names are unclear. How does Millamant treat her ‘thousand lovers’? What besides
wit is ‘admirable’ in Mirabell?
In the Proviso scene, the lovers negotiate the rules of their marriage:
MILLAMANT: ... I won’t be called names after I’m married; positively I won’t be called
names.
MIRABELL: Names!
MILLAMANT: Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweetheart, and the rest of that
nauseous cant, in which men and their wives are so fulsomly familiar – I shall never
bear that – Good Mirabell, don’t let us be familiar or fond, nor kiss before folks ....
Let us never visit together, nor go to a play together, but let us be very strange and
well bred: let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well
bred as if we were not married at all.
MIRABELL: Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your demands are pretty
reasonable.
Yet the sophisticated Millamant soon confesses to Mrs Fainall: ‘If Mirabell should
not make a good husband, I am a lost thing; for I find I love him violently.’ The mask
of wit slips to reveal true love.
Ushering Mrs Marwood into her closet to overhear a conversation, Lady Wishfort
says: ‘There are books over the chimney – Quarles and Pryn, and Short View of the
Stage, with Bunyan’s works to entertain you.’ Quarles was a quaint old moralizer;
Prynne an enemy of stage plays; Bunyan died in 1688. Congreve tries thus to laugh
off the recent attack on himself, among others, by Jeremy Collier in A Short View of
the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage(1698). Collier was not a Puritan
but a principled Anglican clergyman who refused to swear the oath to William and
Mary.
The Way of the Worldwas not a hit, and Congreve wrote little more for the stage.
George Farquhar stuck to the formula, but Collier’s distaste was prophetic.
Alexander Pope (1688–1744), whose own wit could be risqué, was soon to disap-
pr ove of the kind of Restoration comedy in which ‘obscenity was wit’.nFurther reading
Corns, T. N. (ed.),The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Danielson, D. (ed.),The Cambridge Companion to John Milton(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
Donaldson, I.,Ben Jonson: A Life(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Orgel, S.,The Illusion of Power(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). On the
masque.
Parry, G.,The Seve nteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature,
1603–1700(Harlow: Longman, 1989).
Smith,N.,Literature and Revolution in England(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University
Press, 1994).178 5 · STUART LITERATURE: TO 1700