Prove it, madam? 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 Oh yes of scandal, and have your case opened by an old fumbling leacher 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 fidges off and on his cushion as if he had swallowed cantharides, or sate upon cow-itch. (LADY: Oh, ’tis very hard!) 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: Worse and worse.) 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.

Mrs Marwood Monologue from The Way of the World

Rehearse Mrs Marwood's monologue