Language and Action in the Way of the World, Love's Last Shift, and The Relapse

Lots of things happen in Restoration comedies, both onand off-stage. There are disguises and assignations, marriages, separations, and seductions; there are masques, dances, playgoing, walking in the park or the Mall; there are drinking and gaming; sometimes people read. But most of the time they talk. Conversation is, potentially, a morally significant activity. The better dramatists release that potential, so that physical activities can function as applications of values revealed in the primary activity of talking. When Sir Wilfull Witwoud makes his blundering attempt to propose to Millamant in the fourth act of The Way of the World, what catches the attention are less such physical details as the locked door, two people in a room, and Millamant's final, curt dismissal of Sir Wilfull, than the collision of two kinds of speech so different that proper communication is impossible, as Millamant uses words, not simply to fend off Sir Wilfull, but also, by preventing him from making his proposal in form, to guard herself from the unpleasant task of speaking a decision. Such an emphasis encourages discussion of these plays which proceeds from analysis of the way words are used to consideration of the congruence between the sayings and doings of characters, in order to determine degrees of psychological probability, moral perception, and aesthetic wholeness

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