‘I will deceive ’em all, and yet secure myself…This double-dealing is a jewel.’
(thoughts of the Double Dealer himself, the villainous Jack Maskwell)

After the smash hit success of his first play, The Old Bachelor, Congreve quickly followed up with his second play, The Double Dealer, performed later the same year (1693).

It is an experimental play, quite a bold move for a young man of 23. What makes it experimental is that the action is set almost entirely in just one place, namely A gallery in the Lord Touchwood’s house, with chambers adjoining.

In the dedication to the printed version of the play, Congreve explicitly says he set out to observe Aristotle’s three unities, unity of time and place and subject matter, to produce what he describes as ‘a true and regular comedy’.

The so-called unities derive from Aristotle’s work The Art of Poetry or Poetics, written around 335 BC. In this text Aristotle analysed the successful plays of ancient Greece to see what they had in common and deduced some common features they shared, that:

• most of them concern just one subject uncluttered by sub-plots or digressions
• they all take place in one location
• and they all tale place in the space of at most a day, often often in ‘real time’ i.e. over the same amount of time that the play takes to perform and watch i.e. about three hours.

In Aristotle’s book these three ‘unities’ are the results of an empirical analysis of the plays that had been written up to his time. In the hands of later critics and theorists they were turned into ‘rules’ which good drama must obey, especially in France and especially in the 17th century.

And it was from contemporary French writers that Congreve took the idea of the unities and, indeed, some of these French critics (le Bossu, Rapin and Dacier) are mentioned in the play itself – albeit the reference is given to the pretentious bubblebrain Lady Froth and so played for laughs. (I wonder whether this is because the idea was seen as frenchified and pretentious…)

Anyway, in the dedicatory letter to the printed edition, Congreve is explicit about his wish to fulfil them, saying he ‘was resolved to preserve the three unities of the drama’. The Double Dealer is a playwright’s experiment at using Aristotle’s three unities in the composition of a Restoration comedy.

We’ve mentioned how The Double Dealer fulfils unities of time and place (almost all set in the long gallery at Lord Touchwood’s house, and taking place on just one evening) – but the unity of subject matter?

The classic Greek plays were extremely sparse and pure. Restoration comedy, by contrast, made a virtue of building up a labyrinth of complex plots and sub-plots, with the characters themselves hatching schemes, putting on disguises, and carrying out endless cons and scams. So you’d have thought that unity of subject was a non-starter for a playwright working in the genre Congreve was engaged in, yet that is not his opinion.

I made the plot as strong as I could because it was single, and I made it single because I would avoid confusion, and was resolved to preserve the three unities of the drama.

Is it single? Maybe he’s referring to the way everything in the plot stems from just one event, the planned marriage – the next day – of Mellefont and Cynthia, and the way the play then proceeds to engender numerous plots (and counter-plots) they all spring, at root, from that one theme.

Well, so much for the theory he expounds in the preface – how much does it work in practice?

Cast

Men

Maskwell, a villain; pretended friend to Mellefont, gallant to Lady Touchwood, and in love with Cynthia
Lord Touchwood, uncle to Mellefort
Mellefont, promised to, and in love with Cynthia
Careless, his friend
Lord Froth, a solemn coxcomb
Brisk, a pert coxcomb
Sir Paul Plyant, an uxorious, foolish old knight; brother to Lady Touchwood, and father to Cynthia

Women

Lady Touchwood, in love with Mellefont
Cynthia, daughter to Sir Paul by a former wife, promised to Mellefont
Lady Froth, a great coquette; pretender to poetry, wit, and learning
Lady Plyant, insolent to her husband, and easy to any pretender

Music

As with The Old Bachelor, the incidental music and settings of songs were written by Henry Purcell.

N.B. Scene divisions

The Penguin paperback edition of the four plays of William Congreve is very light on scene division, dividing acts into 2 or 3 scenes at most, based on a change of location.

By contrast, the Project Gutenberg online edition – which is itself a facsimile of the edition edited by critic G.S. Street at the very end of the 19th century – indicates the start of a new scene every time the personnel on stage change i.e. when anyone exits or enters. Since people are continually coming and going in Restoration comedies, this means there can be as many as 25 ‘scenes’ in each act.

To begin with I summarised the play just in paragraphs addressing the main plot or character developments. But in Act 4, I switched to using Street’s notation, copying his ‘scene’ numbers, even when they indicated that a character was alone onstage for only a couple of sentences.

I did it as an experiment to see if it makes my text more or less readable. I think it makes it slightly more disjointed and maybe harder to read. On the other hand, it means the reader (you) gets definitive information about who is on stage, or leaving or entering, at every moment of the play.

Which layout do you prefer?

Act 1

Introduces the location – A gallery in the Lord Touchwood’s house, with chambers adjoining – key characters and the set-up. A formal dinner is taking place.

Male characters

Mellefont is the male lead. His sidekick is Careless. There is a shallow fop who fails to see how crude and tactless he is, named Brisk. Lord Touchwood, whose home they’re in, is Mellefont’s uncle. Mellefont is engaged to the daughter of Sir Paul Plyant, who is a guest at the dinner. They are scheduled to be married the following morning. Other male guests include the pert coxcomb Brisk and the solemn coxcomb, Lord Froth (‘But there is nothing more unbecoming a man of quality than to laugh; ’tis such a vulgar expression of the passion; everybody can laugh…when I laugh, I always laugh alone.’) And also there is a fellow rake on Mellefont and Careless’s level, Jack Maskwell.

Female characters

The ladies attending the dinner are Lord Touchwood’s wife, who has a secret passion for Mellefont. Cynthia, the daughter of Sir Paul Plyant who is engaged to Mellefont. Sir Paul’s wife and Cynthia’s mother, the lascivious Lady Plyant, and the solemn coxcomb Lord Froth’s wife, the pretentious Lady Froth.

The play opens with Mellefont following Careless out into the gallery. Dinner is over. The menfolk are in one room, presumably the dining room, while the women have retired to another room at the end of the gallery for tea and gossip.

