EXAMINING THE RESTORATION COMEDY OF ENGLISH DRAMA

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Fainall has promised to lavish the money on her if swindled. Her restless effort in Act V to point out to Lady Wishfort, “the pilfalls of litigating relationships in court” (Davis 1999) is to maximise her opportunity to enable Fainall get the estate, to increase her life of pleasure. In fact, Mrs. Marwood’s verbal utterances negate her nature. She claims to hate men but she sleeps with her friend’s husband and even yearns for Mirabell. In Act II, Foible says of her, “she has a month’s mind for Mirabell, but I know Mr. Mirabell can’t abide her”. Millamant also knows that Mrs. Marwood has a longing desire for Mirabell and decides to play on her jealousy with verbal cruelty:

Then I alone the conquest prize

When I insult a rival’s eyes

If there’s delight in love

It is when I see

That heart, which others bleed for

Bleed for me

Fainall is as sexually promiscuous as he is excessively greedy. He sleeps with Mrs. Marwood and works in a clandestine way to dispossess his wife and her mother – in – law of their wealth for a life of profligacy. He shows as array of greed in Act V where he seeks to rely on Lady Wishfort’s attempted marriage of backmail to dispossess her of her inheritance. But as Paul and Miriam Mueschike observe, “the double – dealer whose life has been a sham meets shattering defeat through overconfidence in a spurious document”.

In fact, as Norman N. Holland (1973) states, “Fainall’s deed is an abortive attempt to make social pressure permanently dislocate emotions, to create a retrograde movement in which the fear of scandal separates Mirabell and Millamant”. Foible really lived up to her name. She causes confusion here and there and together with Waitwell, she agrees to blackmail her mistress, who brought her up from nowhere. Like her, Waitwell is enthusiastic to play Sir Rowland. He tells his master, Mirabell that:

The difficulty will be how to recover my acquaintance and familiarity with my former self, and fall from my transformation to a reformation into Waitwell.

The other world of the play is an attempt to transform a culture of sexual immorality and profligacy into relationships of trust and self – control. Mirabell, Millamant, and Sir Wilfull Witwoud are used in the idiom of the play to propagate this change. On this side of the coin, we see a hand earnestly waving goodbye to illicit sexual jamboree, gambling, and avarice. Before the play opens, Mirabell had had a fill of premarital sex, but within the context of the play, we see him as being focused and emotionally stable, having only one goal, to make Millamant a trusted wife. He refuses to be Lady Wishfort’s lover even though he is aware that she is terribly rich. He refuses to sleep with Mrs. Marwood who is described as having a month’s mind for him.

Of all the women in the play, Mrs. Millamant is the only one who is chaste and decides to remain so until she gets a man who can be trusted and save her from sexual scandal. She needs a man with whom she can enter into a marriage of confidence. “Before their contract scene Millamant insists on treating love lightly and distantly” (Holland 534). Millamant’s tauntings and feminist provises are not intended to hurt Mirabell but to test his emotional stability and allegiance. There is no doubt that she loves Mirabell tenderly for after their contract, she remarks:

Well, if Mirabell should not make a good husband, I am a lost thing for I find I love him violently.

Their long wooing is not only a way of taking precaution, but an opportunity to build trust and deepen their emotional feeling towards each other. Martin Price (1973) expresses the opinion that:

Millamant’s affectations do not reveal her as artificial. They are clearly defensive maneuveres. She seems at every point to be inviting Mirabell to separate himself from this world and to free her from it.

In spite of the various stumbling blocks on his way to marry Millamant, Mirabell remains undaunted and constant. The enormous obstacles he wades through demonstrate that true love is a very protent force, stronger even than kinship relationship. Although Mirabell stirs Lady Wishfort out of her wit in the marriage of blackmail, all is done to take hold of Millamant for it is he also who initiates the process of calming frayed nerves and points to a new moral order, to embrace conscionable existence which blossomed in the English drama of the 18th century. In fact, it is with reference to the character of Mirabell that Downer (1950: 212) notes:

Congreve has one basic plot, the story of an honest love affair brought to a near catastrophe by the hero – gallant’s relations with some other woman in the play, relations which proceed not so much from congenital looseness as from an unwillingness to act contrary to the prescribed code of social behaviour.

CONCLUSION

Restoration drama, especially, the comic genre is a reflection of a society in social decay as a result of collapsed social structures. It is a society bereft of God and moral certitude; but the drama also shows the forces of decency struggling for self – assertion.

This article has examined Restoration comedy. Specifically, it focused on the conditions that brought about the new drama, the nature of Restoration comedy, and the biography of William Congreve are discussed. Finally, Congreve’s The Way of the World has been considered, as an example of Restoration comedy.

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