Love for Love (Broché)

Biographie de William Congreve

William Congreve was born at Bardsey in Yorkshire on 24 January 1670. He was educated in Ireland where his father went first as lieutenant in a company of foot, and later became resident agent for the Earl of Cork and Burlington. At Kilkenny College school he was a younger contemporary of Jonathan Swift, and from thence went, like Swift, to Trinity College, Dublin. He was enrolled 17 March 1691 as a law student in the Middle Temple, London.
Congreve had little intention of studying law. At Will's coffee house, Covent Garden, he became the associate of many of the leading literary figures of the day, in particular John Dryden, to whose translation of Juvenal and Persius (1693) he contributed a version of Juvenal's eleventh satire. His first comedy, The Old Bachelor, was produced at Drury Lane in March 1693. Dryden, who had helped in its preparation for the stage, called it the best first play he had seen; Thomas Southerne, the dramatist, recommended it to Thomas Davenant, the manager of the Theatre Royal; it ran for the unusual length for those times of fourteen days.
This was followed by The Double Dealer in December of the same year, Love for Love (1695), The Mourning Bride, a tragedy (1697), The Way of the World (1700), and a masque, The Judgment of Paris (1701). This was Congreve's last work as a playwright. Although his plays were soon established in the standard repertory, it has been said that Congreve gave up the theatre because he was disappointed in his public.
Despite the immediate success of The Old Bachelor and Love for Love, his other comedies were at first caviare to the general. The Double Dealer only just escaped being hissed from the stage, his finest achievement, The Way of the World, was said not to answer expectation; to be too keen in its satire to win general applause. But it has also been claimed that there was nothing further for him to achieve in comedy.
He knew when his vein was exhausted; he had perfected his art in The Way o f the World and his love of ease was greater than his ambition. Ease and quiet is what I hunt after, he wrote. If I have not ambition, I have other passions more easily gratified. He lived thereafter as Voltaire described him upon no other foot than that of a gentleman, who led a life of plainness and simplicity. He was not rich.
His government sinecures did not pay well until, after the accession of George I, his Whig friends obtained him a commission as Secretary to the Island of Jamaica; his speculation with Vanbrugh as joint manager of the new Haymarket theatre (1704-5) was a failure; his share in Betterton's company in Lincoln's Inn Fields proved of little value. He was, however, the friend of the wits and of the great.
He was one of the group which met initially (at the expense of Tonson, the publisher) to consume the mutton pies of Christopher Car in Sheer Lane, from whence the Kit-Cat club grew. He was thus acquainted with Addison, Steele, Kneller and Vanbrugh, he was a friend of Swift and Pope, who dedicated his translation of the Iliad to him, and of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; he was the lover of Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, with whom much of his time in his declining years was spent.
He died 19 January 1729 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.