The Way of the World E-Book

William Congreve

• Herausgeber: William Congreve
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A Chocolate-house.
Mirabell and Fainall rising from cards. Betty waiting.
MIRA. You are a fortunate man, Mr. Fainall.
FAIN. Have we done?
MIRA. What you please. I’ll play on to entertain you.
FAIN. No, I’ll give you your revenge another time, when you are not so indifferent; you are thinking of something else now, and play too negligently: the coldness of a losing gamester lessens the pleasure of the winner. I’d no more play with a man that slighted his ill fortune than I’d make love to a woman who undervalued the loss of her reputation.
MIRA. You have a taste extremely delicate, and are for refining on your pleasures.
FAIN. Prithee, why so reserved? Something has put you out of humour.
MIRA. Not at all: I happen to be grave to-day, and you are gay; that’s all.

Leseprobe

William Congreve

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Table of contents

PROLOGUE.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.

ACT I.—SCENE I.

ACT II.—SCENE I.

ACT III.—SCENE I.

ACT IV.—SCENE I.

ACT V.—SCENE I.

EPILOGUE.

Audire est operæ pretium, procedere recteQui mæchis non vultis.—Hor. Sat. i. 2, 37. —Metuat doti deprensa.—Ibid.

PROLOGUE.

Spoken by Mr. Betterton.Of those few fools, who with ill stars are curst,Sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare the worst:For they’re a sort of fools which fortune makes,And, after she has made ’em fools, forsakes.With Nature’s oafs ’tis quite a diff’rent case,For Fortune favours all her idiot race.In her own nest the cuckoo eggs we find,O’er which she broods to hatch the changeling kind:No portion for her own she has to spare,So much she dotes on her adopted care.Poets are bubbles, by the town drawn in,Suffered at first some trifling stakes to win:But what unequal hazards do they run!Each time they write they venture all they’ve won:The Squire that’s buttered still, is sure to be undone.This author, heretofore, has found your favour,But pleads no merit from his past behaviour.To build on that might prove a vain presumption,Should grants to poets made admit resumption,And in Parnassus he must lose his seat,If that be found a forfeited estate.He owns, with toil he wrought the following scenes,But if they’re naught ne’er spare him for his pains:Damn him the more; have no commiserationFor dulness on mature deliberation.He swears he’ll not resent one hissed-off scene,Nor, like those peevish wits, his play maintain,Who, to assert their sense, your taste arraign.Some plot we think he has, and some new thought;Some humour too, no farce—but that’s a fault.Satire, he thinks, you ought not to expect;For so reformed a town who dares correct?To please, this time, has been his sole pretence,He’ll not instruct, lest it should give offence.Should he by chance a knave or fool expose,That hurts none here, sure here are none of those.In short, our play shall (with your leave to show it)Give you one instance of a passive poet,Who to your judgments yields all resignation:So save or damn, after your own discretion.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.

MEN.Fainall, in love with Mrs. Marwood,Mirabell, in love with Mrs. Millamant,Witwoud, follower of Mrs. Millamant,Petulant, follower of Mrs. Millamant,Sir Wilfull Witwoud, half brother to Witwoud, and nephew to Lady Wishfort,Waitwell, servant to Mirabell,WOMEN.Lady Wishfort, enemy to Mirabell, for having falsely pretended love to her,Mrs. Millamant, a fine lady, niece to Lady Wishfort, and loves Mirabell,Mrs. Marwood, friend to Mr. Fainall, and likes Mirabell,Mrs. Fainall, daughter to Lady Wishfort, and wife to Fainall, formerly friend to Mirabell,Foible, woman to Lady Wishfort,Mincing, woman to Mrs. Millamant,Dancers, Footmen, Attendants.Scene: London.The time equal to that of the presentation.

ACT I.—SCENE I.