Careless is fed up of the men’s guzzling and senseless words and so was going to pay the women a visit. Mellefont catches up with him and says he has something important to tell him but at exactly that moment they are interrupted by Brisk who has also followed Careless from the dining room and now makes a display if thinking himself a grand and clever fellow, using elaborate metaphors which he then points out – which the other two put up with, and the audience laugh at, till he’s dispatched back to the dining room.

It’s very important to all these plays that the lead characters are established as being on an upper plane of wit and sophistication. They all use the same technique to establish this which is to include at least one pretentious, high-falutin and idiotic fop to show how not to do it – how wit and style easily degenerate into clever-clever mannerisms and pretentious speech which at the same time fails to understand what is going on. In a way it’s a most important dynamic than the more obvious one of that between the sexes. Through this simple device the audience is invited to identify with the two clever lead figures (it’s always two, the minimum number which allows dialogue) and to share in their mocking scorn of the stupid fop figure.

The plays are designed to make the audience feel superior and clever.

Mellefont reveals that Lady Touchwood came to his bedroom and made an advance to him, which he rejected, since when she has taken a furious hatred of him and is doing everything she can to undermine his reputation with Sir Paul, his prospective father-in-law. Therefore Mellefont asks Careless if he will woo Lady Plyant to take up her time and ensure she isn’t influenced against the marriage by wicked Lady Touchwood. Lord and Lady Froth will be too busy admiring each other and the idiot Brisk. Mellefont will keep an eye on his uncle, Lord Touchwood, and Jack Maskwell has promised to keep a watch on Lady Touchwood.

But as his name, and the cast list, indicate, Maskwell is ‘a villain’ working directly against Mellefont’s interests, who is prepared to egg on Lady Touchwood’s malice, because he himself is in love with Mellefont’s fiancee, Cynthia. Though Mellefont thinks he is a trusted friend, Careless quickly explains that he (Careless) doesn’t like him (Maskwell) and suspects him of conspiring with his Aunt, Lady Touchwood.

So, in just the first few minutes of the play, Congreve has established all the characters, their relationships, the baddies’ scheme against him and his counter-plan. It reminds me of the game of strategy, Risk. You feel some kind of process flow diagram is required to capture not only the relationships, but the flows of energy, of ‘hate’ and ‘love’ and the elaborate scheming.

The other menfolk join Mellefont and Careless in the gallery, Sir Paul and Lord Touchwood drunk and reel off to see the women, leaving Brisk and Lord Froth to display their pretentiousness and folly to the two male leads e.g. Lord Froth goes to plays solely not to laugh at them and thus mock the authors. Which Careless says is idiotic, and they then debate what is meant by wit. Then go off to join the ladies

Enter Lady Touchwood and Maskwell, in effect The Conspirators. She is livid with him. He is sly. It becomes clear that, on the rebound from Mellefont’s rejection, hot and indignant, she allowed Maskwell to sleep with her, or:

MASKWELL: I pressed the yielding minute, and was blest.

Thus – as Lady Touchwood sees it – degrading her and betraying his patron, Lord Touchwood, her husband, who has sponsored Maskwell’s rise.

At his words Lady Touchwood quickly flares up into a fury, pacing up and down, and Maskwell keeps having to wait for her to calm down. Maskwell shrewdly sees that what lies at the root of her fury is her ongoing unrequited passion for Mellefont. She loves him and hates him at the same time. Maskwell vows to help her by breaking off Mellefont’s match with Cynthia to which she greedily agrees.

Maskwell tells her he has a Cunning Plan. Lady Touchwood must persuade Lady Pliant that Mellefont is secretly in love with her. Do this, and more of the plan will follow… They exeunt.

Act 2

Lady Froth (dim) and Cynthia (Mellefont’s clever fiancée). Froth is comically pretentious and patronising.

LADY FROTH: For sure my Lord Froth … wants nothing but a blue ribbon and a star to make him shine, the very phosphorus of our hemisphere. Do you understand those two hard words? If you don’t, I’ll explain ’em to you.
CYNTHIA: Yes, yes, madam, I’m not so ignorant. —At least I won’t own it, to be troubled with your instructions.  [Aside.]

In this scene Lord and Lady Froth get ample room to display their nauseatingly self-satisfied love for each other, they praise Brisk for his infinite wit, and generally preen and show off to each other. Lady Froth writes, poems and plays, she has even now completed an epic poem titled The Syllabub, a play on words given that her husband’s name is Froth.

These scenes powerfully convey the sense that ‘we’ – the Truly Tasteful – are adrift in a sea of fools.

They push off, leaving the stage to the two young lovers, Mellefont and Cynthia, who proceed to demonstrate that they are intelligent, level headed and, above all, equal in the cut and thrust of witty conversation. They compare marriage to a game of bowls, or a game at cards.

Into this civilised conversation intrude Lord and Lady Plyant, the former hopping mad because he thinks Mellefont is using Cynthia as a pretext (‘a stalking horse’) to seduce his wife, Lady P. Both are outraged and insist on taking Cynthia away from this snake in the grass. Mellefont instantly detects the malign hand of Lady Touchwood.

Leaving Lady Plyant and Mellefont alone. The comedy in this scene comes from the way Lady Plyant starts out outraged and scandalised at what they’ve been told of Mellefont fancying her, but then slowly dwells on the weakness of the flesh, and of course she is attractive, very attractive, and so, well, nature must take its course:

LADY PLYANT: I know love is powerful, and nobody can help his passion. ’Tis not your fault; nor, I swear, it is not mine. How can I help it, if I have charms? And how can you help it, if you are made a captive?

Lady Plyant becomes increasingly confused about her own attitude, then, as other characters approach, flees.

Mellefont soliloquises that this complication – the red herring that Mellefont fancies Lady Plyant – is his aunt’s doing sure enough – yet it is a relatively simple ruse, ‘a trifling design’. Surely there is more behind. A suspicion which echoes Maskwell’s earlier explanation to Lady Touchwood that he has ‘a stronger plot’.

