The Comedies of William Congreve: Volume 1 [of 2] — A Closer Reading

Street’s Defence of Restoration Language

Street confronts the charge of ‘grossness’ head-on, calling it ‘a stupid question’. He insists that linguistic delicacy is relative: what one age calls coarse, another may find merely direct. He points out that modern writers use periphrases for the same things, and that a reader unfamiliar with two-centuries-old English may find Congreve’s language ‘excessive—like splashes of colour occurring too frequently in the arrangement of a wall’. With time and habit, he claims, ‘a more artistic perspective will be achieved’. This is not a moral apology but an aesthetic one: Street treats the language as a feature of the period’s style, not a flaw in the author.

The Morality Question and the ‘Primal Fallacy’

Street then turns to the more complex issue of immorality, referencing Jeremy Collier’s Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. He identifies a ‘great primal fallacy’ in expecting every work to provide moral instruction, comparing it to demanding that a well-drawn and well-painted picture also tell ‘an interesting story, a fine sentiment, a great thought’. Street advocates for ‘mental detachment’ and discrimination between issues, suggesting that modern critical methods allow one to appreciate Congreve’s comedies on their own terms. This framing encourages the reader to set aside moral judgment and attend to the craft.

Dialogue as Duel: Wit and Metaphor in the Excerpts

The excerpts from the plays themselves showcase the very qualities Street defends. In a scene from The Old Bachelor, Bellmour and Belinda trade barbs about marriage: Bellmour calls courtship ‘the music in the play-house, until the curtain’s drawn’, while Belinda retorts that it is ‘as a very witty prologue to a very dull play’. The exchange is built on extended metaphor, each speaker capping the other’s figure. Later, Heartwell, caught after his wedding, lapses into a rhyming couplet: ‘How wide we err, when apprehensive of the load of life.’ The shift from prose to verse signals emotional intensity, a technique Congreve uses sparingly for effect.

Character and Voice: Servants, Schemers, and Lovers

The excerpts also reveal Congreve’s skill in differentiating voices. Setter, a servant, speaks in brisk, conspiratorial prose: ‘our stratagem succeeded as you intended—Bluffe turns errant traitor’. His language is practical and knowing. By contrast, the lovers Vainlove and Araminta engage in a more refined, almost legalistic banter: ‘You who could reproach me with one counterfeit, how insolent would a real pardon make you!’ Heartwell’s soliloquy, with its bitter rhyme on ‘bride’ and ‘applied’, gives him a distinct, self-lacerating voice. Even in these fragments, Congreve assigns each character a verbal fingerprint, from the pimp’s bluntness to the gallant’s flourish.

Street’s introduction and the accompanying excerpts invite the reader to approach Congreve not as a moralist or a period piece, but as a craftsman of dialogue. The comedies reward attention to verbal timing, metaphor, and the subtle shifts between prose and verse. Readers may find it useful to track how each character’s language reveals their social standing and emotional state, and to note the recurring theatrical metaphors that frame love and marriage as performance.

That rainy afternoon, Congreve’s perfect, brittle couples left me oddly homesick for something warmer—less polished, more human. I closed the volume on Heartwell’s desperate verse, circled the room once, and pulled down a battered copy of Duty, and Other Irish Comedies — Inside the Classic. The rain kept falling. The prose, I found, was just as honest, only kinder. A quiet swap, really.