# The Way of the World: every role by lines, words, and stage time

> William Congreve. 17 speaking roles, 25,194 words, about 180 minutes of speech.

- URL: https://www.offbook.com/plays/the-way-of-the-world
- Last updated: 2026-10-08

**Mirabell** has the most to say in The Way of the World: about 482 lines and 4,038 words, 16% of the play. Congreve’s comedy follows Mirabell as he schemes to marry Mrs. Millamant and secure her fortune from her aunt, Lady Wishfort. Mirabell and Lady Wishfort are almost exactly level, with about 16% of the words each. Lady Wishfort does not speak until Act 3, so her part is packed into the second half.

- Speaking roles: 17
- Scenes: 12
- Words: 25,194
- Speech time: 180 min

## Every role, largest first

| Role | Lines | Words | Share | Minutes | Scenes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Mirabell | 482 | 4,038 | 16% | 28.8 | 7 |
| Lady Wishfort | 453 | 3,989 | 15.8% | 28.5 | 8 |
| Fainall | 338 | 2,857 | 11.3% | 20.4 | 6 |
| Mrs. Marwood | 292 | 2,449 | 9.7% | 17.5 | 6 |
| Mrs. Millamant | 288 | 2,438 | 9.7% | 17.4 | 6 |
| Sir Wilful | 252 | 2,258 | 9% | 16.1 | 5 |
| Witwoud | 240 | 1,983 | 7.9% | 14.2 | 6 |
| Foible | 195 | 1,674 | 6.6% | 12.0 | 7 |
| Mrs. Fainall | 170 | 1,326 | 5.3% | 9.5 | 7 |
| Petulant | 102 | 825 | 3.3% | 5.9 | 4 |
| Waitwell | 88 | 739 | 2.9% | 5.3 | 3 |
| Mincing | 36 | 300 | 1.2% | 2.1 | 4 |
| Footman | 21 | 162 | 0.6% | 1.2 | 2 |
| Peg | 8 | 50 | 0.2% | 0.4 | 1 |
| Betty | 9 | 49 | 0.2% | 0.4 | 2 |
| Coachman | 4 | 31 | 0.1% | 0.2 | 1 |
| Messenger | 4 | 26 | 0.1% | 0.2 | 1 |

## Who speaks in which scene

Words each role speaks in each scene (scene: words). Scenes: 1.1 = Act 1, Scene 1; 1.2 = Act 1, Scene 2; 2.1 = Act 2, Scene 1; 2.2 = Act 2, Scene 2; 3.1 = Act 3, Scene 1; 3.2 = Act 3, Scene 2; 3.3 = Act 3, Scene 3; 4.1 = Act 4, Scene 1; 4.2 = Act 4, Scene 2; 5.1 = Act 5, Scene 1; 5.2 = Act 5, Scene 2; 5.3 = Act 5, Scene 3.

- **Mirabell**: 1.1 (601), 1.2 (1,044), 2.1 (27), 2.2 (1,022), 4.1 (574), 5.2 (231), 5.3 (539)
- **Lady Wishfort**: 3.1 (991), 3.2 (188), 3.3 (96), 4.1 (285), 4.2 (858), 5.1 (336), 5.2 (950), 5.3 (285)
- **Fainall**: 1.1 (407), 1.2 (508), 2.1 (748), 3.3 (548), 5.2 (302), 5.3 (344)
- **Mrs. Marwood**: 2.1 (783), 3.1 (37), 3.2 (290), 3.3 (811), 5.2 (479), 5.3 (49)
- **Mrs. Millamant**: 2.2 (648), 3.3 (634), 4.1 (972), 4.2 (32), 5.2 (123), 5.3 (29)
- **Sir Wilful**: 3.3 (835), 4.1 (438), 4.2 (462), 5.2 (344), 5.3 (179)
- **Witwoud**: 1.2 (1,113), 2.2 (173), 3.3 (366), 4.1 (249), 4.2 (35), 5.3 (47)
- **Foible**: 2.2 (205), 3.1 (655), 3.2 (12), 4.1 (114), 4.2 (172), 5.1 (493), 5.3 (23)
- **Mrs. Fainall**: 2.1 (351), 2.2 (264), 3.1 (120), 4.1 (299), 5.1 (121), 5.2 (115), 5.3 (56)
- **Petulant**: 1.2 (419), 3.3 (206), 4.1 (171), 5.3 (29)
- **Waitwell**: 2.2 (183), 4.2 (533), 5.3 (23)