Enter Maskwell. He feigns hearty friendship with Mellefont and proceeds to tell him most of the truth i.e. Lady Touchwood is conspiring against her marriage and has asked him, Maskwell, to be her tool, to conspire to cancel the marriage, in reward for which he, Maskwell, will receive Cynthia.

Mellefont is innocently grateful to ‘his friend’ and asks for details but Maskwell says people are coming. Return in an hour and he will explain everything. Mellefont exits.

Maskwell delivers a soliloquy, much like one of Iago’s soliloquies, explaining his ideology i.e. all’s fair in love and war, and lying and cheating appear the same to the external viewer as truth and honesty.

MASKWELL: Treachery?  What treachery?  Love cancels all the bonds of friendship, and sets men right upon their first foundations.

Most of the poems and songs in these plays are conventional jingles, but he delivers a quatrain which has genuine psychological power:

Why will mankind be fools, and be deceived,
And why are friends’ and lovers’ oaths believed,
When each, who searches strictly his own mind,
May so much fraud and power of baseness find?

Act 3

Lord and Lady Touchwood during which the Lord finds Lady all too quick to believe bad things of Mellefont and wanting to call the marriage off. He suspects her. She moves to overcome this doubt by going on to say that Mellefont made a pass at her too, only a few days ago, it was probably nothing… and so cunningly infuriating Lord Touchwood till he vows to strip Mellefont naked and throw him out in the street. She pushes him into a side room.

Enter Maskwell and he and Lady Touchwell continue with their conspiracy i.e. they must continue to work on Lord Touchwood and not let his anger to Mellefont cool. Maskwell tells her to tell Lord Touchwood that he (Maskwell) is a good friend to Mellefont, but tried to restrain his passion for Lady T, and vowed he would tell Lord T next time Mellefont told him he was about to make another pass at her. Lady Touchwell agrees, but in an aside Maskwell tells the audience this manoeuvre will also allow Maskwell to cheat Lady Touchwood – the person he’s talking to at that moment. What a bad man!

Lady Touchwood departs to continue playing on Lord Touchwood’s anger at Mellefont. They arrange to meet back up at 8pm that night.

Maskwell has a soliloquy in which he thinks aloud how difficult it is to keep up a pretence of passion for Lady Touchwood who now bores him. He makes the cynically unpleasant point that pretending passion is easy enough in the build-up sex, ‘before fruition’ – but afterwards much harder.

Along comes Mellefont and Maskwell outlines a cunning plan to him. He explains that Lady Touchwood – as payment for Maskwell fouling up the marriage of Mellefont and Cynthia – has offered him, Maskwell, her body. He is to go to her apartment at 8pm to ravish her. Now – how about Mellefont comes along a little after and catches them about to have sex? Maskwell will run out a back passage, leaving Mellefont to confront Lady Touchwood with her attempted adultery. She will have to comply with his wishes, and they will be to cease and desist putting obstacles in the way of his marriage to Cynthia.

Mellefont overflows with gratitude to Maskwell, promises to rendezvous with him at 7.45 tonight, Maskwell exits.

Careless joins Mellefont and tells him how his wooing of Lady Plyant is going i.e. he’s struggling, she goes on and on about her virtue, and they both laugh and what a hen-pecked husband she has made out of Lord Plyant.

At which point Lord and Lady Plyant enter. It becomes clearer than ever that Lady P really henpecks, badgers and humiliates her husband in public. A boy brings a letter. He goes to give it to Sir Paul but Lady P insists she receives it. Just one of the ways in which the normal hierarchy of male authority is undermined in their marriage.

While she opens the letter, Sir Paul laments to Careless that he has a fine estate, town houses and so on, but no heir. Surely that is easy to remedy, says Careless. No, alas, replies Sir Paul, his wife will only let him touch her once a year, if then. In fact they go on to describe the way Sir Paul lets himself be swaddled in blankets like a baby before bed-time to render him utterly incapable of movement, let alone seduction.

Presumably this is meant to be comic, and the audience is meant to fall about at Sir Paul’s pathetic figure, but it comes across on the page as rather sad. The comic patter continues to its logical conclusion, which is Lord Plyant wishing Careless could help him to achieve a male heir. Well, says Careless, I may be able to help you out there…

Enter Lord Froth and Cynthia. Lord Froth is the fool who has a downer on anyone laughing, such a vulgar habit! Cynthia humours the old fool.

Boy enters with another note, Sir Paul tries to interrupt Lady Plyant but she is deep in conversation with Careless, who says aside to Lord Plyant that he is managing the matter they talked of – i.e. Sir Paul thinks Careless is somehow wrangling Lady P into having sex with her husband, whereas we realise Careless is chatting her up to at least give her the impression he wants to have sex with her. Or does he want to have sex with her? And is Sir Paul in fact, genuinely encouraging Careless to do so?

Exit Sir Paul. Enter Brisk and Lady Froth. She, if you remember, fancies herself as a writer, so they enter discussing the merits of scenes in her epic poem, a passage designed to expose their ignorance and lack of taste so the audience can laugh at them. They join with Lord Froth in ridiculing some acquaintances, Lady Whiffler, Mr Sneer and Sir Laurence Loud.

In an aside Cynthia says she has realised there’s no-one so stupid as can’t find even stupider people to mock and condemn. She often makes remarks like this, choric comments on the action.

A chair has arrived in which apparently is conveyed Lady Froth’s daughter. It is indicative of her vain pretensions that she has named her daughter Sapho (after the ancient Greek poet) and very publicly claims she can’t be without seeing her every two hours or so. For some reason, giving children pretentious names reminded me of Posy Simmonds’s cartoon strip, Posy, mocking middle class pretensions. Three hundred years separate the two. Nothing really changes.

Act 4

Mellefont and Cynthia. I find them an attractive couple. Neither is cheating or deceiving the other. They speak as complete equals without recourse to all the insults common in Restoration comedy. They contemplate running off and marrying for love, damn the fact that she’s an heiress (aha). Then she says no, but to prove his devotion, she is counting on Mellefont bringing Lady Touchwood to heel.

