The Way of the World: Verbal Irony 3 key examples

This sounds at first like the highest flattery of the audience. Congreve claims his play is not like other Restoration comedies, which satirize society, because the audience is "reformed" and surely beyond reproach. He does not mean to "give offence" by "instructing" them in how to behave because they already know how to behave. He admits that he might "expose" some of the characters as fools, but he insists that these foolish characters do not reflect anyone who is in the audience. Congreve presents himself as a "passive poet" (rather than an active satirist) who just wrote a play for fun and is presenting it to the audience. They are free to judge the characters as they wish. In fact, Congreve suggests that the audience probably knows better than him which characters ought to be judged.

But Congreve does not really intend this prologue as straightforward flattery. The first clue to this is that the actor who plays Fainall, a chronic liar and manipulator, delivers the speech. By getting the audience to believe they are beyond reproach, Congreve has already gained a point against them. As the play goes on, it becomes clear that only a fool, like Lady Wishfort, can be taken in by this kind of flattery. The play goes on to critique a society of "manners" where people avoid "giving offence" openly by making backhanded compliments and performing politeness more than embodying it. Congreve is having his own fun with performing manners. The prologue sounds extremely polite but is itself one long backhanded compliment.

Nonetheless, the prologue does soften the blows of the play's satire. The fact that Congreve makes fun of his audience by doing exactly what he critiques (couching criticisms in politeness) establishes right away that the satire is good-natured. He is not above is own critique, and he thinks the pettiness of all this "polite" rudeness is at least as amusing as it is bad for society.

Mirabell has suggested that Fainall will disapprove of his gossiping with Mrs. Fainall, ruining reputations. He has reason to believe that Fainall with disapprove: earlier in the day, Fainall described the gossip sessions at Lady Wishfort's house as horrible, frivolous, judgmental affairs where people satiate their appetite for scandal on the corpses of ruined reputations. In this passage, Mrs. Fainall retorts that her husband is simply more obsessed with appearances than satisfying his own curiosity about his neighbors. She claims that as someone obsessed with appearances, Fainall wouldn't want to create yet another scandal by letting himself be seen walking together with his wife. By this logic, Fainall will be happy to let Mrs. Fainall and Mirabell go on together without him.

On the surface, Mrs. Fainall is claiming that her husband is simply worried about politeness and public image. In the world of the play, everyone is supposed to have a healthy concern for public image, so this is a polite enough claim about him. But the idea that it would be fodder for gossip if she and her husband were seen together indicates that their marriage is not in good shape. They must not spend much time together, at least in public. Furthermore, underlying Mrs. Fainall's claim that her husband has "a humour more prevailing than his curiosity" is the idea that Fainall has somehow overridden his basic humanity. How could someone not want to know the latest neighborhood gossip? She does not specify which "humour" prevails. In this period, a healthy person was supposed to a balanced mix of the four humours (phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile). Fainall has too much of one. As the play goes on, it seems likely that it is yellow bile. Too much yellow bile was said to make people hot-tempered and ambitious.

Mrs. Fainall thus uses the pretense that everyone (even Fainall) is concerned about manners to insult her husband by walking off with another man—and her former lover, no less! If he were to stop them, it would disprove her backhanded compliment and reveal that Fainall is not governed by the rules of politeness. After several backhanded compliments, Mrs. Fainall at last outwits Fainall and alerts the audience to the fact that something is off about him.

A rack is a torture device across which a prisoner's body is stretched. While the prisoner's hands and feet are tied at either end, rollers gradually pull the ends apart so that all the joints in the body are pulled apart. The stress on the entire body is very painful. The image of Waitwell hanging on a rack suggests that he is absolutely helpless to do anything because he is so enamored of Wishfort. He is her prisoner. The image is at once flattering and unflattering: he lets Wishfort know that he likes her a lot, but he also chides her a little for leaving him in such a vulnerable position. She is not being a good host, and manners are important to her.

Beneath all this, there is a second meaning to Waitwell's words here. He is waiting "on the tenter of expectation," but not the kind of expectation he allows Wishfort to think. Instead, he is dying to know whether he is going to be able to keep her convinced that he is Sir Rowland long enough for Mirabell to pull off his blackmail scheme. This is a fun caper for Waitwell, possibly in part because he is a servant who now gets to humiliate someone of higher social rank than him. Although his image suggests that he is Lady Wishfort's prisoner, there is a way in which the reverse is true. Because Lady Wishfort is so desperate for attention from a suitor, Waitwell has her captive to his affection. He is gradually stretching her to her limit, seeing how long he can keep her under the spell of his feigned romance.