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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: COM-COR |
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CONGREVE, WILLIAM (167o-1729) , English dramatist, the greatest English master of pure comedy, was born at Bardsey near Leeds, where he was baptized on the loth of February 1670, although the inscription on his monument gives his date of birth as 1672. He was the son of William Congreve, a soldier who was soon after his son's birth placed in command of the 1 garrison at Youghal. To Ireland, therefore, is due the credit of his educationas a schoolboy at Kilkenny, as an under-graduate at Dublin, where he was a contemporary and friend of Swift. From college he came to London, and was entered as a student of law at the Middle Temple. The first-fruits of his studies appeared under the boyish pseudonym of " Cleophil," in the form of a novel whose existence is now remembered only through the unabashed avowal of so austere a moralist as Dr Johnson, that he "would rather praise it than read it." In 1693 Congreve's real career began, and early enough by the latest computation, with the brilliant appearance and instant success of his first comedy, The Old Bachelor, under the generous auspices of Dryden, then as ever a living and immortal witness to the falsehood of the vulgar charge which taxes the greater among poets with jealousy or envy, the natural badge and brand of the smallest that would claim a place among their kind. The discrowned laureate had never, he said, seen such a first play; and indeed the graceless grace of the dialogue was as yet only to be matched by the last and best work of Etherege, standing
gift of one place and the reversion of another were the solid fruits of his splendid success. Next year a better play from the same hand met with worse fortune on the stage, and with yet higher honour from the first living poet of his nation. The noble verses, as faultless in the expression as reckless in the extravagance of their applause, prefixed by Dryden to The Double Dealer, must naturally have supported the younger poet, if indeed such support can have been required, against the momentary annoyance of assailants whose passing clamour left uninjured and secure the fame of his second comedy; for the following year witnessed the crowning triumph of his art and life, in the appearance of Love for Love (1695). Two years later his ambition rather than his genius adventured on the foreign ground of tragedy, and The Mourning Bride (1697) began such a long career of good fortune as in earlier or later times would have been closed against a far better work. Next year he attempted, without his usual success, a reply to the attack of Jeremy Collier, the nonjuror, "on the immorality and profaneness of the English stage "an attack for once not discreditable to the assailant, whose honesty and courage were evident enough to approve him incapable alike of the ignominious precaution which might have suppressed his own name, and of the dastardly mendacity which would have stolen the mask of a stranger's. Against this merit must he set the mistake of confounding in one indiscriminate indictment the levities of a writer like Congreve with the brutalities of a writer like Wycherley an error which ever since has more or less perverted the judgment of succeeding critics. The general case of comedy was then, however, as untenable by the argument as indefensible by the sarcasm of its most brilliant and comparatively blameless champion. Art itself, more than anything else, had been out-raged and degraded by the recent
impeachment or furtiveimputation. In 1700 Congreve thus replied to Collier with The Way of the Worldthe unequalled and unapproached master-piece of English comedy, which may fairly claim a place beside or but just beneath the mightiest work of Moliere. On the stage which had recently acclaimed with uncritical applause the author's more questionable appearance in the field of tragedy, this final and flawless evidence of his incomparable powers met with a rejection then and ever since inexplicable on any ground of conjecture. During the twenty-eight years which remained to him, Congreve produced little beyond a volume of fugitive verses, published ten years after the miscarriage of his master-piece. His even course of good fortune under Whig and Tory governments alike was counterweighed by the physical infirmities of gout and failing sight. He died, January 19, 1729, in consequence of an injury received on a journey to Bath by the upsetting of his carriage; was buried in Westminster Abbey, after lying in state in the Jerusalem Chamber; and bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to the chief
gentleman
The fame of the greatest English comic dramatist is founded wholly or mainly on but three of his five plays. His first comedy was little more than a brilliant study after such models as were eclipsed by this earliest effort of their imitator; and tragedy under his hands appears rouged and wrinkled, in the patches and powder of Lady Wishfort. But his three great comedies are more than enough to sustain a reputation as durable as our language. Were it not for these we should have no samples to show of comedy in its purest and highest form. Ben Jonson, who alone attempted to introduce it by way of reform among the mixed work of a time when comedy and tragedy were as inextricably blended on the stage as in actual life, failed to give the requisite ease and the indispensable grace of comic life and movement
bright light genius is to Congreve's as female is to male, or "as moonlight unto sunlight." No English writer, on the whole, has so nearly touched the skirts of Moliere; but his splendid intelligence is wanting in the deepest and subtlest quality which has won for Moliere from the greatest poet of his country and our age the tribute of exact and final definition conveyed in that perfect phrase which salutes at once and denotes him" ce moqueur pensif comme un apotre." Only perhaps in a single part has Congreve half consciously touched a note of almost tragic depth and suggestion; there is something well-nigh akin to the grotesque and piteous figure of Arnolphe himself in the unvenerable old age of Lady Wishfort, set off and relieved as it is, with grace and art worthy of the supreme French master, against the only figure on any stage which need not shun comparison even with that of Celiane.The Works of William Congreve were published in 1710 (3 vols.). The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve . . . edited by Leigh Hunt (184o), contains a biographical and critical notice of Congreve. See also The Comedies of William Congreve (1895), with an introduction by W. G. S. Street; and The Best Plays of William Congreve (1887, 1903), edited for the Mermaid Series by A. C. Ewald. The Life of William Congreve (1887) by Edmund Gosse, in E. S. Robert-son's Great Writers, contains a bibliography by J. P. Anderson. (A. C. S.) End of Article: CONGREVE, WILLIAM (167o-1729) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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