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In a last desperate attempt to wrest control of two fortunes from Lady Wishfort and spoil the marriage of Mirabell and Millamant, Mr. Fainall's cynical lover Mrs. Marwood in Congreve's Way of the World (1700) warns Lady Wishfort (pretending to be a friend) that Mr. Fainall might force Mrs. Fainall, Lady Wishfort's daughter, into a court of law for adultery. She describes the hypothetical trial in some detail to Lady Wishfort: you would "be ushered in with an O Yez of Scandal; and have your Case open'd by an old fumbler Leacher in a Quoif like a Man Midwife"; the lawyers would proceed with a mockery of legal language including puns, jests, and "Naughty Interrogatories, in more Naughty Law-Latin"; and the whole would be presided over by a "Gray beard"judge who is so titillated by the testimony that he "fidges off and on his Cushion as if he had swallow'd Cantharides.1 Even more embarrassment would follow the trial itself, as "Young Revellers of the Temple, take notes . . . and after talk [the case] all over again in Commons, or before Drawers in an Eating-house" (V, p. 467). Her final climactic threat moves out of the relative order of the courtroom and into the streets: "Nay, this is nothing; if it wou'd end here 'twere well. But it must after this be consign'd by the Short-hand Writers to the publick Press; and from thence be transferr'd to the hands, nay into the Throats and Lungs of Hawkers, with Voices more Licentious than the loud Flounder-man's or the Woman that crys Gray-ease; and this you must hear till you are stunn'd; Nay, you must hear nothing else for some days" (V, p. 468).
I would like to explore Congreve's use of published accounts of trials in this scene. Reconstructing and reimagining such cultural phenomena is both complex and risky, but the presence of these phenomena in a play, rather than in documentary isolation, contextualizes them in a way that offers us a unique window on the artifacts and on the attitudes and values surrounding them. We see both, as it were, in action. In this scene of Marwood's threat, dramatic context tells us how much is at stake; the brevity and conciseness of the fictionalized...