A Chocolate-house.MirabellandFainallrising from cards. Bettywaiting.MIRA. You are a fortunate man, Mr. Fainall.FAIN. Have we done?MIRA. What you please. I’ll play on to entertain you.FAIN. No, I’ll give you your revenge another time, when you are not so indifferent; you are thinking of something else now, and play too negligently: the coldness of a losing gamester lessens the pleasure of the winner. I’d no more play with a man that slighted his ill fortune than I’d make love to a woman who undervalued the loss of her reputation.MIRA. You have a taste extremely delicate, and are for refining on your pleasures.FAIN. Prithee, why so reserved? Something has put you out of humour.MIRA. Not at all: I happen to be grave to-day, and you are gay; that’s all.FAIN. Confess, Millamant and you quarrelled last night, after I left you; my fair cousin has some humours that would tempt the patience of a Stoic. What, some coxcomb came in, and was well received by her, while you were by?MIRA. Witwoud and Petulant, and what was worse, her aunt, your wife’s mother, my evil genius—or to sum up all in her own name, my old Lady Wishfort came in.FAIN. Oh, there it is then: she has a lasting passion for you, and with reason.—What, then my wife was there?MIRA. Yes, and Mrs. Marwood and three or four more, whom I never saw before; seeing me, they all put on their grave faces, whispered one another, then complained aloud of the vapours, and after fell into a profound silence.FAIN. They had a mind to be rid of you.MIRA. For which reason I resolved not to stir. At last the good old lady broke through her painful taciturnity with an invective against long visits. I would not have understood her, but Millamant joining in the argument, I rose and with a constrained smile told her, I thought nothing was so easy as to know when a visit began to be troublesome; she reddened and I withdrew, without expecting her reply.FAIN. You were to blame to resent what she spoke only in compliance with her aunt.MIRA. She is more mistress of herself than to be under the necessity of such a resignation.FAIN. What? though half her fortune depends upon her marrying with my lady’s approbation?MIRA. I was then in such a humour, that I should have been better pleased if she had been less discreet.FAIN. Now I remember, I wonder not they were weary of you; last night was one of their cabal-nights: they have ’em three times a week and meet by turns at one another’s apartments, where they come together like the coroner’s inquest, to sit upon the murdered reputations of the week. You and I are excluded, and it was once proposed that all the male sex should be excepted; but somebody moved that to avoid scandal there might be one man of the community, upon which motion Witwoud and Petulant were enrolled members.MIRA. And who may have been the foundress of this sect? My Lady Wishfort, I warrant, who publishes her detestation of mankind, and full of the vigour of fifty-five, declares for a friend and ratafia; and let posterity shift for itself, she’ll breed no more.FAIN. The discovery of your sham addresses to her, to conceal your love to her niece, has provoked this separation. Had you dissembled better, things might have continued in the state of nature.MIRA. I did as much as man could, with any reasonable conscience; I proceeded to the very last act of flattery with her, and was guilty of a song in her commendation. Nay, I got a friend to put her into a lampoon, and compliment her with the imputation of an affair with a young fellow, which I carried so far, that I told her the malicious town took notice that she was grown fat of a sudden; and when she lay in of a dropsy, persuaded her she was reported to be in labour. The devil’s in’t, if an old woman is to be flattered further, unless a man should endeavour downright personally to debauch her: and that my virtue forbade me. But for the discovery of this amour, I am indebted to your friend, or your wife’s friend, Mrs. Marwood.FAIN. What should provoke her to be your enemy, unless she has made you advances which you have slighted? Women do not easily forgive omissions of that nature.MIRA. She was always civil to me, till of late. I confess I am not one of those coxcombs who are apt to interpret a woman’s good manners to her prejudice, and think that she who does not refuse ’em everything can refuse ’em nothing.FAIN. You are a gallant man, Mirabell; and though you may have cruelty enough not to satisfy a lady’s longing, you have too much generosity not to be tender of her honour. Yet you speak with an indifference which seems to be affected, and confesses you are conscious of a negligence.MIRA. You pursue the argument with a distrust that seems to be unaffected, and confesses you are conscious of a concern for which the lady is more indebted to you than is your wife.FAIN. Fie, fie, friend, if you grow censorious I must leave you:—I’ll look upon the gamesters in the next room.MIRA. Who are they?FAIN. Petulant and Witwoud.