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Satire
Explanation and Analysis—Moralist Bookshelf:
In Act 3, Scene 4, Wishfort tells Marwood to hide in her closet (more of a study than a storage room in this context) while she speaks to Foible and tries to see if Foible and Mirabell are up to something. Wishfort alludes to several moralist works, all on the bookshelf in the closet for Marwood to peruse:
Dear friend, retire into my closet, that I may examine her with more freedom. – You’ll pardon me, dear friend; I can make bold with you. – There are books over the chimney – Quarles and Prynne, and the Short View of the Stage, with Bunyan’s works, to entertain you.
Quarles is a poet whose most famous work, Emblems, dressed up scripture in ornate paraphrases. Critics such as Alexander Pope and Sir John Suckling (who Millamant later quotes) hated Quarles and thought his work was a pointless embellishment on ideas readers could get by reading the Bible directly. Like many of the people in Congreve's play, Emblems makes a flashy show of its moral superiority rather than saying anything especially important or new. Meanwhile, Prynne and Jeremy Collier (who wrote A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage in 1698) had both critiqued the theater for promoting bad morals. Collier had specifically called out Congreve and several other playwrights for their plays' failure to punish characters for their sins. Bunyan is John Bunyan, who wrote Pilgrim's Progress, one of the most commercially successful Christian allegories ever. Reading Pilgrim's Progress was fashionable for a long time, and readers could appear to be devout Christians simply by showing that they had read this book.
These allusions contribute to the play's satire. Lady Wishfort is one of the immoral characters who, according to Collier's argument, ought to be punished. The fact that Lady Wishfort herself is representative of the kind of people who like these moralist works reveals a lack of reflection on moralists' part. Like Quarles's dressed-up scripture, Lady Wishfort's bookshelf is a display of morals more than morality in practice. The people who read and write these books, Congreve implies, aren't actually any better than anyone else. In fact, they are often worse because they are hypocrites who perform moral superiority without understanding or really embodying it.
Congreve's prologue indicated that the play would not make fun of audience members because surely everyone in the audience is beyond reproach. Those audience members who saw through the verbal irony of the prologue, concluding that no one is truly beyond reproach, are in on the joke here. They understand that Lady Wishfort is just like those audience members who believe that they actually are beyond reproach.
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