Defoe’s public life – his bankruptcies; his jailing for political attacks; his notorious, seemingly unprincipled service to various political parties – is so absorbing that an attempt at viewing his inner life and his life in a domestic setting might seem both irrelevant and unnecessary. Nevertheless, we have to give some credence to the reality of the sincere, loving father who presented himself in the letters to his daughter Sophia. Such a vision of Defoe has to be woven into the many other Defoes: the somewhat unscrupulous businessman, the adventurer, the spy, the writer whose lively imagination found its fulfilment in the fictions he wrote from 1718 to 1725. When he appealed to his ’Sincerity’ in his autobiography, few seemed to believe him, but it is possible that amid all the lies and deceptions that he practised there was a core of belief in his own integrity. This essay tries to trace that part of his self throughout his career.

When Aubrey Williams argued that Congreve's tragedy, The Mourning Bride, echoed the Christian morality that was part of the English religious environment of the time, the only doubters might have been those who continued to follow Jeremy Collier's questionable attempt to show that the play was “a mere Rant of smut and profainness.” But it was mostly Congreve's comedies that drew Collier's attention. And it was with these works that Williams had his major task in showing an overall attention to Christian themes— a task that raised eventual objections that were overwhelming in their rejection of what amounted, by extension, to a thesis— a thesis that seemed capable of extending to all the literature of the Restoration. As Julia Stone Peters summed up the controversy, had Williams offered his argument as a corrective to seeing the Restoration as a period of complete dissoluteness and ribaldry in life and on the stage, it would have met general approbation. It was by extending his arguments to a point that would have made the Restoration into just another unexceptional period of Christian belief, little different from, say, the fifteenth or the early seventeenth century, Peters argued, that he met resistance from many of the knowledgeable scholars of the period. On the other hand, The Mourning Bride evokes Providence often enough to leave it outside the equation.

The question about The Mourning Bride, then, is whether, allowing for a strong strain of belief in the triumph of a moral scheme governing earthly actions, such a scheme does not exist alongside other ways of seeing human experience that are specifically tied to the political and intellectual milieu of the time in which it was written. For example, Williams pointed out that the play is shrouded in darkness— a darkness of tombs and dungeons. Williams perceived in this a standard Christian view of the human condition, quoting William Sherlock's comment, “we live in the dark, and know not what is good for ourselves”; and again as an example of human blindness, “we are saved and made happy by what we feared.” These quotations come from William Sherlock's A Discourse Concerning the Divine Providence (1694).

John Dryden, who specialized in poetry involving elaborate and occasionally exaggerated encomiums, praised William Congreve as a playwright who might equal Shakespeare. Commenting upon Congreve's second play, The Double Dealer, Dryden argued that Congreve's writings appeared to have the “strength” of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights combined with the “skill” of the writers of the Restoration.

Congreve certainly had a major reputation during his lifetime. But no modern literary historian has suggested naming any part of the period in which he lived “the Age of Congreve,” in the way such a designation has frequently been assigned to his contemporaries: Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, or even Joseph Addison. Yet his contribution of four excellent comedies and a tragedy to the literature of the English Stage was far from insignificant. Three of his plays have been revived in productions of the National Theatre and, of course, university classes in the history of the English drama are almost certain to contain one of his comedies. If he never achieved the heights of greatness imagined by Dryden, he is still to be regarded as a major British playwright.

His importance has frequently been ascribed to his witty dialogue and the charming nature of his lovers— especially Angelica and Valentine in Love for Love and Millamant and Mirabell in The Way of the World. But much of such admiration has its origin in Charles Lamb's vision of Restoration comedy as depicting an artificial milieu having little connection with a real world of sexual desire and betrayal. Whereas Lamb viewed the stage of his own time as being deeply involved in questions of morality, he argued that Congreve’s plays revealed a “privation of moral light.” Lamb's criticism was constructed to protect Restoration comedy from a century of attacks depicting it as entirely immoral.

In what might be interpreted as a fortunate aporia in William Congreve's The Double Dealer, Sir Paul Plyant expresses his horror at what he believes to be the discovery of an illicit relationship between Careless and his wife. Calling Careless “a Judas Maccabeus and Iscariot both,” he thanks Providence for the disclosure. He also thanks Providence, when Careless and Lady Plyant gull him into believing what the audience knows to be false— that the relationship between Lady Plyant and Careless has been entirely innocent. I want to argue in this chapter that Sir Paul's inability to differentiate between a betrayal for the sake of evil (Judas Iscariot) and righteous behavior (Judas Maccabeus)— to distinguish between good actions and bad, between traitors and honest men— is central to characterization and content in Congreve's comedy.

It is a work dominated by Maskwell, who intends to bring about a revolution in the families of the Touchwoods, the Plyants, and the Froths, to cheat Mellefont of his inheritance, and to carry off Cynthia, the woman to whom Mellefont is engaged. That Maskwell adds a dark tone to Congreve's comedy has long been recognized. What I want to emphasize here is the degree to which The Double Dealer, dominated as it is by a sense of betrayal, may owe some of its apparently unusual characterization less to aesthetic experimentation and more to the political spirit of the early years of the 1690s in which it was composed and performed.

