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'Comedy Elevating its Voice'
Tragic Intertextualities in Congreve's The Double-Deale/
JOHNC.
Ross
The reception of the premiere performances ofWilliam Congreve's second comedy, The Double-Dealer, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in early November
2
1693, grievously disappointed its author. They were not entirely disastrous, as by
12 November Dryden could report in a letter that the play 'has already been
acted Eight times,.J Still) Congrevets hurt and angry dedicatory epistle reflects
the painful contrast with the prodigious popularity of his less ambitious first play,
The Old Bachelor, which had been premiered in March 1693. What evidently
made it worse was that, as Colley Cibber would recall, the play was 'unreasonably
overrun' with 'Boisterous Cavils'."
With The Old Bachelor, Congreve had immediately gained recognition as a
playwright of exceptional gifts and promise. Two of his three later stage-plays,
the comedy Love for Love, and his only tragedy, The Mourning Bride, would
prove immensely popular; and even The Way of the World, although it did not,
gained him much esteem, and has since been widely recognised as his masterpiece. So, what went wrong with The Double-Dealer?
In his letter of 12 November, Dryden traced its unfavourable reception to
the penalties suffered by the over-acute satirist: 'The women thinke he has exposd their Bitchery too much; & the Gentlemen, are offended with him; for the
discovery of their follyes: and the war of their Intrigues, under the notion of
Friendship to their Ladyes Husbands'. That something of this kind did happen
is indicated by Congreve's efforts towards the end of his dedicatory epistle to
defend his satire against the admitted fact that 'some of the Ladies are offended
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
This essay had its origins in research for my edition of The Douhle-Dealer in the New l'Ilermaid series, London: Ernest Benn; New York: W.W. Norton, 1981. It was presented in a
more concise form as a paper at the AULLA Congress in February 1995. In various forms, it
has been helpfully commented upon by Don McKenzie, Harold Love and Richard Corballis,
to each of whom I owe much gratirude.
Judith Milhous and Robert Hume argue for this dating of the premiere performance on the
ground that it was about one month prior to the publication of the play, announced in the
LDnJon Gazette, 4-7 December 1693 - 'Dating Play Prem.ieres from Publication Data, 16601700', Haruard Library Bulletin 22, 1974,374-405 [p.396J. It is dared in October 1693 in The
London Stage, 1660-1800, edited by W. Van Lennep, E.L Avery, A.H. Scouten, G.W. Stone,
& C.B. Hogan, 11 vols, Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965-68, I, 428.
The quatto first edition is post-dated 1694.
William Ccngreve: Lttters and Documents, ed. John C. Hodges, London: Macmillan, 1964,
p.9S. [Hereafter, WeLD.]
Colley Cibber t 'To the Reader,' Ximena; or the Heroic Daughter (1719), p.xx.
WCLD, pp.95-96. It may also be that the Jacobite faction in the audience were hostile because they saw themselves targetted in the play's castigation of intrigue :lnd treason, although
W.H. Van Voris has linked this to the specific case in 1692 of the forger and professional
'false witness' Robert Young, in The Cultivated Stance: The Designs ofCongreves Plays, Dublin:
Dolmen Press, 1965, pp.57-59.
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[because] I have represented some Women Vicious and Mfected,.6
What is of greater interest here is that earlier on in the epistle he had complained that, whereas 'several Persons of the first Rank both in Wit 'and Qbtality'
had given their approval to the play, 'Illiterate Cri ticks' or those who judged
without proper consideration had raised objections about the use made of soliloquy, and about certain aspects of its design and characterisation: 'The Hero of
the Play, as they are pleased to .call him (meaning Mellifont), is a Gull, and made
a Fool and cheated.' He responded that the key factor was the 'Character of
Maskwell/ as a deceiving 'Villain'; being deceived by such an adroit character
does not make others, per se, gulls and fools.
