William Congreve wrote his plays and his novella, Incognita, during a
time of immense social and political upheaval. The revolution of 1688
brought with it a rash of new ideas. William and Mary were monarchs
chosen by a Convention of Englishmen, not rulers chosen by divine right.
And new ideas in philosophy and politics, most notably expressed in the
writings of John Locke, gave a new shape to the way the world was
perceived. Congreve, an ardent supporter of the dual monarchy and later
of William III, was depicted by Charles Lamb and many later critics as
writing comedies that had no connection with the real world. To the
contrary, his writings reflect a strong engagement with the changes
occurring in the social milieu of the time. The new sense of political
liberty brought with it greater social equality; the lapse in the
Licensing Act brought greater freedom in publishing. And while the
attack upon the stage by Jeremy Collier in 1698 was to rein in some of
the explorative nature of comedy during the 1690s, Congreve took
advantage of the new freedoms from the events of 1688 to write
sophisticated comedies that both exploited this liberation and
criticised it.
This book attempts to examine Congreve's major writings in the light of
these changes by beginning with what appears to have been the questions
raised by what may be seen as skepticism about the family, the collapse
of concepts of marriage and the debates over divorce that dominated the
decade. The book demonstrates how Congreve's plays were very much a part
of this; however, in his comedies, he always managed to achieve a light
surface affect. This is perhaps never truer than in his first
publication, his novella Incognita. Yet what appears to be an amusing
series of mistaken identities resembling what was called a "Spanish
plot" turns out to contain some serious questions about identity and
some doubts about the way we understand our world. After demonstrating
the political ambiguities of The Old Batchelor, the book shows how the
betrayal of the family to which the lovers, Mellefont and Cynthia, are
attached, by the sinister Maskall, is a fairly blatant attack on the
politics of Jacobitism. Congreve followed this with the lighter Love
for Love, which, beneath its odd Egyptian imagery, contains an attack
upon the patriarchal concept of government still accepted by the
followers of the deposed king, James II. In his tragi-comedy, The
Mourning Bride, Congreve allowed his plot to carry the weight of the
Whig rebellion, giving his lovers the epistemology of perception that
belonged to the new world of the 1690s, compared to the uncontrolled
passions of the past. In his final play, The Way of the World, he
demonstrates how his lovers of 1700 reveal a combination of sensibility
and canniness that make them capable of facing the complexities of the
new century.
