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146 Restoration to Romanticism 1660–1789<br />

strange as if we had been married a great while; and as wellbred<br />

as if we were not married at all.<br />

MIRABELL Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your<br />

demands are pretty reasonable.<br />

MILLAMANT Trifles, – as liberty to pay and receive visits to and from<br />

whom I please; to write and receive letters, without interrogatories<br />

or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please; and choose<br />

conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no obligation<br />

upon me to converse with wits that I don’t like, because they are<br />

your acquaintance; or to be intimate with fools, because they may<br />

be your relations. Come to dinner when I please, dine in my<br />

dressing-room when I’m out of humour, without giving a reason.<br />

To have my closet inviolate; to be sole empress of my tea-table,<br />

which you must never presume to approach without first asking<br />

leave. And lastly wherever I am, you shall always knock at the<br />

door before you come in. These articles subscribed, if I continue<br />

to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife.<br />

What raises Congreve above many of his contemporaries is the acute<br />

observation of the social and emotional pressures on characters who are<br />

more richly drawn than traditional stereotypes. Like many later writers of<br />

comedy, Congreve was something of an outsider, having been brought up<br />

in Ireland, and perhaps the outsider’s eye gave him a privileged viewpoint<br />

on the society he portrayed with such insight, sympathy, and wit.<br />

Vanbrugh’s The Relapse and The Provok’d Wife (1696 and 1697)<br />

particularly outraged Jeremy Collier. They take linked plots to new<br />

heights, with richly drawn characters – such as Sir Novelty Fashion,<br />

Sir Tunbelly Clumsy, Sir John and Lady Brute, Lord Foppington, Lady<br />

Fancyfull – and a series of intrigues and impersonations, which bear<br />

out the implications of the characters’ names and attributes. Here,<br />

Loveless has his way with Berinthia – notice how she objects!<br />

BERINTHIA Heavens, what do you mean?<br />

LOVELESS Pray, what do you think I mean?<br />

BERINTHIA I don’t know.<br />

LOVELESS I’ll show you.<br />

BERINTHIA You may as well tell me.

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