The problem can be seen as one of arousing certain kinds of expectations by
ostensibly conforming to a contemporary comedy template, and then disconcertingly violating them. This template required that the central young gentleman
character who finishes up marrying the central young lady should be a wit, the
kind of 'Hero' or protagonist whose aggressive attempts to dominate every situation may not always work out, but who finally manages to out-smart everyone,
except maybe the young lady, who in wit may prove his equal (this pattern was
firmly established by Etherege's comedies, and reinforced by the standard makeup of the acting company),
The Old Bachelor. despite such details as the oddity of the young gentleman
Vainlove, had satisfied these expectations. Mellefont, however, in The DoubleDealer, even though he tries to do so, proves incapable of controlling the course
of events. He goes on trusting,Maskwell too long, dismissing the warnings of his
plot comes about more from the inifriend Careless; and victory in the
tiatives of the young lady, Cynthia, and of Careless, than from anything initiated
by Mellefont.
Insofar as Mellefont is indeed 'the Hero of the Play,' he can be seen as deriving from a quite different template, that of some Restoration tragedies. Here,
the marker of the hero is the nobility of his nature rather than his skill as a manipulater of events. Presenting the play in print empowered Congreve to provide
pointers to the interpretative contexts by which his play should be appreciated.
His identification of Maskwell in the dramatis personre list as 'A Villain' is one
such pointer. Such a character is not like the competitive antagonist of comedy:
he is a figure of serious evil. Another is the chosen epigraph on the title-page,
'Interdum !amen.) & voce m Comcedia to/lit, , from Horace's Ars Poetica: 'Sometimes
however, even Comedy elevates its voice:' For classically-conscious Restoration
dramatists, comedy was inherently a low genre"lacking the heightening and cultural prestige of tragedy. This lowness could be ameliorated either by combining
a comic plot with a tragic (or at least serious) plot, as in Dryden's mixed-plot
tragicomedy The Spanish Friar, or by raising some sequences of the dialogue to
the rhetorical elegance of high comedy, or by elevating the 'voice' of comedy even
6.
7.
Citations from
Doublt-Dtaltr are (rom Tht Complttt Plays ofWilliam Crmgreve, ed. Herbert Davis. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
In other translations Comedy 'raises' or 'excites' its voice. The reproduction of the tide-page
in Davis's edition, in type-facsimile, omits the ampersand.
Tragic lntertextualities in The Double Dealer
137
higher, to the heightened diction of tragedy. 8
Such qitics as William Archer, Maximilian Novak, Harold Love, John
Barnard, Brian Corman and Laura Brown have recognised the formally experi9
mental nature of The Double-Dealer. Various other critics have noticed elements
of quasi-tragic characterisation, with several of them noting a curious resemblance to melodrama. lo Nonetheless, its relation to contemporary tragedies has
remained relatively unexplored, perhaps because modern readers tend to find
reading Restoration tragedies tediously heavy going. It may also be that some
critics have been accessing the play through editions deriving from the revised
text of 1710, in which, as Don McKenzie has shown, Congreve·has systematically re-cast some of the key speeches of Maskwell and Lady T ouchwood to
bring them more securely within the rhetorical range of comedy, with echoes of
ll
tragedy rhetoric rendered merely parodic.
That Congreve should be experimenting in this way at this time can be related to his close association with John Dryden and Thomas Southerne, as his
literary mentors. Both men were dissatisfied with the generic limitations of comedy, and were conducting successive experiments in composing plays that were
formally generic hybrids. Plays like Dryden's Don Sebastian (1689) or Southerne's later works The Fatal Marriage (1694) and C?roonoko (1695) mated a tragic
main action with a comic under-action. Dryden had earlier mated heroic or
tragicomedic upper plots with comedic lower plots, as in Secret Love (1667),
Marriage ala Mode (1671) and The Spanish Friar (1680). More problematic were
those plays in which generic modulation took place within a single plot, as in
Southerne's The Wives' Excuse (1691), with at its heart Lovemore's long} inconsequential wooing aria, derived from tragedy. Dryden's The Assignation, or, Love
Frank Harper Moore, The Nobler Pleasure: Dryden'.J Comedy in Theory and Practice, Chapd
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963, passim.