They exit and give way to Careless and Lady Plyant. If you remember, Mellefont asked his friend Careless to seduce Lady Plyant so as to prevent her listening to and becoming part of Lady Touchwood’s campaign to derail Mellefont’s marriage. This scene is designed to show Lady Plyant’s wordy self-regard, which is quite funny, but the real comedy lies in Careless adopting and exaggerating the rhetoric of a devoted lover, interspersed with exasperated asides to the audience complaining about how difficult it is to keep up this charade.

Finally, after reams of loverly doggerel, Lady Plyant breaks and weeps at his loverly devotion – at which point Careless tells the audience he’s struggling not to burst out laughing. At which point Sir Paul appears with his daughter, Cynthia. Careless quickly hands Lady Plyant a love letter and scarpers.

Now, you may remember that Lady Plyant had caused a great fuss when she accused Mellefont of making a pass at her. Now she changes her tune. Now she declares it was an honest mistake on her part, she believes Mellefont is honourable, and when her husband pushes her on the subject, says she believes so because Mr Careless has told her so. Smart Cynthia immediately see her (step)-mother is in love with Careless, and has changed to her (Cynthia’s) side i.e. supporting the marriage of Cynthia and Mellefont – because Careless has asked her to.

Now Lady Plyant asks for that letter which Sir Paul received in the last act. She wants to read Careless’s love letter under pretence of reading Sir Paul’s. As you might expect it is full of lovey expressions but when she goes to return Sir Paul’s letter to him, she gives him Careless’s love letter by mistake!

Brisk arrives to say there’s music and dancing in the hall and can they please release Cynthia to go dance and also, could Sir Paul send Careless to the dancing if he meets him. Sir Paul promises and exits.

Brisk, by himself, soliloquises, telling us he is love with Lady Froth and fussing and fretting about what to say to her.

Enter Lady Froth for a ridiculous comic scene in which they both declare their love yet mock each other, incapable of taking themselves or the situation seriously. They embrace and at that precise moment her husband, Lord Froth, enters.

Scene 7

Thinking quickly, Lady Froth converts the embrace into practicing the country dancing which even now is taking place in the main hall. Lord Froth is momentarily jealous then realises they are dancing and relaxes. A bit. Still suspicious.

The scene contains a particularly crude piece of double entendre. Embroidering on her excuse, Lady Froth asks her husband if he will practice dancing with her.

LADY FROTH: Shall you and I do our close dance, to show Mr. Brisk?
LORD FROTH: No, my dear, do it with him.
LADY FROTH: I’ll do it with him, my lord, when you are out of the way.

You can well imagine the arch way an actress can deliver that line to the audience which roars with laughter, 330 years ago, as today. They all exit.

Scene 8

Enter Lady Plyant and Careless. Now we see the denouement of the mistaken letter gag. Lady P just has time to tell Careless she’s given her husband Careless’s love letter before…

Scene 9

He enters, reading the letter which makes it perfectly plain Careless is scheduled to rendezvous with his wife that night and plough her. He is incensed and very bitter that he has spent three years being swaddled up every night, while his wife is all the time arranging for him to become a cuckold.

Scene 10

However, Careless has had time to come up with a cunning plan and Lady Plyant now enters, asks her husband if he has read this outrageous letter, and turns the tables by asking whether he – Sir Paul – was complicit in this scheme to debauch her? Eh? Eh? And Sir Paul is so hen-pecked that she brilliantly succeeds in persuading him that she is the wronged party, insists she will ask for a divorce. Because of course, Sir Paul did ask Careless to melt his wife, so he feels somehow responsible.

There’s a little exchange which makes it clear that, as punishment, not only will Sir Paul be utterly swaddled again tonight, as usual, but his right hand which is usually kept free so he can… will also be bound in cloths. So he can what? Pee, presumably, Surely. Lady Plyant storms impressively out.

Scene 11

Enter Careless. The audience now sees Careless spinning elaborate excuses. He says he tried to talk Lady Plyant into being more amenable to her husband, then pretended to be in love with her and her, then went to the lengths of writing her a love letter. He promises to report back if it has any effect, but laments that she is a tower of chastity! This is an impressive story and Sir Paul falls for it, rejoicing in his wife’s virtue.

Scene 12

Mellefont and Maskwell. It’s 7.45pm. Maskwell tells Mellefont to sneak into Lady Touchwood’s chambers so as to be ready to leap out apparently catching her in the act of being unfaithful with Maskwell, thus putting himself in a position to make her stop trying to undermine Mellefont’s marriage. Got it?

Scene 13

Maskwell soliloquises, explaining that he has an ‘after game’ to manipulate the situation further.

Scene 14

Enter Lord Touchwood. Maskwell plays him, playing up to what Lady Touchwood told her husband, namely that Maskwell knew about Mellefont’s wish to ravish Lady Touchwood, but tried to stop him. Maskwell plays the loyal friend who doesn’t want to betray his best friend, but… says he had hoped it was a one-off indiscretion, but now finds Mellefont resolved in his villainy. Prove it! says Lord Touchwood. And now we see why Maskwell has arranged for Mellefont to be in Lady Touchwood’s chambers. Maskwell tells him to meet him 15 minutes hence outside Lady Touchwood’s chamber and he will give the lord the proof he requires. Touchwood agrees and they part.

Scene 15

Mellefont hiding, wishes Lord Touchwood were her to see his wife debauched by Maskwell.

Scene 16

Enter Lady Touchwood saying Maskwell is late. She is expecting simply to have sex with him.

Scene 17

Enter Maskwell apologising for being late. They start to kiss, at which moment Mellefont leaps out from behind an arras, Lady Touchwood screams, Maskwell runs out the back door.

Scene 18

It takes Lady Touchwood a while to calm down during which she and Mellefont converse in a relatively high-flown tragic register, he recommending her to Christian penitence, she talking about hell and damnation. All a bit damned serious, what. Finally they reach the stage Mellefont wants, which is for Lady Touchwood to repent and say she will put no more barriers in the way of Mellefont’s marriage to Cynthia.

