CONGREVE, WILLIAM English dramatist, the greatest English master of comedy, was born at Bardsey, near Leeds, where he was baptized on Feb. 1o, 167o, although the in scription on his monument gives the date of his 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 garrison at Youghal. To Ireland, therefore, is due the credit of his education—as a schoolboy at Kilkenny from 1681 to 1685, and then as an under graduate at Dublin under St. George Ashe, where he was a contemporary and friend of Swift. His family moved from Ireland to Staffordshire, probably at the Revolution, and it seems to have been there, in 169o, that Congreve wrote The Old Bache lor, to amuse himself, as he says, during convalescence from an illness. From college he came to London, and was entered as a student of law at the Middle Temple in 1691. The first-fruits of his studies appeared under the boyish pseudonym of "Cleophil," in the form of a novel (Incognita, or Love and Duty reconciled, 1692), whose existence is now remembered only through the avowal of Dr. Johnson that he "would rather praise it than read it." Tradition has it that Incognita was written at the age of 17, but there are evidences of revision at a maturer age. Congreve took his place in the London of William and Mary very quickly. He had some poems in Gildon's Miscellany (1692), and was enlisted by Dryden among those who collaborated in his transla tion of Juvenal, contributing also the complimentary poem that was prefixed to Dryden's translation of Persius that accompanied it (1692).
In 1693 Congreve's career of fame began with the brilliant appearance and instant success of his first comedy The Old Bachelor (1693) under the generous auspices of Dryden, then, as ever, a witness to the falsehood of the vulgar charge which taxes the greater among poets with jealousy or envy. The dis crowned 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, as till then it had done, alone among the barefaced brutalities of Wycherley and Shadwell. The types of Congreve's first work were the common conventional properties of stage tradition, but the fine and clear-cut style in which these types were reproduced was his own. The gift of one place and the reversion of another were the solid fruits of his splendid success, but the tradition that portrays him as living in wealth on lavish sinecures does not need Swift's exaggerated picture of his poverty to refute it. Swift wrote of him that Congreve spent on writing plays And one poor office half his days.
Next year a better play from the same hand met with worse fortune on the stage, and with yet higher honour from Dryden. The noble verses, as faultless in the expression as reckless in the extravagance of their applause, prefixed by Dryden to The Double Dealer (1694) 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 of his art and life, in the appearance of Love for Love (1695). The production of this play is a landmark in the theatrical history of the period. For some time the patentees of Drury Lane, in spite of their monopoly, had allowed the affairs of the theatre to get into such a condition that there seemed some danger of London being left without a theatre at all. Seeking to counteract falling profits by cutting salaries, they drove their players to the edge of mutiny, and the murder of Mountfort, closely followed by the deaths of Leigh and Nokes, had brought affairs to a crisis which even the brilliant success of The Old Bachelor could only mitigate. At last William III. was persuaded that he was not bound by his predecessor's monopoly, and the malcontents of the Theatre Royal opened a new theatre in the tennis-court in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The patentees did their best to wreck the scheme, seeking to recover some of the deserters by offers of increased salaries, but only two were tempted back (see the prologue of Love for Love), and the venture opened successfully on April 3o, 1695, with Love for Love. In 1697 Congreve's 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 years would have been closed against a far better work. He was now manager of the new Lincoln's Inn theatre, and under contract to supply them with a new play every year—which he entirely failed to do. His health was already indifferent. Next year he attempted, without his usual success, a reply, Amendments of Mr. Collier's False and Imperfect Citations (1698) to the attack of Jeremy Collier, the nonjuror, "on the immorality and pro faneness of the English stage"—an attack for once not discredit able to the assailant, whose honesty and courage were evident enough to prove him incapable alike of the ignominious precau tion 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 be set the mistake of con founding in one 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 succeed ing critics. The general case of comedy was then, however, as untenable by the argument as indefensible by the sarcasm of its more brilliant and comparatively blameless champion. Art itself, more than anything else, had been outraged and degraded by the recent school of the Restoration, and the comic work e f Congreve, though different rather in kind than in degree from the bestial and blatant licence of his immediate precursors, was inevitably for a time involved in the sentence passed upon the comic work of men in all ways alike his inferiors. The true and triumphant answer to all attacks of honest men or liars, brave men or cowards, was then as ever to be given by the production of work unarraignable alike by fair means or foul, by frank im peachment or furtive imputation. In 1700 Congreve thus replied to Collier with The Way of the World—the unequalled and un approached masterpiece of English comedy, which may fairly claim a place beside or 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 inexplicable on any ground of conjecture. There is a persistent but insufficiently authenticated tradition that the author himself rushed in front and rated the unappreciative audience. Whether from disgust at this treat ment or not, at any rate, he wrote no more plays, though there are two more pieces of more or less dramatic work from his pen. It is known that Congreve, Vanbrugh and Walsh collaborated to translate Moliere's M. de Pourceaugnac, under the title of Squire Trelooby; it is, however, a matter of conjecture whether the anonymous work of this name, published in 1704, represents their work. The general opinion is that it does, and Summers includes it in his edition of Congreve's complete works (Nonesuch Press, 1925). The other is an opera Semele, set to music by Handel; it was performed at Cambridge in 1925.
