In Three Couples Talking: Doing It With Words in Restoration Comedy, Margaret Amis uses language game theory to examine the conversations of the Wit couples in three Restoration Comedies: Sir George Etherege's The Man of Mode, John Dryden's Marriage a la Mode, and William Congreve's The Way of the World. Speakers engage in witty language--performative language--when they understand that their word perform actions such as insulting, complimenting, attacking, defending, promising, daring, resisting, yielding. But language that brackets criteria of truth and' falsehood, as Wit language does, ends up subverting the possibility that language can mean--or be believed--directly.;Each chapter considers a different pair of lovers in a rigorous close reading of their conversations, at the same time that it addresses different problematics. Since courtship takes place through the medium of "duels" how does language operate in a game where the players are ambivalent? How do courtships work when the things language does--performs--complicate the things it says?;The Etherege chapter opens the discussion of the problem with Wit language. The performative language that allows Harriet and Dorimant to discover their status as lovers makes it impossible for Harriet to believe Dorimant when he declares his love at the end. However, in the Dryden chapter, Rhodophil and Doralice need to suspend the truth-bearing qualities of language in order to allow other truths and feelings to come to the fore. With the Wit tradition well established, Millamant and Mirabell display their virtuoso understanding of the sexual nature of language. Indeed, in all three chapters, I demonstrate that the lovers' conversations are deeply intimate investigations that rehearse the kind of marriage and sexual life they will have. The Wit couples' sexuality as enacted in language communicates the pleasure of having power over another and the pleasures of yielding.
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