Scene 19

Maskwell softly lets Lord Touchwood in through the door.

Scene 20

Lady Touchwood sees Lord Touchwood in hiding. Suddenly she realises she can switch the situation to her own advantage. Suddenly she starts struggling with Mellefont and begging him not to ravish her. He thinks she’s gone mad until Lord Touchwood leaps out of hiding and runs towards him with his sword raised.

Lady Touchwood virtuously holds her husband back, claiming Mellefont knows not what he does. Mellefont realises he has destroyed his own case, and becomes almost delirious. [This all feels a lot more like a tragedy than a comedy.] When Touchwood’s back is turned Lady T grins at Mellefont and makes the horn symbol behind her own husband’s back. God, she has totally totally triumphed and Mellefont is driven to paroxysms of frustration as they exeunt.

Scene 21

Mellefont soliloquises with an intensity which recalls Hamlet.

Oh, I could curse my stars, fate, and chance; all causes and accidents of fortune in this life!

Even at this nadir of his fortunes he believes Maskwell is his friend and they had a good plan and it’s just bad luck that it went wrong.

Act 5

Scene 1

Lady Touchwood is blessing her good fortune that her husband happened to enter the chamber at that moment, Maskwell enthusiastically agreeing, although we know it was his doing.

Scene 2

Lord Touchwood approaching, Lady T exits. Maskwell has a brief soliloquy saying he will manage Touchwood.

Scene 3

Seeing Touchwood in earshot Maskwell delivers a fake-honest monologue in which he berates himself for being false to his friend in order to be virtuous and help Lord Touchwood. In case I haven’t emphasises this, remember that Maskwell owes his place in the world, i.e. position and money, to Touchwood’s support.

It works perfectly. Persuaded of his saintly virtue, Touchwood comes forward and declares that he will blast Mellefont from the family, and put Maskwell in his place. Maskwell feigns being overcome and then says there is one last thing to make his happiness complete… Cynthia’s hand in marriage? says Touchwood. He will arrange it with Sir Paul. He exits.

Scene 4

Maskwell alone realises a) his scheme has totally succeeded but b) if either Mellefont or Lady Touchwood hear about his betrothal to Cynthia they will both immediately realise he’s been gulling them and will unite against him. He must be cunning. He must mix a lot of truth with his lies. The best deceits are the almost true ones.

No mask like open truth to cover lies,
As to go naked is the best disguise.

Scene 5

Enter Mellefont and Maskwell makes haste to tell him the complete truth, that Lord Touchwood has appointed Maskwell his heir and affianced him to Cynthia, but claims he wants none of it, and says he has a cunning plan. They go off to find Cynthia.

Scene 6

Cut to the scene in which Lord Touchwood tells Lady Touchwood his plan i.e. to make Maskwell his heir and marry him to Cynthia. Lady Touchwood is appalled, specially when Lord T tells her Maskwell himself told him how in love with Cynthia he is. Lady T is furious. The rat!

Scene 7

Lady Touchwood alone soliloquises. O villain! This isn’t at all funny, it has real tragic force:

What, have I been bawd to his designs, his property only, a baiting place?  Now I see what made him false to Mellefont.  Shame and distraction!  I cannot bear it, oh! what woman can bear to be a property?  To be kindled to a flame, only to light him to another’s arms; oh! that I were fire indeed that I might burn the vile traitor.

Scene 8

Enter Sir Paul. Lady Touchwood with Lady MacBeth hauteur calls him a fool and a cuckold which feeble Sir Paul takes to be a joke. He wants to find his wife to discuss the revolution in events i.e. Touchwood disinheriting Mellefont and replacing him with Maskwell. Lady T tells him that if he allows for the cancellation of the marriage and raising of Maskwell, she will tear his eyes out! He thinks she’s mad and goes off to find his wife to discuss the fate of their daughter (Cynthia).

Scene 9

Maskwell reveals his cunning plan to Cynthia and Mellefont which is to arrange to borrow Lord Touchwood’s coach and six and elope with Cynthia, and the family chaplain to marry them. Or at least tell Touchwood that’s the only way he can gain Cynthia. He assures Mellefont he’s not actually going to do it – though of course he is.

Maskwell tells Mellefont that he, Mellefont, will dress up as the chaplain so the whole thing will be under his control. Both he and Cynthia are bamboozled by the complexity of the double bluff of the plan (as was I) but Mellefont agrees to meet in my lady’s dressing chamber. Mellefont exits.

Scene 10

Maskwell tells Cynthia he’s had second thoughts, He’ll meet her in the chaplain’s chamber on the corner of the gallery. She agrees but says you must tell Mellefont. Of course I will, says Maskwell, lying. She exits.

Scene 11

Maskwell soliloquises the deep down the deceived want to be deceived. He told them exactly what the plan is yet neither of them smelt a rat. Now to recruit the chaplain or, as they seem to have been called in the aristocratic cant of the day, the ‘Levite’, in this case a Mr Saygrace.

Scene 12

He knocks on the door of Mr Saygrace who opens it. There is some comedy about the chaplain’s garrulity but Maskwell now explains the plot. He has paid Saygrace to provide a clerical suit but sewn up the sleeves. They’ll now send the suit to Mellefont’s rooms. While he struggles to get into it Cynthia will arrive back, the room will be kept dark and Cynthia will be persuaded that Saygrace is really Mellefont. And so will accompany Maskwell down to the carriage and so be carried away and married against her will.

Saygrace is a small but perfectly formed example of the claim that Congreve gives every one of his characters distinctive speech patterns, e.g:

MASKWELL: Have you stitched the gown sleeve, that Mellefont may be puzzled, and waste time in putting it on?
SAYGRACE: I have: the gown will not be indued without perplexity.

Scene 13

Maskwell is with Lord Touchwood who tells him something has triggered Lady Touchwood and she has gone mad with rage, something about him, Maskwell. Damn, Maskwell had feared just this possibility – she’s realised how he has used her. Lord Touchwood is irked that his wife is disobeying him and wishes Maskwell’s marriage could be signed and sealed this evening. This falls perfectly into Maskwell’s wishes and he tells Lord Touchwood he has a cunning plan…

Scene 14

Enter Careless and Cynthia. Careless has seen and overheard just enough to realise Maskwell is concocting some wicked plan.

