“So do in the light” of Congreve in brief
“So do in the world” – the last of four comedies, written by William Kongrig, the most famous of the galaxy of English playwrights of the Restoration. And though his other play, “Love for Love,” written five years earlier, was incomparably more famous, as well as a much greater stage success and a more rich stage story, it was “So do in the light” that seems to be the most perfect of Congreve’s heritage. Not only in its title, but in the play itself, in its characters there is that universality, that non-attachment by the time of its creation, to the specific circumstances of London’s life at the end of the 17th century. , which gives this play a character of genuine classics.
It is this feature that naturally causes the most unexpected parallels and associations in reading the play of Congreve. The play “So act in the light” is first and foremost a “comedy of morals”, the mores of a secular society,
In the comedy of Congreve, there are not so many actors. Mirabell and Mrs. Millance are our heroes; Mr. and Mrs. Feinell; Whitwood and Petyulent are secular cunts and witticisms; Lady Wishforth – Mrs. Feinell’s mother; Mrs. Marwood is the main “spring of intrigue,” in some ways the prototype of the Wilde Mrs. Cheveley of the “Ideal Husband”; maid Lady Wishforte Foyble and valet Mirabella Waytwell – they also have to play an important role in action; the half-brother of Whitwood, Sir Wilfoot is an uncouth provincial with monstrous manners, which, however, makes his significant contribution to the final “happy end”. To retell a comedy, the plot of which abounds with the most unexpected turns and moves, is obviously ungrateful, therefore we will outline only the main lines.
Mirabell, a windbreaker known to the whole of London and an irresistible ladies’ man, who has a stunning success in women’s society, managed to turn his head like the elderly Lady Wishforth, and the insidious Mrs. Marwood. Now he is passionately in love with the beautiful Millend, who clearly reciprocates with him. But the above-mentioned ladies, rejected by Mirabell, are doing everything possible to prevent his happiness with a successful rival. Mirabell very much resembles Lord Goring of the “Ideal Husband”: by nature, a man of the highest order, who has quite clear ideas about morality and morality, he nevertheless strives in secular conversation with cynicism and wit not to fall behind the general tone and very much succeeds in this, because its witticisms and paradoxes are not as an example brighter, more spectacular and paradoxical, rather than the heavy-handed attempts of the inseparable Whitwood and Petülent, representing a comic couple, like Gogol’s Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky. Petyulent, however, differs from his friend in his penchant for spiteful gossip, and here comes the help that comes out in Zoryatsky’s “Woe from Wit”: “He is a man of the world, / A notorious swindler, a rogue…”
The beginning of the play is a never-ending cascade of witticisms, jokes, puns, and everyone strives to “recite” the other. However, in this “salon conversation”, under the guise of smiling friendliness, unconcealed mucks speak in the face, and behind them – behind-the-scenes intrigues, ill-will, anger…
Millameng – a real heroine: intelligent, refined, one hundred heads above the rest, captivating and willful. There is something in it from Shakespeare’s Katarina, and from Moliere’s Selimena from Misanthrope: she finds particular pleasure in tormenting Mirabella, constantly jesting and ridiculing him and, I must say, doing it very successfully. And when he tries to be sincere and serious with her, taking off the clown mask for a moment, the Millament becomes frankly boring. She agrees in everything with him, but to teach her, read her morals – no, your will, dismiss!
However, to achieve its goal, Mirabell starts a very intriguing intrigue, the “executors” of which are servants: Foyble and Waitwell. But his plan, with all its ingenuity and ingenuity, stumbles upon the resistance of Mr. Feynedle, which, unlike our hero, though he is a modest person, but in reality is an embodiment of insidiousness and shamelessness, and insidiousness engendered entirely by terrestrial causes-greed and greed. Lady Wishforth is involved in the intrigue too, this is where the author takes her soul, giving vent to her sarcasm: in the description blinded by the certainty of her irresistibility of an elderly coquette, blinded to such a degree that her female vanity outweighs all the arguments of the mind, preventing her from seeing quite obvious and unaided eyes cheating.
Generally, putting a number of noble ladies and their maids, the playwright makes it clear that, in terms of morality, the morals of both of them are the same – to be precise, the maids try not to lag behind their mistresses in anything.
The central point of the play is the scene of the explanation of Mirabella and Millanment. In the “conditions” that they put forward before marriage, with every inherent desire to preserve their independence, in one they are surprisingly similar: in the reluctance to look like the many married couples that their friends are: they looked at this ” family happiness “and for themselves they want something completely different.
A cunning plot Mirabella suffers a fiasco next to the cunning of his “friend” Feynella. However, virtue in the finals triumphs, vice defeated. Some heaviness of this “happy ending” is obvious – as well as any other, however, for almost any “happy ending” slightly gives a fairy tale, always more or less, but diverging from the logic of reality.
The result is summed up all the words that Mirabell says: “This is the lesson to those people who are foolish, / That marriage is defile with deception of mutuality: / Let both sides observe the honesty, / Or the double-cheat is found on the rogue.”
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