## The longest speeches

| Speech | Scene | Words | Lines |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Mrs. Marwood: “Indeed, Mrs. Engine, is it thus with you? Are you become a go-between of this importance? Yes, I shall watch you. Why this wench is the passe-partout, a very master-key to everybody’s strong box. My friend Fainall, have you carried it so swimmingly? I thought there was something in it; but it seems it’s over with you. Your loathing is not from a want of appetite then, but from a surfeit. Else you could never be so cool to fall from a principal to be an assistant, to procure for him! A pattern of generosity, that I confess. Well, Mr. Fainall, you have met with your match.—O man, man! Woman, woman! The devil’s an ass: if I were a painter, I would draw him like an idiot, a driveller with a bib and bells. Man should have his head and horns, and woman the rest of him. Poor, simple fiend!—“Madam Marwood has a month’s mind, but he can’t abide her.”—’Twere better for him you had not been his confessor in that affair, without you could have kept his counsel closer. I shall not prove another pattern of generosity; he has not obliged me to that with those excesses of himself, and now I’ll have none of him. Here comes the good lady, panting ripe, with a heart full of hope, and a head full of care, like any chemist upon the day of projection.” | Act 3, Scene 2 | 237 | 24 |
| Sir Wilful: “In vino veritas, aunt.—If I drunk your health today, cousin—I am a Borachio. But if you have a mind to be married, say the word and send for the piper; Wilfull will do’t. If not, dust it away, and let’s have t’other round.—Tony!—Ods-heart, where’s Tony!—Tony’s an honest fellow, but he spits after a bumper, and that’s a fault—” | Act 4, Scene 2 | 199 | 20 |
| Mirabell: “And for a discerning man somewhat too passionate a lover, for I like her with all her faults; nay, like her for her faults. Her follies are so natural, or so artful, that they become her, and those affectations which in another woman would be odious serve but to make her more agreeable. I’ll tell thee, Fainall, she once used me with that insolence that in revenge I took her to pieces, sifted her, and separated her failings: I studied ’em and got ’em by rote. The catalogue was so large that I was not without hopes, one day or other, to hate her heartily. To which end I so used myself to think of ’em, that at length, contrary to my design and expectation, they gave me every hour less and less disturbance, till in a few days it became habitual to me to remember ’em without being displeased. They are now grown as familiar to me as my own frailties, and in all probability in a little time longer I shall like ’em as well.” | Act 1, Scene 2 | 177 | 18 |
| Lady Wishfort: “Why, if she should be innocent, if she should be wronged after all, ha?—I don’t know what to think—and I promise you, her education has been unexceptionable—I may say it, for I chiefly made it my own care to initiate her very infancy in the rudiments of virtue, and to impress upon her tender years a young odium and aversion to the very sight of men; aye, friend, she would ha’ shrieked if she had but seen a man till she was in her teens. As I’m a person, ’tis true—she was never suffered to play with a male child, though but in coats. Nay, her very babies were of the feminine gender. Oh, she never looked a man in the face but her own father or the chaplain, and him we made a shift to put upon her for a woman, by the help of his long garments, and his sleek face, till she was going in her fifteen.” | Act 5, Scene 2 | 164 | 17 |
| Lady Wishfort: “Well, and how shall I receive him? In what figure shall I give his heart the first impression? There is a great deal in the first impression. Shall I sit?—no, I won’t sit—I’ll walk—aye, I’ll walk from the door upon his entrance, and then turn full upon him—no, that will be too sudden. I’ll lie—aye, I’ll lie down—I’ll receive him in my little dressing-room; there’s a couch—yes, yes, I’ll give the first impression on a couch—I won’t lie neither, but loll and lean upon one elbow, with one foot a little dangling off, jogging in a thoughtful way—yes—and then as soon as he appears, start, aye, start and be surprised, and rise to meet him in a pretty disorder—yes—oh, nothing is more alluring than a levee from a couch in some confusion. It shows the foot to advantage, and furnishes with blushes and re-composing airs beyond comparison. Hark! There’s a coach.” | Act 4, Scene 1 | 163 | 17 |
| Mirabell: “I denounce against all strait lacing, squeezing for a shape, till you mould my boy’s head like a sugar-loaf, and instead of a man-child, make me father to a crooked billet. Lastly, to the dominion of the tea-table I submit—but with proviso, that you exceed not in your province, but restrain yourself to native and simple tea-table drinks, as tea, chocolate, and coffee. As likewise to genuine and authorised tea-table talk—such as mending of fashions, spoiling reputations, railing at absent friends, and so forth—but that on no account you encroach upon the men’s prerogative, and presume to drink healths, or toast fellows; for prevention of which, I banish all foreign forces, all auxiliaries to the tea-table, as orange-brandy, all aniseed, cinnamon, citron, and Barbados waters, together with ratafia and the most noble spirit of clary—but for cowslip-wine, poppy-water, and all dormitives, those I allow.—These provisos admitted, in other things I may prove a tractable and complying husband.” | Act 4, Scene 1 | 162 | 17 |
| Sir Wilful: “The fashion’s a fool and you’re a fop, dear brother. S’heart, I’ve suspected this—by’r lady I conjectured you were a fop, since you began to change the style of your letters, and write in a scrap of paper gilt round the edges, no bigger than a subpoena. I might expect this when you left off “Honoured brother,” and “Hoping you are in good health,” and so forth, to begin with a “Rat me, knight, I’m so sick of a last night’s debauch.” Ods heart, and then tell a familiar tale of a cock and a bull, and a whore and a bottle, and so conclude. You could write news before you were out of your time, when you lived with honest Pimple Nose, the attorney of Furnival’s Inn.—you could intreat to be remembered then to your friends round the reckan. We could have gazettes then, and Dawks’s Letter, and the Weekly Bill, till of late days.” | Act 3, Scene 3 | 158 | 16 |
| Mrs. Marwood: “’Twere better so indeed. Or what think you of the playhouse? A fine gay glossy fool should be given there, like a new masking habit, after the masquerade is over, and we have done with the disguise. For a fool’s visit is always a disguise, and never admitted by a woman of wit, but to blind her affair with a lover of sense. If you would but appear barefaced now, and own Mirabell, you might as easily put off Petulant and Witwoud as your hood and scarf. And indeed ’tis time, for the town has found it, the secret is grown too big for the pretence. ’Tis like Mrs. Primly’s great belly: she may lace it down before, but it burnishes on her hips. Indeed, Millamant, you can no more conceal it than my Lady Strammel can her face, that goodly face, which in defiance of her Rhenish-wine tea will not be comprehended in a mask.” | Act 3, Scene 3 | 156 | 16 |
| Fainall: “Why, faith, I’m thinking of it.—Let me see—I am married already; so that’s over. My wife has played the jade with me; well, that’s over too. I never loved her, or if I had, why that would have been over too by this time—jealous of her I cannot be, for I am certain; so there’s an end of jealousy. Weary of her I am and shall be—no, there’s no end of that—no, no, that were too much to hope. Thus far concerning my repose. Now for my reputation: as to my own, I married not for it; so that’s out of the question. And as to my part in my wife’s—why, she had parted with hers before; so, bringing none to me, she can take none from me: ’tis against all rule of play that I should lose to one who has not wherewithal to stake.” | Act 3, Scene 3 | 152 | 16 |
| Mrs. Millamant: “Trifles!—As liberty to pay and receive visits to and from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please, and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don’t like, because they are your acquaintance, or to be intimate with fools, because they may be your relations. Come to dinner when I please, dine in my dressing-room when I’m out of humour, without giving a reason. To have my closet inviolate; to be sole empress of my tea-table, which you must never presume to approach without first asking leave. And lastly, wherever I am, you shall always knock at the door before you come in. These articles subscribed, if I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife.” | Act 4, Scene 1 | 151 | 16 |