Scene 15

Enter Mellefont, joining Careless and Cynthia. Careless tells him Maskwell is a villain and intends to betray him. Mellefont refuses to believe it. They all see Saygrace leaving his room with a bundle under his arm and the two men follow him.

Scene 16

Leaving Cynthia to encounter Lord Touchwood. Touchwood is musing to himself, surprised that Maskwell had such an intricate plan already worked out, and had arranged it with the chaplain. When she overhears the word chaplain, Cynthia really realises something is wrong. She begins to tell Lord Touchwood that here is betrayal but at that moment they hear the voices of Maskwell and Lady Touchwood from a nearby room.

Scene 17

Touchwood and Cynthia hide and witness the following scene: Lady Touchwood is so outraged by Maskwell’s betrayal she is holding a dagger and prepares to strike. But his impassive confident smile disarms her, she drops it and starts weeping, saying she never could resist him. Lord Touchwood is stupefied.

Lady Touchwood tells him why she was so angry – because she heard he was to marry Cynthia. Maskwell asks her how could he, who had enjoyed bliss in her arms, possibly choose any other woman? Listening to this Lord Touchwood splutters and chokes with anger.

Maskwell now tells Lady Touchwood that the entire plan has been to please her and prove faithful to her. How so? Well, explains Maskwell, he has told Mellefont to meet them in my lady’s dressing chamber. Well, Lady Touchwood should be there disguised as Cynthia, and accompany him down the stairs. When he realises it is her not Cynthia, he will be in her power and she can force him to love her. And if he won’t, she can stab him in the heart – and Maskwell gives her the dagger! He tells her to run and change. She is amazed at the cunning of his villainy and runs off.

Scene 18

Maskwell soliloquises, overheard by Cynthia and Touchwood. He congratulates himself on his quick thinking and hopes out loud that Cynthia is ready at the meeting place. (She’s not; she’s still hidden onstage overhearing everything along with Lord Touchwood.) And exits.

Scene 19

Cynthia and Touchwood emerge from their hiding place. Touchwood is beside himself with rage and mortification. His wife the adulterer and Maskwell the villain! He vows to forgive Mellefont and to humiliate the baddies. Let’s round up the entire cast, he says, and bring them back here. Exeunt.

Scene 20

A funny scene in which dim Sir Paul explains everything is topsy-turvy to Lord Froth who’s been having a nap. What’s topsy-turvy asks Froth, my wife? No no, says Sir Paul, she’s in the garden with Brisk. Doing what? Laying their heads together? What? Writing poetry, my lord, making couplets. WHAT? So it’s a little bit of comic relief between the tragic outbursts and the final scene.

Scene 21

Enter Lady Froth and Brisk, greeting her husband and unwittingly continuing the rude double entendres when she says she has been lying on her back in the garden studying the stars. Has she now?

Scene 22

Enter Lady Plyant, Cynthia and Careless i.e. almost the entire cast is assembled. Careless is explaining to Lady Plyant about the conspiracy they have discovered, she says Oh my Lord are all men so fickle and Careless gallantly replies, ‘Madam, you have charms to fix inconstancy’, to which she blushes.

Scene 23

At that moment there is a loud shriek and Lady Touchwood comes running onstage pursued by her husband dressed as a curate. They struggle, she breaks free and runs away.

LORD TOUCHWOOD: Go, and thy own infamy pursue thee.

Scene 24

Enter Mellefont dragging Maskwell. He accuses him to his face, contemns him, but Maskwell (like Iago) says nothing. Touchwood orders his servants to seize him. This is all very tragic and Shakespearian. Congreve brings off a nice little bit of comic repartee right at the end of the play, for the assembled fops and fools are of course astonished by what they’re witnessing.

BRISK: This is all very surprising, let me perish.
LADY FROTH: You know I told you Saturn looked a little more angry than usual.

That made me laugh out loud. But the whole thing suddenly ends. Lord Touchwood says, Mellefont I forgive you, and tells everyone to be merry.

LORD TOUCHWOOD: We’ll think of punishment at leisure, but let me hasten to do justice in rewarding virtue and wronged innocence. Nephew, I hope I have your pardon, and Cynthia’s.
MELLEFONT: We are your lordship’s creatures.
LORD TOUCHWOOD: And be each other’s comfort. Let me join your hands. Unwearied nights, and wishing days attend you both; mutual love, lasting health, and circling joys, tread round each happy year of your long lives.

Well, yes, but mainly No, no they can’t, because the tone has become so intense and serious that a few cheerful words cannot undo the generally dark tendency of the previous few hours.

Aspects of The Double Dealer

The plot

I can see why the play was not a success, but it’s not, I think, from the ‘experimental’ unity-of-place aspects. Instead it’s the plot. It feels like everything has been sacrificed to the fiendishly complex set of interlocking schemes, which continually escalate in invention and complexity until, as Lord Touchwood says:

I am confounded when I look back, and want a clue to guide me through the various mazes of unheard-of treachery.

It feels like so much energy went into mapping out these plots and stratagems that none was left over for the comedy. Comedy comes in numerous forms, but 1. the play has no dominating comic figure such as the great Widow Blackacre in William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer or the awesome Lord Foppington in John Vanbrugh’s play The Relapse. And 2. there are surprisingly few comic situations. Instead the core situations are often quite serious, and the comically dim characters – weak-willed Sir Paul Plyant and his bossy wife, and the absurdly pretentious Lady Froth and her giggling husband Lord Froth, plus the idiot fop Brisk – are simply wheeled on at regular intervals to plaster over the more serious foundations.

In other words, the comedy doesn’t very often arise from the plot or situations, but feels bolted on, almost as an afterthought.

