William Congreve

William Congreve

born 24 January 1670, Bardsey, Yorkshire, England; died 19 January 1729, London

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Life

In 1674 Congreve's father was granted a commission in the army to join the garrison at Youghal, in Ireland and so after a transfer to Carrickfergus, Congreve, was sent to school at Kilkenny, the Eton of Ireland, in 1681. Five years later, he entered Trinity College, Dublin. During the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) the family moved to Stretton in Staffordshire, and Congreve's father was made estate agent to the earl of Cork in 1690. In 1691 he was entered as a law student at the Middle Temple and started writing and publishing. He quickly became known and became a protégé of John Dryden. In that year Dryden and Congreve collaborated on a translation of the satires of Juvenal and Persius. Congreve published a novel, Incognita, in 1691. In March 1693 he achieved sudden fame with the production at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, of The Old Bachelour, which was written in 1690. Congreve claimed to have composed this play to amuse himself during convalescence. The Double Dealer had its premiere in 1693, Love for Love in 1695. In 1695 Congreve became one of the managers of the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields and he was made one of the five commissioners for licensing hackney coaches, though at a reduced salary of £100 per annum. When Congreve's masterpiece The Way of the World failed to be successful in 1700, he refrained from writing plays. He did not, however, desert the stage entirely and wrote librettos for two operas, and collaborated on translating Molière's Monsieur de Pourceaugnac for Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1704. It is likely that Congreve's retreat from the stage was partly the result of his play failing and partly of the Collier attack, which was launched against the supposed immorality of contemporary comedies and specifically against Congreve and Dryden. The rest of his life he passed rather quietly, being in easy circumstances thanks to his private income and his multiple government posts. When Voltaire visited him, Congreve maintained that he does not want to be thought of as author, but as English gentleman. He is notorious for his affection for Anne Bracegirdle — who acted most of his female leads, was a close friend and probably his mistress. In his later years he probably had an affair with the second duchess of Marlborough, and he probably fathered her second daughter, Lady Mary Godolphin, later duchess of Leeds. This would account for the large legacy, which he left to the duchess of Marlborough. He died after a carriage accident in 1729.

Works

Drama

Being born after the Restoration William Congreve belongs to the second generation of writers, together with Richard Steele, George Farquhar and John Vanbrugh. Congreve's comedies are similar in their polished brilliance to George Etherege's comedies of manner. His main themes are the manners and behaviour of the upper and middle classes, the tensions between love and money, obedience to one's parents and the wish to live one's own life; the need to lie in society and the wish to be honest. Congreve's first play The Old Bachelour(1693) was an enormous success, running for the then unprecedented length of a fortnight and commended even by the great writer John Dryden. Congreve's next play, The Double-Dealer, played in November or December of the same year at Drury Lane did not meet with the same applause. People criticised that the villain was too villainous and that his monologues were too artificial. Love for Love, which was first performed in 1695, almost repeated the success of his first play. It was the first production staged for the new company in Lincoln's Inn Fields, which was opened after protracted crises of the United Company at the Theatre Royal. Congreve failed to carry out his promise of writing one play a year for the Lincoln's Inn Fields company, so the theatre staged his next play The Mourning Bride in 1697. Although it is now his least regarded drama, this tragedy increased his reputation enormously and became his most popular play. No further dramatic work appeared until March 1700, when Congreve's masterpiece, The Way of the World, was produced and at first met with criticism. This is often attributed to the complexity of the plot. The Way of the World ropes around the lovers Mirabell and Millamant who have to overcome several difficulties in order to marry and secure Millamant's substantial inheritance. It is not only difficult to follow the plot, but it is also difficult to find out who is a villain, a fool or a hero. Fainall, the bad guy, at first resembles hero Mirabel. The three fools Witwoud, Petulant and Sir Wilfull Witwoud sparkle with puns and bonmots. After a while, however, the audience started to like The Way of the World and it became a comedy classic.

Poetry

In 1695 Congreve began to write his more public occasional verse, such as his pastoral on the death of Queen Mary II and his Pindarique Ode, Humbly Offer'd to the King on his taking Namure. He also wrote a considerable number of poems, some of the light social variety, some scholarly translations from Homer, Juvenal, Ovid, and Horace, and some Pindaric odes. The volume containing these odes also comprised his Discourse on the Pindarique Ode (1706), which brought some order to a form that had become wildly unrestrained since the days of the poet Abraham Cowley.

Sources

Corman, Brian. “Comedy” in The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Ed. D. Payne Fisk. Cambridge: CUP, 2003.

Korninger, Siegfried. The Restoration Period and the Eighteenth Century. 1660 – 1780. München: Österreichischer Bundesverlag Wien, 1964.

"Congreve, William." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 22 May 2009 <http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-1477>.