—Bring me some chocolate.MIRA. Betty, what says your clock?BET. Turned of the last canonical hour, sir.MIRA. How pertinently the jade answers me! Ha! almost one a’ clock! [Looking on his watch.] Oh, y’are come!SCENE II.MirabellandFootman.MIRA. Well, is the grand affair over? You have been something tedious.SERV. Sir, there’s such coupling at Pancras that they stand behind one another, as ’twere in a country-dance. Ours was the last couple to lead up; and no hopes appearing of dispatch, besides, the parson growing hoarse, we were afraid his lungs would have failed before it came to our turn; so we drove round to Duke’s Place, and there they were riveted in a trice.MIRA. So, so; you are sure they are married?SERV. Married and bedded, sir; I am witness.MIRA. Have you the certificate?SERV. Here it is, sir.MIRA. Has the tailor brought Waitwell’s clothes home, and the new liveries?SERV. Yes, sir.MIRA. That’s well. Do you go home again, d’ye hear, and adjourn the consummation till farther order; bid Waitwell shake his ears, and Dame Partlet rustle up her feathers, and meet me at one a’ clock by Rosamond’s pond, that I may see her before she returns to her lady. And, as you tender your ears, be secret.SCENE III.Mirabell, Fainall, Betty.FAIN. Joy of your success, Mirabell; you look pleased.MIRA. Ay; I have been engaged in a matter of some sort of mirth, which is not yet ripe for discovery. I am glad this is not a cabal-night. I wonder, Fainall, that you who are married, and of consequence should be discreet, will suffer your wife to be of such a party.FAIN. Faith, I am not jealous. Besides, most who are engaged are women and relations; and for the men, they are of a kind too contemptible to give scandal.MIRA. I am of another opinion: the greater the coxcomb, always the more the scandal; for a woman who is not a fool can have but one reason for associating with a man who is one.FAIN. Are you jealous as often as you see Witwoud entertained by Millamant?MIRA. Of her understanding I am, if not of her person.FAIN. You do her wrong; for, to give her her due, she has wit.MIRA. She has beauty enough to make any man think so, and complaisance enough not to contradict him who shall tell her so.FAIN. For a passionate lover methinks you are a man somewhat too discerning in the failings of your mistress.MIRA. And for a discerning man somewhat too passionate a lover, for I like her with all her faults; nay, like her for her faults. Her follies are so natural, or so artful, that they become her, and those affectations which in another woman would be odious serve but to make her more agreeable. I’ll tell thee, Fainall, she once used me with that insolence that in revenge I took her to pieces, sifted her, and separated her failings: I studied ’em and got ’em by rote. The catalogue was so large that I was not without hopes, one day or other, to hate her heartily. To which end I so used myself to think of ’em, that at length, contrary to my design and expectation, they gave me every hour less and less disturbance, till in a few days it became habitual to me to remember ’em without being displeased. They are now grown as familiar to me as my own frailties, and in all probability in a little time longer I shall like ’em as well.FAIN. Marry her, marry her; be half as well acquainted with her charms as you are with her defects, and, my life on’t, you are your own man again.MIRA. Say you so?FAIN. Ay, ay; I have experience. I have a wife, and so forth.SCENE IV.[To them] Messenger.MESS. Is one Squire Witwoud here?BET. Yes; what’s your business?MESS. I have a letter for him, from his brother Sir Wilfull, which I am charged to deliver into his own hands.BET. He’s in the next room, friend. That way.SCENE V.Mirabell, Fainall, Betty.MIRA. What, is the chief of that noble family in town, Sir Wilfull Witwoud?FAIN. He is expected to-day. Do you know him?MIRA. I have seen him; he promises to be an extraordinary person. I think you have the honour to be related to him.FAIN. Yes; he is half-brother to this Witwoud by a former wife, who was sister to my Lady Wishfort, my wife’s mother. If you marry Millamant, you must call cousins too.MIRA. I had rather be his relation than his acquaintance.FAIN. He comes to town in order to equip himself for travel.MIRA. For travel! Why the man that I mean is above forty.FAIN. No matter for that; ’tis for the honour of England that all Europe should know we have blockheads of all ages.MIRA. I wonder there is not an act of parliament to save the credit of the nation and prohibit the exportation of fools.FAIN. By no means, ’tis better as ’tis; ’tis better to trade with a little loss, than to be quite eaten up with being overstocked.MIRA. Pray, are the follies of this knight-errant and those of the squire, his brother, anything related?FAIN. Not at all: Witwoud grows by the knight like a medlar grafted on a crab. One will melt in your mouth and t’other set your teeth on edge; one is all pulp and the other all core.MIRA. So one will be rotten before he be ripe, and the other will be rotten without ever being ripe at all.FAIN. Sir Wilfull is an odd mixture of bashfulness and obstinacy. But when he’s drunk, he’s as loving as the monster in The Tempest, and much after the same manner. To give bother his due, he has something of good-nature, and does not always want wit.MIRA. Not always: but as often as his memory fails him and his commonplace of comparisons. He is a fool with a good memory and some few scraps of other folks’ wit. He is one whose conversation can never be approved, yet it is now and then to be endured. He has indeed one good quality: he is not exceptious, for he so passionately affects the reputation of understanding raillery that he will construe an affront into a jest, and call downright rudeness and ill language satire and fire.FAIN. If you have a mind to finish his picture, you have an opportunity to do it at full length. Behold the original.SCENE VI.[To them] Witwoud.WIT. Afford me your compassion, my dears; pity me, Fainall, Mirabell, pity me.MIRA. I do from my soul.FAIN. Why, what’s the matter?WIT. No letters for me, Betty?BET. Did not a messenger bring you one but now, sir?WIT. Ay; but [...]