Tragedy not comedy

The other really obvious element which undermines its enjoyment as a comedy is that quite a lot of it deals with genuine, extreme and tragic emotions, which are expressed in extreme tragic rhetoric. When Lady Touchwood goes to stab Maskless she is in real emotional agony:

LADY TOUCH: Ha! Do you mock my rage? Then this shall punish your fond, rash contempt. [Goes to strike.]

When Lord Touchwood realises a) how Maskwell has played him but even worse b) how his wife has been unfaithful to him with one man and is planning to do it again with another, he is in real torment.

LORD TOUCHWOOD: Astonishment binds up my rage!  Villainy upon villainy!  Heavens, what a long track of dark deceit has this discovered!  I am confounded when I look back, and want a clue to guide me through the various mazes of unheard-of treachery.  My wife!  Damnation!  My hell!

Maskwell has more in common with a tragic villain such as Iago than a comic character like Lord Foppington, and he sets the tone which, despite various comic interludes, ends up feeling really quite dark and intense.

Tragic register

Extreme words and expressions predominate.

Hell

Almost from the start Hell is invoked, Mellefont describes the hell in Lady Touchwood’s imagination (‘hell is not more busy than her brain, nor contains more devils than that imagination); it is a frequent ejaculation (‘Hell and damnation!’, ‘Confusion and hell!’, ‘Hell and the devil!’, ‘Hell and amazement!’

Villain

I associate the word ‘villain’ with Hamlet:

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables,–meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;

The word villain occurs 11 times in all of Hamlet, but 26 times in The Double Dealer.

Devil

Occurs 16 times. But it’s the way this tragic vocabulary is combined into fire-breathingly earnest speeches:

LADY TOUCHWOOD: Death, do you dally with my passion?  Insolent devil!  But have a care,—provoke me not; for, by the eternal fire, you shall not ’scape my vengeance.  Calm villain!  How unconcerned he stands, confessing treachery and ingratitude!  Is there a vice more black?  Oh, I have excuses thousands for my faults; fire in my temper, passions in my soul, apt to ev’ry provocation, oppressed at once with love, and with despair.  But a sedate, a thinking villain, whose black blood runs temperately bad, what excuse can clear?

Violence

Right at the start Mellefont tells Careless that, provoked, Lady Touchwood made a run for his sword to do him or herself an injury. Later Lady Touchwood threatens to stab Maskwell. Maskwell gives her back the dagger so she can stab Mellefont. Lord Touchwood has to be restrained from drawing his sword and stabbing Mellefont when he thinks the latter has deflowered his wife, threatening to write the word ‘villain’ in his face with the tip of his sword!

Divorces not marriages

Comedies generally end in marriages, and this one sort of does, but the over-riding impression is of the catastrophic collapse of Lord Touchwood’s marriage, which dominates everything else, and finds echoes in Brisk’s adultery with Lady Froth and Lady Plyant’s verging on the edge of adultery with Careless.

Normally in these plays, one marriage at most is adulterated and its failure is outnumbered by two or so happy new marriages at the end. In this play the almost certain adultery of three marriages just outweighs the supposedly happy marriage which concludes it.

Incest

In fact, now I come to review the play, the theme of incest is almost more prevalent than marriage.

1. Mellefont is Lord Touchwood’s nephew. That means that, when Touchwood is led to believe Mellefont has been sleeping with Lady Touchwood it meant he was having sex with his own aunt – which was, in those times, considered incest – a crime she makes the most of when she play acts that Mellefont is ravishing her for the benefit of Lord Touchwood who has just entered the room:

LADY TOUCHWOOD: I’ll grow to the ground, be buried quick beneath it, e’er I’ll be consenting to so damned a sin as incest! unnatural incest!

2. Cynthia is Sir Paul Plyant’s daughter. Her mother died and Sir Paul remarried, so the current Lady Plyant is Cynthia’s step-mother. In other words, early in the play when Lady Plyant is led to believe that Mellefont wants to sleep with her, she stretches a point to claim that sleeping with your fiancée’s step-mother is incest:

LADY PLYANT: Oh, the impiety of it… and the unparalleled wickedness! O merciful Father! How could you think to reverse nature so, to make the daughter the means of procuring the mother?
MELLEFONT: The daughter to procure the mother!
LADY PLYANT: Ay, for though I am not Cynthia’s own mother, I am her father’s wife, and that’s near enough to make it incest.

Sir Paul Plyant and Lady Touchwood are brother and sister, tying the family relationships even tighter together. This sense of the characters forming a close-knit circle is a kind of geneological counterpart to the unity of place. It is a kind of unity of family which helps to make the play feel claustrophobic, as if it is all taking place within one family. It isn’t, but sometimes it feels as if it is.

Hamlet

Lord Touchwood is Mellefont’s Uncle. The accusation of incest keeps recurring. The keyword ‘villain’ is repeated. That, along with the frequent drawing of swords, reminds me more than ever of Hamlet. As does the unity of place – the claustrophobic castle at Elsinor and the claustrophobic gallery of Lord Touchwood’s house. And as does the frequent hiding in order to hear characters make key confessions – as Polonius hides behind an arras or Hamlet comes across Claudius praying, and as Touchwood sees the scene where Lady Touchwood pretends to be ravished, or Cynthia and Touchwood hide and finally discover the truth about Lady T and Maskwell.

Not the plot but the mood are sometimes cognate.

A family alliance

In fact in his introduction to the Penguin edition, Eric Rump points out that the marriage of Mellefont and Cynthia will not only unite two families but save them. It is made plain that Sir Paul Plyant has no male heir, only a daughter (Cynthia) and the way his second wife treats him, is unlikely to have any more children, while it is equally clear that Lord Touchwood, though blessed with properties, has no heir at all which is why he has adopted his nephew Mellefont as heir.

In other words, without the marriage, both families will go extinct. So there’s more than just money and a pretty woman riding on the marriage. There is the survival of two lineages, which explains Lord Touchwood’s outburst when Cynthia casually says she has vowed never to marry if she can’t marry Mellefont:

SIR PAUL: Never to marry! Heavens forbid! must I neither have sons nor grandsons? Must the family of the Plyants be utterly extinct for want of issue male? O impiety!

