SOURCE: Gill, Pat. “A Trick Done with Mirrors.” In Interpreting Ladies: Women, Wit, and Morality in the Restoration Comedy of Manners, edited by John Stacey, pp. 1-21. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Gill explores how Restoration playwrights used satire to deal with society's moral restrictions against sexualized females.

Disappointed and angry at the critical response to The Double Dealer (1693), William Congreve included a peevish justification of the work in his dedication. In it he warns “the Ladies” offended by the vulgarity in his satirical portraits that moral objections reflect badly on those who find fault.¹ Any lascivious depictions in this play, he archly contends, are figments of their own guilty imaginings: “I have heard some whispering, as if [the Ladies] intended to accuse this Play of Smuttiness and Bawdy: But I declare I took a particular care to avoid it, and if they...