The Way of the World Lesson Plan

Explore the many ways in which women are discussed in Act II.

Conversation focuses throughout the act on women and especially on relationships between women and women, women and men, and men and men. For example, Mirabell makes fun of women's relationships, insinuating that they are insincere but pretend to be devout, and Ms. Marwood argues back that the relationships between men are even more disingenuous.

Congreve parodies these same-sex friendships and those between men and women by showing almost all of the characters of either gender being disingenuous to one another willy-nilly. This disingenuousness is caused by the dual themes in Restoration Comedies of...