## Small roles that can be doubled

These pairs of small roles never speak in the same scene, so one actor could play both. Check entrances and silent appearances in your script before you cast it this way.

- Petulant and Peg
- Waitwell and Footman
- Waitwell and Peg
- Waitwell and Betty
- Waitwell and Coachman
- Waitwell and Messenger
- Mincing and Peg
- Mincing and Betty
- Mincing and Coachman
- Mincing and Messenger
- Footman and Peg
- Footman and Coachman

## Questions actors ask

### Who has the most lines in The Way of the World?

Mirabell, with about 482 lines and 4,038 words, 16% of everything spoken in the play. Lady Wishfort is next, with about 453 lines (15.8%).

### How long is The Way of the World?

The full text has 25,194 spoken words, about 180 minutes at 140 words a minute before pauses, scene changes, and cuts. Most productions cut the text, so running times vary.

### How many speaking roles are in The Way of the World?

17 named roles speak in this edition, across 12 scenes. 6 of them have less than 2% of the words, which is why small parts are often doubled.

## How we count

Counts are computed from the full text of the [Standard Ebooks edition](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-congreve/the-way-of-the-world) (public domain; retrieved 2026-10-08). Words are every spoken word, with stage directions removed. Lines are verse lines as printed, plus prose at 10 words a line, because prose has no fixed line breaks; editions differ, so other sources give slightly different line counts. Time is words at 140 words a minute, before pauses and stage business. A role is counted in a scene when it speaks there. To count a script that is not in the library, paste it into the [script line counter](https://www.offbook.com/tools/script-line-counter).