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Library / Literature & Fiction

The Double-Dealer: A Comedy

by William Congreve

Pages
about 99
Category
Literature & Fiction
Language
English
Reading time
1.8 h at 250 wpm
Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 61 min at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

Transcribed from the 1895 Methuen and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

Huic equidem consilio palmam do: hic me magnifice effero, qui vim tantam in me et potestatem habeam tantae astutiae, vera dicendo ut eos ambos fallam.

TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE CHARLES MONTAGUE, ONE OF THE LORDS OF THE TREASURY.

Sir,--I heartily wish this play were as perfect as I intended it, that it might be more worthy your acceptance, and that my dedication of it to you might be more becoming that honour and esteem which I, with everybody who is so fortunate as to know you, have for you. It had your countenance when yet unknown; and now it is made public, it wants your protection.

I would not have anybody imagine that I think this play without its faults, for I am conscious of several. I confess I designed (whatever vanity or ambition occasioned that design) to have written a true and regular comedy, but I found it an undertaking which put me in mind of Sudet multum, frustraque laboret ausus idem. And now, to make amends for the vanity of such a design, I do confess both the attempt and the imperfect performance. Yet I must take the boldness to say I have not miscarried in the whole, for the mechanical part of it is regular. That I may say with as little vanity as a builder may say he has built a house according to the model laid down before him, or a gardener that he has set his flowers in a knot of such or such a figure. I designed the moral first, and to that moral I invented the fable, and do not know that I have borrowed one hint of it anywhere. I made the plot as strong as I could because it was single, and I made it single because I would avoid confusion, and was resolved to preserve the three unities of the drama.

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