage it would admit of from the justness of action.

As for the critics, my Lord, I have nothing to say to, or against, any of them of any kind; from those who make just exceptions, to those who find fault in the wrong place. I will only make this general answer in behalf of my play (an answer, which Epictetus advises every man to make for himself to his censurers) viz. That if they who find some faults in it were as intimate with it as lam, they would find a great many more.