Bring out the
significance of the title of The Way of the World.
It
was perhaps sheer pedantic myopia that, when Jeremy Collier published his essay
A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness
of the English Stage in
1698, he made Congreve a particular target of his criticism. That Collier had a
case is undeniable, but he forgot that a true artist does have as sincere
obligation to society as a churchman. Had he waited before publishing his essay
till the production of The Way of the World (1770), he could have perhaps
understood that truth; for, in the play The Way of the World Congreve seems to
understand the “immorality and profaneness” of a society, upon the matrices of
which Restoration plays were made. He was seriously thinking of an alternative
pattern of behaviour and an alternative set of codes of conduct. The very title
of the play, The Way of the World points to the ‘way’ the hero
and heroine (and by implication the spectators) should adopt in order to come
out of the grip of the fashionable society. The whole story is an illustration
of the process, by following which Mirabell and Millament seek a resolution,
that is, to gain their own world by using and manipulating the existing social
norms, through the winding lanes of that society. Congreve constructed the plot
of the play accordingly with this aim in mind. One can discern a definite
pattern in the movement of the play