9. William Archer, introduction to William Congrroe (1912), reprinted in Wil/iam Congrt:'Vt: The
Critical Heritage, ed. Alexander Lindsay & Howard Erskine-Hill, London; New York:
Roudedge, 1989, ppA47-57. Maximilian E. Novak, William Congrrue, New York: Twayne.
1971, pp.92-94. John Barnard, (Passion, "Poetical Justice'" and Dramatic Law in The DouoltDealer and The Way of the World, in William
ed. Brian Morris, Mermaid Critical
Commentaries, London: Ernest Benn; Torowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefidd, 1972, pp.95-112
(p.96). Harold Love,
Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1974, pp. 44-50. Brian Corman,
"'The Mixed Way of Comedy": Congreve's The Dou!JIe-Dealer: Modtrn Philology, 71, 1974,
p.357. Laurn Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760: An Essay in Gmeric History. New
Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1981, p.124.
10. See, in Wi/liam Congrt:'f)(: The Critical Heritage. critiques by PoppIe (1735). pp.214-15;
Hazlitt (1819), p.315; Macaulay (1841). pp.370-71; Archer (1912), pp.450-57j Palmer
(1913), p.478. See also Norman N. Holland, The First Modem Comedies: The Significance of
Elherege. Wycherley and Congreve, 1959; Bloomington; London: Indiana University Press,
1967, pp.149, 157-60.
.
11. D.F. McKenzie, 'Congreve Cleans Up His Act', in Of Pavlova, Poetry ant:! Paradigms. ed.
Lauric: Barber & Christine Franzen, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1993, pp.94-95.
An example of such criticism is Anthony Gosse, 'Plot and Character in Congreve's The Douhit-Dealer.' Modem Language Quarterly. 29, 1968,274-88; reprinted in Congrtve: Camedits. ..
A Casthook.. ed. Patrick Lyons, London: !vIacmillan, 1982, pp.142-56. Cosse acknowledges in
Notc: 11 that his critique is based upon Bonamy Dobree's edition of 1925, which was based
upon the 1710 text.
8.
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Bibliographical Society ofAustralia & New Zealand Bulletin
in a Nunnery (1672) had juxtaposed comic and heroic registers within its upper
plot, with limited success. His Amphitryon, or The Two Sosias (1690) likewise
combines 'low comedy, high comedy and higher comedy: with its central action
modulating between high romantic comedy and comic satire. 12
As Robert Maddey has observed, Southerne's salutation to Congreve in his
commendatory verses prefaced to The Old Bachelor as Dryden's rightful heir, as
the 'Absolute Lord' of 'the Muses Land: and Dryden's own verses prefaced to
The Double-Dealer, addressing Congreve as his literary son and heir, must have
made him feel Ca good deal of pressure to live up to [such] accolades.'ll As Julie
Stone Peters recognizes, his own inclinations, like Dryden's, led him to conceive
of 'two kinds of theater/ the classic and the popular, and to try to associate his
own plays with the classic tradition. I"
Congreve claims in his epistle to The Double-Dealer that he has advanced
from writing la very imperfect Comedy,' The Old Bachelor, to composing one that
is not 'without its Faults' but that at least has its 'Mechanical part ... perfect,'
with a plot he has 'made as strong as I could, because it was single,' in compliance with 'the three Unities of the Drama.' It is single yet complex, in the sense
that the subsidiary action involving the seduction of Lady Plyant by Careless is
causally linked to the central action, and the cuckolding of Lord Froth by Mr
Brisk is incidental. The central action concerns the efforts of Maskwell to frustrate the progress of Mellefont and Cynthia towards their imminent marriage,
and to secure Cynthia for himself Mellefont is the nephew and heir of Lord
Touchwood; and Lady Touchwood is both infatuated with him and having an
affair with Maskwell, who is a kind of senior servant within the household. The
under-actions are straightforward comedy, with echoes from tragedies parodic
and amusing. It is in the main action that serious generic modulation of 'voice'
can be found.