In 1705 he was associated with Vanbrugh in the management of the Queen's theatre, while still retaining an interest in the Lincoln's Inn venture. But increasing gout made him unfit for the work and he soon retired definitely from theatre manage ment. During the rest of his life Congreve produced little beyond a volume of fugitive verses, published ten years after the mis carriage of his masterpiece. But mention should be made of the Discourse on the Pindaric Ode, which accompanied his Pindaric Ode to the Queen, in 1786. This essay, based on the work of Lesueur and Schmid, is a valuable piece of literary criticism, bringing out clearly the true structure of the Pindaric ode, and helping to dam the flood of purposeless aggregations of long and short lines that had been assuming the name. 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 on Jan. 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 f riend of his last years, Henrietta, duchess of Marl borough, daughter of the great duke, rather than to his family, which, according to Johnson, was in difficulties, or to Mrs. Brace girdle, the actress, with whom he had lived longer on intimate terms than with any other mistress or friend, but who inherited by his will only .1200.
The one memorable incident of his later life was the visit of Voltaire, whom he astonished and repelled by his rejection of proffered praise and the expression of his wish to be considered as any other gentleman of no literary fame. The great master of well-nigh every province in the empire of letters, except the only one in which his host reigned supreme, replied that in that sad case Congreve would not have received his visit. His portrait, painted by Kneller, for the Kitcat club, depicts him as handsome and inclined to be stout. We get hints of taste rather in advance of his age in his collections of pictures and old ballads, and his love for his country house in Buckinghamshire. But it is re markable how indefinite an impression we get of him. Dr. Proto popesco, in his study of him (Un classique moderne), says: "Hote assidu de la maison des Marlborough, nous n'entendons que le bruit de ses machoires; avec ses amis, ne fait que boire." We know him to have been a wit, but none of his talk is preserved. He had no enemies, and the most varying figures of his time, bitterly at war with each other, succeed each other in his rooms without embarrassment. Gay calls him "unreproachful." We may conclude with the estimate of Congreve's work which A. C. Swinburne wrote for the ninth edition of the Encyclopcedia Britannica in an article largely retained above, with certain addi tions of matters of fact.
"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 to the action and passion of his elaborate and magnificent work. Of Congreve's immediate predecessors, whose aim had been to raise on French foundations a new English fabric of simple and un mixed comedy, Wycherley was of too base metal and Etherege was of metal too light to be weighed against him; and besides theirs no other or finer coin was current than the crude British ore of Shadwell's brutal and burly talent. Borrowing a metaphor from Landor, we may say that a limb of Moliere would have sufficed to make a Congreve, a limb of Congreve would have sufficed to make a Sheridan. The broad and robust humour of Vanbrugh's admirable comedies gives him a place on the master's right hand ; on the left stands Farquhar, whose bright light genius is to Congreve's as female is to male, or 'as moonlight unto sun light.' 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 Celimene." BIBLIOGRAPHY.-( I ) Works: The Works of William Congreve were Bibliography.-( I ) Works: The Works of William Congreve were published in z7zo (3 vols.). The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve . . . (edit. Leigh Hunt, 184o), contains a biographical and critical notice. See also The Comedies of William Congreve (1895), with an introduction by W. G. S. Street; Semele (edit. D. D. Arundell, 1925) ; Incognita (edit. Brett-Smith, Percy reprint no. 5, 1922). The Complete Works of William Congreve (4 vols., 1923, Nonesuch Press, edit. M. Summers) includes Squire Trelooby and his letters to the Keallys, as well as a full critical and biographical introduction. The theatrical history is prefixed to each play. It should be added that the productions of Love for Love (19'7) and The Way of the World (19r8) by the Stage Society caused a con siderable revival of interest in Congreve, and The Way of the World was produced at the Lyric theatre, Hammersmith, in 1923, and ran for over zoo nights, being again successfully revived at Wyndham's in 1927. A few fragments otherwise unedited vvill be found in A Sheaf of Poetical Scraps (edit. D. Protopopesco, Bucharest, 1923).
(2) Biography: Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Amours of William Congreve by "C. Wilson" (London, 173o) is one of Curll's more blatant frauds, and is quite valueless; E. Gosse, The Life of William Congreve (1881, new ed., 1924) ; D. Protopopesco, Un classique moderne, William Congreve (Bucharest, 1925). See also Swift, Journal to Stella, and G. Meredith, An Essay on Comedy (I897)•