“Drink up all the Water in the Sea:” Contracting Relationships in Congreve’s Love for Love and the Way of the World

This essay argues that Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy’s pervasive representation of legal technicality substantially complicates our received picture of that most conventional of comic resolutions, marriage. The late plays of Congreve in particular demonstrate a period-wide tendency to assess marriage, understood as a resolutely legal process, within the context of other types of legal relationship. Even as they involve themselves in legal technicality, these comedies signally involve forms of obligation that push against or past the bounds of the law. They address the period’s broader legal culture with an improvisational flexibility unrivaled by case law and commentary alike.