Studying English Literature

It was perhaps sheer pedantic myopia that, when Jeremy Collier published his essay A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage in 1698, he made Congreve a particular target of his criticism. That Collier had a case is undeniable, but he forgot that a true artist does have as sincere obligation to society as a churchman. Had he waited before publishing his essay till the production of The Way of the World ( 1770), he could have perhaps understood that truth; for, in the play The Way of the World Congreve seems to understand the “immorality and profaneness” of a society, upon the matrices of which Restoration plays were made. He was seriously thinking of an alternative pattern of behaviour and an alternative set of codes of conduct. The very title of the play, The Way of the World points to the ‘way’ the hero and heroine (and by implication the spectators) should adopt in order to come out of the grip of the fashionable society. The whole story is an illustratio...

In The Way of the World, his last comedy, Congreve seems to come to realise the importance for providing an ideal pair of man and woman, ideal in the sense that the pair could be taken for models in the life-style of the period. But this was almost impossible task, where the stage was occupied by men and women, sophisticated, immoral, regardless of the larger world around them, and preoccupied with the self-conceited rhetoric as an weapon to justify their immoral activities within a small and restricted area of social operation. Congreve could not avoid this, and for this, he had to pave his way through the society by presenting a plot which, though complicated enough for a resolution, aims at the ideal union between the hero and heroine—Mirabell and Millament. They emerge as the triumphant culmination of the representative characters of the whole period, of course not types, for they are real enough to be human. Congreve endowed his hero and heroine with all the qualities typical of t...