The playwright affirms that '1 design'd the Moral first, and to that Moral I
invented the Fable, and do not know that I have borrow'd one hint of it any
where.' The point is not that he has 'invented the Fable! ex nihilo, but that he has
made original use of familiar materials drawn from the literary-dramatic culture
of the time. One can trace the presence of these materials in previous plays that
have been printed; and they may for all I know have also been present in other
plays that were so unsuccessful they were never printed, or given significant mention, or perhaps never performed yet circulating in manuscipt. What is intriguing
here is that where these have been traced they are to be found not so much in
comedies as in tragedies (there may very well.be others).
The relation to contemporary tragedies can be perceived as occurring at
three levels. On the first characters can be found self-consciously quoting (or
misquoting) famous lines from plays that can be assumed to have been suffit
12. Moore, 42-45,101-04,111-25, 154-66, 183-93, 193-209 (quotation from p.20S).
13. Robert Markley, T'Wo-Edg'd Weapons: Styh and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherrge, Wycherlry
and Congrevt, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, p.199.
14. Julie Stone Peters, Crmgreve. the Drama, and the Printed Word, Stanford, Ca.: Stanford Universiry Press, 1990, pp.35-37.
Tragic Intertextualities in The Double Dealer
139
ciently popular within the repertory of the United Company that judicious theatre-goers could be expected to recognise them. On the second, there are shifts
into generic tragic idioms. On the third, there are structural parallels, or contrasts, that often are pointed to by verbal motifs. With each of these, the truly
discerning play-goer for the
perfomances might 'have been expected to
appreciate the ironies generated ·by recalling the corresponding dramatic situations in those other plays, the character who was the speaker of them, and
whether the actor now speaking them was the same as had played the original
character, or someone ironically different. IS
Ostentatious quotations can be found from three plays: Nathaniel Lee's
tragedy The Rival Queens; or the Death ofAlexander the Great, first performed in
1677; John Dryden's split-plot tragicomedy The Spanish Friar, premiered in
1680; and Shakespeare's Othello.
Very early in Act I, the pushy wouldwit Mr Brisk responds to being
snubbed by his betters with: 'Spite, proud spite, by the Gods! and burning envy:
(I.i.25-26). Here is the enraged Alexander the Great, in Act IV, scene 1 (1.426)
of The Rival Queens, responding to the reproaches of CIyrus, and about to murder him. It is a comically indecorous usurpation of heroic dignity by Brisk. In the
premiere production, it is also the up-and-coming young actor George Powell
usurping one of the old master Thomas Betterton's' famous lines - strictly, 'Spite!
by the Gods, proud spite! and burning envy!,16
More ludicrous, and pathetic, is Sir Paul Plyant's protesting demand to his
daughter Cynthia, when she declares that if she can't have Mellefont, she has
'sworn never to many': 'But did you swear, did that sweet Creature swear! ha?'
(IV. i.138-39). Here he is echoing Alexander's agonised question about one of
his two loves, the queen Statira: 'Ha! did she swear? did that sweet Creature
swear?' (II.i.350). This would have been all the more absurd in that the actor
playing Sir Paul was Thomas Dogget, a comedy actor who played such low character-parts as the old, impotent, foolish citizen-cuckold Fondlewife in The Old
Bachelor.
In Act II, Sir Paul's attempt to express righteous indignation about Mellefont's alleged lusting after his second wife had gone badly wrong: 'When I am
provok'd to fury, I cannot incorporate with Patience and Reason, - as soon may
Tygers Match with Tygers, Lambs with Lambs, and every Creature couple with
its Foe, as the Poet says' (II.i.222-26). The poet he is misremembering is
Horace, in the Ars Poetica, lines 12-13, as to the limits of poetic licence: that
15. For exploration of the theatrical intertextualities of Restoration comedies in performance, see
Peter Holland, The Ornammt of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration C()medy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp.77-81. 215-19.
16. The key motif of
usurpation is identified by Harold Love, in his chapter on this play.
