William Congreve

William Congreve, oil painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller (died 1723), 1709

WILLIAM CONGREVE

CONGREVE, WILLIAM (1670-1729), English dramatist, the greatest English master of pure comedy, was born at Bardsey near Leeds, where he was baptized on the 10th of February 1670, although the inscription on his monument gives his date of 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, as an under-graduate at Dublin, where he was a contemporary and friend of Swift. From college he came to London, and was entered as a student of law at the Middle Temple to study Law. In 1693 Congreve's real career began, with the brilliant appearance and instant success of his first comedy, The Old Bachelor. 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.

Next year a better play from the same hand met with a worse fortune on the stage, The Double Dealer. For the following year witnessed the crowning triumph of his art and life, in the appearance of Love for Love (1695). Two years later his ambition rather than his genius adventured on the foreign ground of tragedy, and The Mourning Bride (1697).

In 1700 Congreve thus replied to Collier with The Way of the World--the unequalled and unapproached masterpiece of English comedy, which may fairly claim a place beside or just beneath the mightiest work of Molière. 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 since inexplicable on any ground of conjecture. During the twenty-eight years which remained to him, Congreve produced little beyond a volume of fugitive verses, published ten years after the miscarriage of his masterpiece. His even course of good fortune under Whig and Tory governments alike was counterweighted by the physical infirmities of gout and failing sight. He died, January 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. 
1) Prepare a timeline of William Congreve.