William Congreve

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For other uses, see William Congreve (disambiguation).
William Congreve
William Congreve by Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt.jpg
William Congreve in 1709 by Godfrey Kneller
Born24 January 1670
Bardsey, England
Died19 January 1729 (aged 58)
London, England
OccupationPlaywright, poet
NationalityEnglish
Period1693–1700
William Congreve (24 January 1670 – 19 January 1729) was an English playwright and poet.

Early life[edit]

Congreve was born in Bardsey, West Yorkshire, England (near Leeds).[note 1] His parents were William Congreve (1637–1708) and Mary (néeBrowning; 1636?–1715). A sister was buried in London in 1672. He 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.

Literary career[edit]

William Congreve wrote some of the most popular English plays of the Restoration period of the late 17th century. 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)
Unfortunately, his career ended almost as soon as it began. After writing five plays from his first in 1693 until 1700, he produced no more as public tastes turned against the sort of high-brow sexual comedy of manners in which he specialized. 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 despite his stance as a Whig among Tories.

Later life[edit]

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, including Anne Bracegirdle, for whom he wrote major parts in all his plays, and Henrietta Godolphin, 2nd Duchess of Marlborough, daughter of the famous general, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, whom he had probably met by 1703 and who had a daughter, Mary (1723–1764), 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[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: William Congreve
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:[original research?]
  • "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast," which is the first line of the play, spoken by Almeria in Act I, Scene 1. (The word "breast" is often misquoted as "beast", and "has" sometimes appears as "hath".)
  • "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.[2] (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[edit]

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

Bibliography[edit]

Wikisource has original works written by or about:
William Congreve

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. Jump up ^ Samuel Johnson doubted Congreve's claim to have been born in Bardsey, Yorkshire in 1670 ("Neither the time nor place of his birth are certainly known; if the inscription upon his monument be true, he was born in 1672. For the place; it was said by himself, that he owed his nativity to England, and by every body else that he was born in Ireland."), and berated him for disowning his native country. However, Edmond Malone later found a baptism entry for Congreve in the Register of Bardsey, in the West Riding of York that would seem to prove that Congreve was not lying when he said that he was born in England: "William, the sonne of Mr. William Congreve, of Bardsey grange, was baptised Feb. 10, 1669 [i.e. 1670 by the modern reckoning of the new year]".[1]

References[edit]

  1. Jump up ^ Johnson, Samuel (1861). Cunningham, Peter, ed. Lives of the most eminent English poets. New York: Derby and Jackson. p. 15.
  2. Jump up ^ The mourning bride: a tragedy – Google Books. Books.google.co.uk. Retrieved 2010-11-15.

Sources[edit]

  • 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.
  • Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration. London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853.

External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to William Congreve.
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