Julie Stone Peters, discussing Lady Froth's 'academic-heroic epic: to which Brisk will contribute marginal notes, points to 'the powerful parallel between Lady Froth's (or woman's)
scholarly usurpation and MaskweU's (or the lower class male's) attempted dynastic usurpation'
(Peters, p.lDS). Citations from Nathaniel Lee's tragedies are from The Works ofNathanie/ Lu,
ed. Thomas B. Stroup & Arrhur L. Cooke, 2 vols, c.1954-55, Meruchen. NJ: Scarecrow Reprint Corp., 1968.
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Bibliographical Society ofAustralia & New Zealand Bulletin
lambs should not be made to couple with tigers. However he is muddling that
with a misquoted speech from the deeply serious character Raymund in Drydeds
The Spanish Friar: '0 Horrour! Horrour! After this Alliance, / Let Tygers match
with Hinds" and Wolves with Sheep, / And every Creature couple with his Foe'
(IV.i.401-03).17
Soon after, Sir Paul gives himself away in another fashion when warning his
daughter about the supposed infidelity of her fiance: 'there's nothing but deceit
about him; Snakes are in his Peruke, and the Crocodile of Nilus in his Belly'
(ILi.246-48). Here he is fatally associating himself with the old cuckold Gomez
in The Spanish Friar, who complains of his frisky young wife as 'that Crocodile of
Nilus' (V.i.281). Gomez would have been an obvious Dogget role in the 1690s.
Poor Sir Paul makes himself even more ridiculous later, when, having discovered his wife's intrigue to cuckold him, he soliloquizes as an Othelio figure:
10 my Lady Plyant, you.were Chaste as Ice, but you are melted now, and false as
Watee (IV.i.430-31). Here he is echoing Othellds lament, 'She was false as water' (IV.ii.135). Earlier in the play, and quite independently, Lady Plyant has cast
herself as Desdemona, in responding to Meliefont's supposed intention to seduce
her: 'Have I, I say, preserv'd my self, like a fair Sheet of Paper, for you to make a
Blot upon' (II.i.2S9-60). She is reducing to bathos OthelIo's lament, Was this
fair paper, this most goodly book, / Made to write ('whore" upon?' (IV.ii.72-73).
In demanding of him, 'give me Mathemacular Demonstration' (ILi.302-03), she
is conflating Othelio's 'Give me ocular proof' with Thomas Rymer's recently
published remark on Othello; This may be a lesson to Husbands, that before
dB
their Jealousie be Tragical, the proofs may be Mathematical. Her following
exclamation, 'oh! The Impiety of it!' (Il.i.304) probably misremembers Othello's
'But yet the pity of it, Iago! 0, Iago, the pity of it, Iago· (IV.i.192-93). Her earlier demand, 'Have I preserved my Honour as it were in a Snow-House for this
three year past?' also seems to reduce to bathos Hamlet's warning to Ophelia, 'Be
thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny' (Hamlet,
IILi.135-36).19
A second level of intertexuality can be seen in the adoption of recognizable
tragic dialogue registers. In the straightforwardly comic areas of the play, this can
be seen as consciously done, in Careless's seducing of Lady Plyant, when he pretends to be dying for love of her: 'I feel my Spirits faint, a general dampness
17. Citations from Tht SpaniJh Friar are from Tht WorkJ ofJohn Dryden. voLXIV, ed. Vinton
Dearing & Alan Roper, Berkeley, Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1992.
18. Thomas Rymer, A Short VitW ofTragtdy (1692), in Tht Critical Work.r ofThomaI Rymer, ed.
C.A. Zimansky, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956, p.132.
19. T.W. Craik, 'Congreve as a Shakespearean,' in POttry and Drama 1570-1700: Essays in Honour of Harold F. Brook.r, ed. Anrony Coleman & Antony Hammond, London; New York:
Methuen, 1981 , contends that most such 'Shakespearean reminiscences' are an 'aspect of
Congreve's style,' and 'are uttered by speakers quite unconscious of the Shakespearean origin
of their expressions' (pp.186, 192 note 9). This applies to the use of them in the dialogue of
the central action characters, such as Lord T ou..;hwood. However, the use of them by Sir Paul
and Lady Plyant, alongside very obvious quoting or misquoting of lines from other tragedies,
is clearly meant to be seen as equally intentional, however silly.
