William Congreve

For other uses, see William Congreve (disambiguation).

William Congreve
William Congreve in 1709 by Godfrey Kneller
Born	(1670-01-24)24 January 1670 Bardsey, England
Died	London, England
Occupation	Playwright, poet
Nationality	English
Period	1693–1700

William Congreve (24 January 1670 – 19 January 1729) was an English playwright and poet.

Early life

Congreve was born in Bardsey, West Yorkshire, England (near Leeds). His parents were William Congreve (1637–1708) and Mary (née Browning; 1636?–1715). The family moved to London in 1672. They relocated again in 1674 to the Irish port town of Youghal where his father served as a lieutenant in the British army. Congreve spent his childhood in Ireland, where his father, a Cavalier, had settled during the reign of Charles II. Congreve was educated at Kilkenny College where he met Jonathan Swift, who would be his friend for the remainder of his life; and at Trinity College in Dublin. Upon graduation, he matriculated in the Middle Temple in London to study law, but felt himself pulled toward literature, drama, and the fashionable life. Artistically, he became a disciple of John Dryden whom he met through the gatherings of literary circles held at Will's Coffeehouse in the Covenant Garden District of London.

Literary career

William Congreve wrote some of the most popular English plays of the Restoration period of the late 17th century. His first play, The Old Bachelor, was produced at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1693 and later produced by the Theatre Royale. By the age of thirty, he had written four comedies, including Love for Love (premiered 30 April 1695) and The Way of the World (premiered 1700), and one tragedy, The Mourning Bride (1697).

His playwrighting career was brief. Five plays authored from 1693 to 1700 would prove the entirety of his output, as public tastes turned away from the sort of high-brow sexual comedy of manners in which he specialised. He reportedly was particularly stung by a critique written by Jeremy Collier (A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage), to the point that he wrote a long reply, "Amendments of Mr. Collier's False and Imperfect Citations." A member of the Whig Kit-Kat Club, Congreve's career shifted to the political sector, where he held various minor political positions, including being named Secretary of the Island of Jamaica by George I in 1714, in spite of being a Whig among Tories.

Later life

Congreve withdrew from the theatre and lived the rest of his life on residuals from his early work. His output from 1700 was restricted to the occasional poem and some translation (notably Molière's Monsieur de Pourceaugnac). Congreve never married; in his own era and through subsequent generations, he was famous for his friendships with prominent actresses and noblewomen for whom he wrote major parts in all his plays.These women included Anne Bracegirdle and Henrietta Godolphin, 2nd Duchess of Marlborough, daughter of the famous general, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Congreve and Henrietta probably met by 1703 and she had a daughter, Mary (1723–1764), who was believed to be his.

As early as 1710, he suffered both from gout and from cataracts on his eyes. Congreve suffered a carriage accident in late September 1728, from which he never recovered (having probably received an internal injury); he died in London in January 1729, and was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Famous lines

Two of Congreve's turns of phrase from The Mourning Bride (1697) have become famous, albeit frequently in misquotation, and often misattributed to William Shakespeare:

• "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast," which is the first line of the play, spoken by Almeria in Act I, Scene 1. This is often misquoted as "Music has charms to soothe the savage beast".
• "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned," spoken by Zara in Act III, Scene VIII. (This is usually paraphrased as "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned")

Congreve coined another famous phrase in Love for Love (1695):

• "O fie, miss, you must not kiss and tell."

References in popular culture

A fictitious play by Congreve, The Gallivant, features prominently in the novel Flowers for the Judge by Margery Allingham.

Works

• The Old Bachelor (1693)
• The Double Dealer (1694)
• Love for Love (1695)
• The Mourning Bride (1697)
• The Way of the World Is also William Congreve last play (1700)

See also

• Restoration comedy

Sources

• Congreve, William. The poetical works of William Congreve. With the life of the author. Cooke's edition. Embellished with superb engravings. London, [1796]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. California State Univ, Northridge. 3 November 2015
• Klekar, Cynthia. "Obligation, Coercion, and Economy: The Gift of Deed in Congreve’s The Way of the World." In The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.
• "Love for Love." Drama for Students. Ed. Jennifer Smith. Vol. 14. Detroit: Gale, 2002. 175-205. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 3 November 2015.
• Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration. London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853.

External links

• Biography
• Works by William Congreve at Project Gutenberg
• Works by William Congreve at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• William Congreve at Find a Grave