by Maureen Cutajar

Created on: July 20, 2010

Mirabell and Millamant dramatize the true wit that is so carefully and symmetrically defined through opposition. They are wary and difficult resenting the loss of judgement that love imposes even as they accept it. Millamant declares, “well, if Mirabell should not make a good husband, I am a lost thing – for I find him I love him violently”. Earlier Mirabell voices his concern that for “a discerning man” he is somewhat too passionate for a lover.

Mirabell’s pragmatic scheming throughout the play is designed to procure him Millamant’s fortune. Millamant in turn treats her admirer with the wanton cruelty of a social opponent. However, their relationship reveals depths strangely out of keeping with the superficial manner of their exchanges.

In the Proviso Scene, Mirabell and Millamant are arguing in a humorous manner about a vision of marriage free from the cant and the hypocrisy that surround them. They are moving towards matrimony but they are making conditions.

Mirabell declares: “I’ll never marry, unless I am first made sure of my will and pleasure”. Millamant explicitly seeks a relationship fully and elegantly comfortable to the manners and ways of the world. However, she additionally requires within that studied conformity an assurance of continued affection and the space for a private existence. Millamant seeks to prevent their being “ashamed of one another for ever after”, and she demands the specific and limited independence available to her as a married woman.

Mirabell’s provisos reflect similar concerns with the working details of a meaningful private relationship. He forbids the eccentricities and excesses that would endanger the genuine commitment required of sexual partners, urging Millamant, in effect, not to trial with their love. He also comments on the health and safety of his prospective offspring, for which the audience can already discern a fatherly affection.

The lovers negotiate in this scene for a mutual private happiness within the confines of a rigid and demanding social context and they establish their relationship upon the possibility of such a reconciliation.

In Congreve’s “The Way of the World” the lovers are confronted with a tangle of intrigue but it is their skill in extricating themselves from it that is admired, their integrity is preserved by a tact that resists both the shallowness of affectation and the cruelty of blind passion. The manage to be sincere in a world full of pretence and their love is in any case true love.

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