Tragic Intertextualities in The Double Dealer
141
overspreads my face, a cold deadly dew already vents through all my Pores'
(IV.i.114-16). This is moving into the register of Nathaniel Lee's tragedies,
echoing the poisoned and dying Alexander's cry, What means this deadly dew
upon my forehead?', in The Rival Queens (V.i.239),and the 'cold and deadly
draught' of poison in his Theodosius (1680; V.iv.52). Lady Plyanes response,
What heart of Matble can refrain-to weep?' (IV.i.119-20), represents an attempt
at elevated diction, reflecting Alexander's protest to Roxana after she has murdered Statira: 'I wou'd ha' rent / With my just hands that Rock, that Marble
heart' (V.i.183-84).
In certain sequences within the more serious-toned areas of the main action,
the shift of the diction into a tragic register reflects a shift in general register of
the play itself, in the 1693 text. It correlates with configurations of character
types and situations that had their bases in currently popular tragedies. The central characters of this action, Lord and Lady Touchwood, Maskwell, and to some
extent Mellefont, and even Cynthia, become, in these sequences, opaque to the
logics of comedy. While the character-configuration they reflect differs from one
tragedy to another, one can recognise a pattern: the basically honourable yet bewildered (and sometimes himself passion-driven) monarch; his virago-queen; the
conspiring villain, driven by envious destructiveness; the young princely hero,
driven by honourable love and loyalty, and prepared- to die nobly rather than violate either; and the heroine he loves, who can sometimes display surprising resourcefulness in the face of death.
Structurally, Congreve's central plot has distinct schematic resemblances to
Dryden's Aurung-Zehe, with Lord and Lady Touchwood corresponding to the
Emperor of India and his Empress, Nourmahal, Maskwell to the prince Morat
(although Morat is an amoral antagonist rather than a villain), Mellefont to the
noble prince Aurung-Zebe, and Cynthia to his bride Indamora. Both plays are
concerned with a conflict over the right of succession to family and political
power, and with conflicting sexual passions.
Lady T ouchwood derives from the order of viciously lustful and murderous
virago-queens, such as Lee's Qyeen Roxana, the Empress Laula in Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco, and Dryden's Empress Nourmahal. Her role was
devised for and performed by the established specialist in such characters in the
1690s, Elizabeth Barry. She adopts their characteristic diction of florid passion,
and something of their extreme behaviour. Her cry, 'Oh! I could rack myself,
play the Vulture to my own Heart, and gnaw it piece-meal' (IV.ii.46-47) reflects
the diction of Archelaus and Ziphares in Lee's Mithridates (1678): 'I'll tear her
piece-meal ... Why dost thou rack me thus?' (V.ii.123, 127); of Statira to Roxana
in The Rival Queens: 'Feed like a Vulture, tear my bleeding heart' (V.i.l04); and
of Roxana herself (to Cassander, about Alexander): '0 I cou'd tear my flesh, / Or
him, or you, nay all the world to pieces' (IV.i.117-18).
Her dramatic situation, of being driven frantic by her sexual obsession with
her nephew, and then seeking to ruin him, is a variation of Nourmahal's, driven
to extremes by her passion for her step-son Aurung-Zebe, trying to murder both
him and his true-love Indamora, and finally
to insanity and suicide.
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Bibliographical Society ofAustralia & New Zealand Bulletin
The queen-figure has however no villain-ally in this play, and in that respect,
Lady Touchwood's situation more closely resembles that of Settle's dowager
Empress Laula, who is sleeping and conspiring with the type-villain Crimalhaz.