In which case:

All were ruined, all my hopes lost. My heart would break, and my estate would be left to the wide world.

A plight which will, presumably, have carried more weight and been more readily understandable to its original audience 330 years ago.

Soliloquies

And that brings me to another of the ways the play was experimental which is the large number of soliloquies it contains. In other Restoration comedies plenty of characters give little asides directly to the audience, but this is different. An ‘aside’ is almost always comic, whereas a soliloquy or dramatic monologue is almost always serious and, in this play, often very serious, Machiavellian and wicked.

The widespread use of soliloquy is another way in which the play feels like it’s using the language, the tone and techniques more associated with tragedy than comedy.

In fact the extensive use of soliloquy was singled out by commentators on the play for criticism, and Congreve goes to some lengths to defend it in the dedicatory epistle. He argues that a man alone talking to himself is generally a bad sign in life, but that a man thinking – weighing the pros and cons of an action – cannot be conveyed any other way onstage except through the medium of words. The audience cannot sit and watch a man doing nothing but think silently for 3 or 4 minutes. Therefore soliloquy must be allowed, or as Congreve drolly puts it, the playwright is ‘forced to make use of the expedient of speech, no other better way being yet invented for the communication of thought’.

And he makes the additional point about soliloquy that it tends to depict a character who’s contemplating criminal or anti-social activity. If a character is in love or anxious or afraid, they can easily share these feelings with a confidant – and hence most of the lead characters in Restoration comedy come accompanied by a confidant and a lot of the text consists of lead and confidant sharing thoughts, analysing the situation and so on.

But if a character is contemplating a crime, or a scheme whereby he or she plans to deceive some or all of the other characters, then by its very nature the character has to keep their thoughts to themselves.

Thus the surprising ubiquity of soliloquy in The Double Dealer is not a wilful experiment, it reflects the fact that two of the central characters – Maskwell and Lady Touchwood – spend a great deal of time devising schemes and then evaluating their schemes. It reflects the high proportion of ‘villainy’ in the text.

And pondering all this has made me understand better why soliloquy is more often found in tragedy – where wicked characters such as Iago or Macbeth are scheming – than in comedy – where the mere fact that you have characters joking about themselves or others requires dialogue.

So the mere existence of soliloquies in a play is a good indication of its fundamentally tragic nature. And the number of soliloquies in this play indicate that beneath all the (often very funny) comic scenes, lurks a fundamentally serious plot structure.

The happy couple

A final peculiarity is that the (often deeply buried) motor of the plot is the planned marriage of Mellefont and Cynthia which Maskwell’s malignancy is devoted to spiking. And yet the happy couple are very rarely on stage alone together, only two or three times and each one relatively brief.

In other words, the central relationship the whole narrative is meant to be about, is only very thinly sketched in. Eric Rump describes it as having a certain ‘autumnal feeling’ about it. And this is another reason why it pales into insignificance compared to the twin infidelities of Lady Touchwood and her towering tragic rages, which carry vastly more dramatic weight.

I can see why it ‘failed’. It’s a tragedy masquerading as a comedy. There are quite a few really funny scenes and moments in it – Brisk and Lady Froth converting a passionate embrace into a dancing lesson springs to mind, Careless brilliantly explaining away the love letter to his wife which was enraging Sir Paul, and Brisk’s nonchalant comment right at the end – but there are also howling rages, threats of murder and violence, references to incest, and it ends with a woman running howling offstage, an honourable marriage in ruins, and a Machiavellian villain dragged off virtually in chains.

And I can see why Congreve was cross that it failed and defends himself at more than usual length in the dedicatory epistle to the printed version. He had put a lot of effort into it. He was trying to do something new. He was hurt that carping critics attacked almost every aspect of his play.

Anyway, once bitten… In his third play he returned to a purity of comic tone and to the trusted comic techniques, which helped make it one of his best.

Metaphors

Having noticed Congreve’s stylish use of metaphors in The Old Bachelor, I was alert for them in this play, such as Careless’s casual military metaphor:

CARELESS: So you have manned your works; but I wish you may not have the weakest guard where the enemy is strongest.

Describing Maskwell’s faithlessness uses metaphors of gardening:

CARELESS: His affection to you, you have confessed, is grounded upon his interest, that you have transplanted; and should it take root in my lady, I don’t see what you can expect from the fruit.

This ability to choose an appropriate metaphor and then to extend it gracefully, is a sign of wit, and a sign of fools is that their analogies or metaphors are graceless or inappropriate. Here is Lady Plyant mixing her metaphors with laughable effect (and being complimented on it by her doting husband):

LADY PLYANT: Have I behaved myself with all the decorum and nicety befitting the person of Sir Paul’s wife?  Have I preserved my honour as it were in a snow-house for these three years past? Have I been white and unsullied even by Sir Paul himself?
SIR PAUL: Nay, she has been an invincible wife, even to me; that’s the truth on’t.
LADY PLYANT: Have I, I say, preserved myself like a fair sheet of paper for you to make a blot upon?
SIR PAUL: And she shall make a simile with any woman in England.

Whereas cognoscenti like Mellefont and Maskwell are masters of the extended metaphor:

MELLEFONT: Maskwell, welcome, thy presence is a view of land, appearing to my shipwrecked hopes. The witch has raised the storm, and her ministers have done their work: you see the vessels are parted.
MASKWELL: I know it. I met Sir Paul towing away Cynthia.  Come, trouble not your head; I’ll join you together ere to-morrow morning, or drown between you in the attempt.
MELLEFONT: There’s comfort in a hand stretched out to one that’s sinking

Useful phrases

When Lady Touchwood picks up a suggestion of Maskwell’s and adds an improvement, Maskwell says admiringly:

Excellent! Your ladyship has a most improving fancy.

‘You have a most improving fancy.’ I’d love to say that to someone in real life.

Radio production

Related links

• The Double Dealer on Project Gutenberg

More seventeenth century reviews

• More seventeenth century reviews