William Congreve: Love for Love and The Way of the World

As I’m exploring Restoration drama, it’s inevitable that at some point I must get to Congreve, the most popular comic playwright of the period (despite writing only 5 plays), so here we go.

Love for Love

This play premiered in 1695. For context, that’s about 2 decades after Dryden’s Marriage à-la-Mode, and about a century after The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Love for Love is about Valentine, a young man who has got into great debts and now may lose his inheritance to his younger brother Ben, which to him means he would no longer be able to marry his love Angelica. 

It needed some getting used to (for me anyway), but it’s a witty play with many funny lines. 

“VALENTINE Sir, is this usage for your son? For that old, weather-headed fool, I know how to laugh at him; but you, sir—

SIR SAMPSON You, sir; and you, sir! – Why, who are you, sir? 

VALENTINE Your son, sir. 

SIR SAMPSON That’s more than I know, sir, and I believe not. 

VALENTINE Faith, I hope not. 

SIR SAMPSON What, would you have your mother a whore!...”

(Act 2) 

The entire play is in prose. 

“SIR SAMPSON […] Body o’ me, why was not I a bear, that my cubs might have lived upon sucking their paws? Nature has been provident only to bears and spiders; the one has its nutriment in his own hands, and t’other spins his habitation out of his entrails. 

VALENTINE Fortune was provident enough to supply all the necessities of my nature, if I had my right of inheritance. 

SIR SAMPSON Again! Oons, han’t you four thousand pound? If I had it again, I would not give thee a groat. – What, wouldst thou have me turn pelican, and feed thee out of my own vitals?...” 

(ibid.) 

I’m not surprised though that Love for Love has fallen out of fashion, as it’s a very silly play. The plot is silly. The tricks are silly. The humour partly makes up for it, compared to the Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge plays (some of which left a bad taste in my mouth), but this is still a sordid world that Congreve is depicting, a world full of lust and greed and deceit and betrayal. 

“MISS PRUE Oh, I have pure news; I can tell you pure news. – I must not marry the seaman now – my father says so. Why won’t you be my husband? You say you love me, and you won’t be my husband. And I know you may be my husband now if you please. 

TATTLE Oh fie, miss; who told you so, child?

[…] 

MISS PRUE Who? Why you did; did not you? 

TATTLE O pox, that was yesterday, miss; that was a great while ago, child. I have been asleep since; slept a whole night, and did not so much as dream of the matter.” 

(Act 5) 

In Marriage à-la-Mode, Dryden has got a good idea of writing the two plotlines in two modes, separating the pure and loving couple from the cynical and deceitful world. Congreve doesn’t do so: Angelica may seem angelic enough, I suppose, but Valentine is part of the same sordid world that Congreve satirises. Angelica tests Valentine in the final scene and sees him as a good choice for a husband, but I don’t. I remember the beginning: 

“JEREMY […] there’s your father’s steward, and the nurse with one of your children from Twitnam. 

VALENTINE Pox on her, could she find no other time to fling my sins in my face? […] A thoughtless two-handed whore, she knows my condition well enough and might have overlaid the child a fortnight ago if she had any forecast in her.” 

(Act 1) 

(overlaid=smothered) 

That’s not exactly likeable, is it? The play is funny, but to me it’s no wonder that it’s no longer staged 3 centuries later. 

The Way of the World 

The play was premiered in 1700, 5 years after Love for Love. This is the plot: Mirabell wants to marry Millamant, but he must receive the blessing of Millamant’s aunt, Lady Wishfort; Lady Wishfort however holds a grudge against him and wants Millamant to marry her nephew Wilfull Witwoud.

It sounds simple—Mirabell has to persuade Lady Wishfort to change her mind—but the plot is intricate because of the complicated relationships between the characters: Mirabell is friends with both the Fainalls; Fainall married his wife for money, as she’s Lady Wishfort’s daughter and a widow; Mrs Fainall also didn’t marry him for love, and was once involved with Mirabell; in another strand, Millamant, in love with Mirabell and supposed to marry Sir Wilfull Witwoud, is also being pursued by Witwoud and Petulant, etc. 

Look at this conversation between Mrs Fainall and her friend, Mrs Marwood: 

“MRS FAINALL Ay, ay, dear Marwood, if we will be happy, we must find the means in ourselves, and among ourselves. Men are ever in extremes; either doting or averse. While they are lovers, if they have fire and sense, their jealousies are insupportable: and when they cease to love (we ought to think at least) they loathe, they look upon us with horror and distaste, they meet us like the ghosts of what we were, and as from such, fly from us.

MRS MARWOOD True, ’tis an unhappy circumstance of life that love should ever die before us, and that the man so often should outlive the lover. But say what you will, ’tis better to be left than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old. For my part, my youth may wear and waste, but it shall never rust in my possession.”

(Act 2)

The cynicism about marriage and human nature that I saw in Love for Love is also in this play. 

“MRS FAINALL Is it possible? Dost thou hate those vipers, men?

MRS MARWOOD I have done hating ’em, and am now come to despise ’em; the next thing I have to do is eternally to forget ’em.

MRS FAINALL There spoke the spirit of an Amazon, a Penthesilea.

MRS MARWOOD And yet I am thinking sometimes to carry my aversion further.

MRS FAINALL How?

MRS MARWOOD Faith, by marrying; if I could but find one that loved me very well, and would be throughly sensible of ill usage, I think I should do myself the violence of undergoing the ceremony.”

(ibid.) 

Seem like best friends, don’t they? Congreve then reveals that Mrs Marwood is having an affair with Fainall, the husband.  

The Way of the World is very witty: the vivacious and quick-witted Millamant is clearly a cousin of Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Rosalind—the verbal sparring between her and Mirabell is especially reminiscent of Beatrice and Benedick—Congreve’s play also makes me think of Oscar Wilde. However, it doesn’t have the light touch of Oscar Wilde or the warmth of Molière—it’s darker, more serious—and compared to Love for Love, it’s subtler and more sophisticated. In some ways, it’s more like Dangerous Liaisons: Congreve seems more interested in the villains, and that viper Mrs Marwood is in the centre of the play. 

“MILLAMANT Well, ’tis a lamentable thing, I swear, that one has not the liberty of choosing one’s acquaintance as one does one’s clothes.

MRS MARWOOD If we had that liberty, we should be as weary of one set of acquaintance, though never so good, as we are of one suit, though never so fine. A fool and a doily stuff would now and then find days of grace, and be worn for variety.

MILLAMANT I could consent to wear ’em, if they would wear alike; but fools never wear out. They are such drap de Berri things! Without one could give ’em to one’s chambermaid after a day or two.

MRS MARWOOD […] If you would but appear barefaced now, and own Mirabell, you might as easily put off Petulant and Witwoud as your hood and scarf. And indeed ’tis time, for the town has found it, the secret is grown too big for the pretence. ’Tis like Mrs. Primly’s great belly: she may lace it down before, but it burnishes on her hips. Indeed, Millamant, you can no more conceal it than my Lady Strammel can her face, that goodly face, which in defiance of her Rhenish-wine tea will not be comprehended in a mask.

MILLAMANT I’ll take my death, Marwood, you are more censorious than a decayed beauty, or a discarded toast…” 

(Act 3) 

The play, for the large part, is bitter, and even Millamant is here sardonic. 

In the end, all is resolved (though I thought the exposé was a bit silly) and Congreve shows that there is love, there is trust, there is decency, even if he was more interested in the villains. This is a great play, a brilliant study of hypocrisy, manipulation, and deceit.