The dramatic crisis at the end of Act IV of The Double-Dealer, in which
Mellefont is lured into Lady Touchwood's bedroom by Maskwell and then accused by her, when her husband appears, of attempted rape, has some similarities
to the crisis in the fourth scene of Act III of The Empress ofMorocco. This scene,
in Laula's bed-chamber, begins with Laula and Crimalhaz realising their liaison
has been detected by the noble hero of the play, Muly Hamet. They conspire
together how to deceive her son, the Young King, and to overthrow Muly
Hamet. She murders the eunuch Achmat, and Crimalhaz stabs his own arm.
Then, when the Young King and Muly Hamet enter, Laula accuses Muly
Hamet of trying to ravish her, saying that he had killed Achmat and wounded
Crimalhaz, when both were trying to defend her. Muly Hamet does not effectually deny the accusation of attempted rape, because he is not willing to openly
impugn her honour, to her son. Consequently the Young King believes the accusation, and condemns Muly Hamet to death, but Laula, fearing this will force
him to expose her, induces her son to change this sentence to imprisonment. 2o
On another level, Edward Burns has seen this episode as a parody of the
closet scene in Hamlet, Act III scene 4, with Mellefont's intention of scoring a
moral and strategic advantage over his aunt going calamitously wrong, with him
being entrapped by Maskwell, and then accused of sexual molestation by herself.
The 'ironic force of the casting meant this was bound to happen, since it is
'Maskwell [who] is Betterton,' who had recently been making a major impression
21
in this scene playing Hamlet.
Structurally, and as a representative of the tragic villain type, Maslrnrell has
affinities with Crimalhaz, and with the character Cassander in The Rival Queens,
who is Roxana's ally in conspiracy, although he is not her bedfellow, and who
poisons Alexander, out of spiteful envy. As the title-character of The DoubleDealer, however, he is given an unusual degree of weight, with the role devised
for and taken by Thomas Betterton, the regular strong tragic lead actor of the
United Company. Maskwell is motivated, ostensibly, by his own love for Cynthia; but it is apparent in the play that his desire to secure her as his wife has
more to do with advancing his own social ambitions; and he is driven also by en20. Thomas Davies, in Dramatic Miscellanies (1783-84), IIl, 320, proposed that John Fletcher's
play, Cupids Revenge (ca. 1615) was a source for Th( 'Double-Dealer. The notion of this play as
Congreve's main source has been developed in, e.g., John Harold Wilson, Th( InjIuenu of
Beaumont and Fletcher on Restoration Drama, Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press,
1928), pp.66-67. Its possible use as a source cannot be dismissed, notably as a model for Lady
Touchwood's arousing of her husband's suspicions against Mellefont in Act Ill. However, the
character types are all to be found in Restoration tragedies. The episode in which Leucippus
is trapped into spying on a royal council meeting, and then betrayed, is more remote from the
scene in Lady Touchwood's bedroom than the two comparable scenes mentioned here, from
plays that would have been in the contemporary repertory.
21. Edward Burns, Restoration Comedy: Crius of D(sir( and Identity, London: Methuen, 1987,
p.196.
Tragic Intertextualities in The Double Dealer
143
vious destructiveness. Hence he is quite unlike the tricksters of contemporary
comedies, who are essentially harmless.
Maskwell's technique of deceiving by telling the truth reflects a similar ploy
by the conspirator Benducar in Dryden's Don Sebastian (1689), as contemporary
play-goers may have been expected to recognise. Benducar furthers his plot to
overthrow and supplant the Emperor of Algiers by telling him he will pretend to
be doing so, to test public dissatisfaction, and rejoices in soliloquy:
Now, by his own consent, I ruin rum,
FOf, should some feeble Soul, for fear or gain,
Bolt out t'accuse me, even the King is cozen'd,
And thinks he's in the secret.
How sweet is Treason when the Traytor's safe! (II.i.120-24).
