146. An oyez of scandal

How should one respond to a libel?  File suit?

Mrs. Marwood. What, and have your name prostituted in a public court; yours and your daughter’s reputation worried at the bar by a pack of bawling lawyers? To be ushered in with an oyez of scandal; and have your case opened by an old fumbling lecher in a quoif like a man-midwife, to bring your daughter’s infamy to light; to be a theme for legal punsters, and quibblers by the statute; and become a jest, against a rule of court, where there is no precedent for a jest in any record; not even in Doomsday Book: to discompose the gravity of the bench, and provoke naughty interrogatories in more naughty law Latin; while the good judge, tickled with the proceeding, simpers under a grey beard, and fidgets off and on his cushion as if he had swallowed cantharides, or sat upon cow-itch.

Lady Wishfort. O, ’tis very hard!

Mrs. Marwood. And then to have my young revellers of the Temple take notes, like prentices at a conventicle; and after talk it over again in Commons, or before drawers in an eating-house.

Lady Wishfort. Worse and worse.

Mrs. Marwood. Nay, this is nothing; if it would end here ’twere well. But it must after this be consigned by the shorthand writers to the public press; and from thence be transferred to the hands, nay, into the throats and lungs of hawkers, with voices more licentious than the loud flounder-man’s: and this you must hear ’till you are stunned; nay, you must hear nothing else for some days.

That's from Congreve's The Way of the World, which after three centuries remains unsurpassed in its comic abuse of lawyers and judges.  (If you're wondering about the cantharides or cow-itch, follow the links.)   But there are layers of irony in Mrs. Marwood's  speech,  because she's one of the villains of the piece.   Layer one, which is apparent to everyone in the theater except Lady Wishfort: her advice is deeply self-interested.  Layer two, which is mainly apparent to lawyers: it's still good advice.