William Congreve, The Way of the World

Dryden would have approved of the double plot, which ties itself up nicely because all the characters are related to each other or friends with each other or sleeping with each other. Some young gallants try to keep an aunt from marrying again so that they'll end up with her fortune, but unlike Jonson's Epicene, the aunt never gets her money taken away from her. (So the nephew's inheritance is still safe? It's not clear—no one ever actually mentions the money, but since that's always what's at stake in plays about aunts and uncles getting married, the presumptive inheritance must be what's moving the plot here, too.)

There are a LOT of Jonson references, really—a dumb cousin comes in from the country and someone mentions Bartholmew Fair; when the gallants discuss how they'll keep the aunt from marrying the suitor, they mention Mosca in Volpone to explain how, if the fake suitor did get proposed to, he'd demand too many conditions in the marriage settlement for the aunt to agree to it—and he'd do this not because he didn't want to marry her, but because they'd already had him married that morning to another servant. But a better Jonson parallel for a story about a fake marriage would have been Epicene—and I can't figure out why Congreve doesn't use that, instead.