Mellefones incapacity to penetrate the deceits of Maskwell. or to counter effectively the accusations of Lady T ouchwood, has some affinity with the binds of
moral nobility that paralyse Muly Hamet and Aurung-Zebe. In the casting, the
murder ofWilliam Mountfort in December 1692 had left the United Company
without a strong actor for leading young gendeman roles, with the role taken
here by the less prominent actor Joseph Williams Qohn Verbruggen, who would
prove to have more potential, was playing Careless). Cynthia's quick-witted seizing of the opportunity to eaves-drop upon the conspiring of Maskwell and Lady
T ouchwood has something of the resourcefulness of Mariamne, in The Empress
of Morocco, or of Indamora in Aurung-Zebe. For Anne Bracegirdle, the actress
playing Cynthia, these would have been very much in her line.
Cumulative verbal and stylistic echoes draw attention to structural affinities
with Shakespeare's Othello. a much older tragedy, but one that evidendy had a
secure place in the current theatrical repertory. Lord Touchwood emerges briefly
late in Act IV and early in Act V as a serious Othello figure, although ironically
his suspicion is inflamed not against his wife but against his nephew and heir, as
the attempted seducer and rapist of her. The most direct of the echoes is his demand of Maskw-ell, 'How! give me but Proof of it, Ocular Proof (IV.i.562-63),
echoing Othelio's demand to Iago, 'Give me the ocular proof (III.iii.366). His
later declaration, 'My Nephew is the alone remaining Branch of all our ancient
Family; him I thus blow away' (V.i.S7-S8) recalls Othellds 'All my fond love
thus do I blow to heaven' (III.iii.4S2). Once again, there is an ironic reversal in
the casting, with the dignified but relatively lighter-weight Edward Kynaston as
Lord T ouchwood, and Betterton 'not in the OthelIo but in the Iago role.
Many of these verbal, stylistic and structural parallels Congreve may well
have expected the more astute playgoers to pick up and appreciate. The closest
precursor to Maskwell, however, can be found in, a much more obscure tragedy,
Nevill Payne's The Fatal Jealousie. first performed in 1672, and published in
1673. Jasper, identified, as Maskwell is, in the Dramatis Personae list as 'A Villain,' is the servant of Don Antonio, identified as 'A Jealous Lord.' Jasper repeatedly plays upon and reinforces his master's pathological suspicions about the
supposed infidelities of his innocent and virtuous wife Celia. Jasper meanwhile is
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regularly bedding Celia's old nurse, but rejects suggestions he should marry her:
'Faith, Madam, I / Was ne're made to be Steel to a Tinder-Box; she's / Meer
Touch-wood,' (p.16) Congreve doubtless drew from this play the names of Lord
and Lady Touchwood, Maskwell's arousing the suspicions of Lord Touchwood
against Mellefont, and Maskwell's liaison with Lady Touchwood, which he is
starting to find wearisome (see Maskwell's soliloquy, lII.i.174-86, 'Pox I have
lost all Appetite to her ... '). He would also have found in it the motifs of the viper in the bosom, of witchcraft, and of making someone dance without a fiddle
(that is, making a fool of him).
The introduction of the tones and diction of the tragic or heroic drama had
occurred in individual speeches in other comedies of this era at moments of extreme emotional intensity for the character concerned, as in Mrs Loveit's exit
line in Etheregets The Man of Mode (1676); but the impact of such isolated exclamations would have been modified by their comedic contexts. What Congreve
did with the central action of The Double-Dealer, as it appeared in 1693, involved
taking far more radical risks with breaches of generic decorum, which exceeded
what the theatre audience was prepared to accept. In his 1706 and 1710 redactions, he toned down the indecorum, and, as Don McKenzie has persuasively
demonstrated, in 1710 affirmed the claim to classic status of his plays through
their mode of typographic presentation, with 'French scenes',
In his following comedies, Love for Love and The Way of the
Congreve would achieve seriousness in comedy by other means. Nonetheless, in the
second of these, in the development of the character Fainall (another Betterton
role, behind whom lurks the ghost of Maskwell), and in the treatment of the
conflict for the succession in an upper-class family, one can perceive a mature
fulfilment of many of the dramatic ideas and dynamics that were being experimented with in The Double-Dealer.