That its characterization seemed unusual is obvious enough. Jeremy Collier later singled it out for a particularly vicious attack, noting, “There are but Four Ladies in this Play, and three of the biggest of them are Whores.” Dryden's comment on what had to be considered merely a moderate success for the playwright he was to proclaim as a worthy successor to Shakespeare took in the audience's reaction to both Collier's “Whores” and their three gullible mates. “The women thinke he has exposd their Bitchery too much; & the Gentlemen, are offended with him; for the discovery of their follyes: & the way of their Intrigues, under the ‘notion of Friendship to their Ladyes Husbands.’ “

The character of Sir Sampson Legend, along with that of Foresight, is one of the great achievements of Congreve's Love for Love. Both parties represent systems of thinking that are presented as antiquated and absurd. Before the entrance of Sir Sampson, Foresight has just been speculating on the possibility that his wife may be having love affairs. He begins by remarking that she is “young and sanguine,” perfectly adequate descriptions at a time when the humors theory still governed attitudes toward character, but he quickly enters into theories of astrology, physiognomy, and palmistry, pointing out that she was born under the sign of Gemini and had a mole on her lip. Compared to these, her “open liberality on the Mount of Venus” (Volume 1: 285 [II. iii, 104– 5]) would seem a direct description of her sexual promiscuity, not so much to Foresight and his naive appeal to palmistry, where it refers to the area at the base of the thumb, but clearly enough to Sir Sampson and the audience as part of the vaginal area. Foresight's absurd mixture of out- of- date pseudosciences and primitive folk readings of character and events will play an important role in this comedy of readings and misreadings.

Sir Sampson's skeptical view of such matters and his tendency toward exaggeration are both seemingly based on his extensive travels, but he too is tied to antiquated systems. He complains that his son, Valentine, did not realize the powers that belonged to a father, “no Authority, no Correction, no Arbitrary Power” (1:286 [II.v, 5– 6]). His dismissal of “Forgiveness and Affection” and his embrace of “Power” might seem to identify him as a wrong- headed disciple of Thomas Hobbes, who viewed the entire relationship between father and son as based on obedience to the parent. But Hobbes wrote mainly of “power,” “dominion,” and “sovereignty,” the distinguishing factors between children, servants, and slaves. Sir Sampson's “Arbitrary Power” smacks of the criticism leveled against Louis XIV by contemporaries and of John Locke's attack upon Sir Robert Filmer's patriarchal ideas of government. Indeed, in addressing his son, Valentine, Sir Sampson maintains that his son is his “Slave” (1:291 [II.vii, 40]), a category based upon the freedom of Sir Sampson's choosing to engage in the act of sexual intercourse that produced him.

Few comedies provide such brilliant opportunities for actors to show off their talents as Congreve's The Way of the World. Yet however much Congreve directed his talents toward creating a comedy that would please the theatrical audience, he also turned to a number of serious and interrelated themes. At its heart, Congreve's play is very much a fable about the complexities and difficulties of family relationships. At the same time, it has much to do with the related subject of politics, reflecting considerable pessimism about the dismal contemporary political scene. I also want to argue in this essay that the play is essentially about the problems of Mrs. Arabella Fainall. Such a view is admittedly counterintuitive in that it is contrary to our sense of the play as performance. As readers and audience, we have to find pleasure in the lovers, Mirabell and Millamant, played originally by John Verbruggen and Anne Bracegirdle, and be fascinated by the villainous Fainall and Marwood, played by the most accomplished actors of the time, Thomas Betterton and Elizabeth Barry. In addition, the part of Lady Wishfort, acted originally by Elinor Leigh, can be powerful enough to dominate the entire play. By comparison, the role of Mrs. Fainall, acted by Elizabeth Bowman, had little of the theatrical fireworks of those acted by the stars of Betterton's Lincoln's Inn Fields troupe. And yet the “moral” of the play, spoken at the end by Mirabell, appears clearly aimed at Mrs. Fainall's situation:

I am not arguing that we should ignore in any way the theatrical aspects of the play. But we should pay some attention to Congreve's “Dedication to Ralph, Earl of Montague,” in which he appears to express surprise that his work succeeded so well on the stage and emphasizes the artistic elements of his comedy, comparing it to the works of the classical writers, Terence and Menander. A careful reading may allow us to focus on what Congreve considered the central concepts of his play.

In 1988, when the three hundredth anniversary of “The Glorious Revolution” of 1688 was to be celebrated in Great Britain, there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the event. Admittedly, a few modest exhibitions were started during this period of the year, but certainly no grand celebration. Edmund Burke had presented this revolution as a mere adjustment in the English political scene— an event entirely different from the French Revolution, even before its frightening executions. There was no parading of a supposedly charming queen such as Marie Antoinette on to the scaffold. No, James II had attempted to leave, had been brought back to London, had hung about for a short time, and then simply left without anyone bothering too much about it. He did attempt several comebacks— in Ireland (he lost the Battle of the Boyne), through a possible invasion— but nothing, it seemed, very effectual. The result was a degree of ambiguity, well encapsulated in the dialogue between Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim in Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, published in separate volumes between 1759 and 1767. In presenting a vivid description of the battle of Landen, Uncle Toby waxes enthusiastic over the courage of King William III. Corporal Trim is caught up by Uncle Toby's fervid pronouncement, “Brave,! brave by heaven! […] he deserves a crown,” by shouting, “As richly, as a thief deserves a halter.” Uncle Toby decides that there is no question about Corporal Trim's loyalty and refuses to pursue any objection to this questionable analogy. But as loyal as Corporal Trim might be, we know that he was wounded in his knee at the battle of Landen, left on the battlefield, and suffered excruciating pain in his recovery. For all his loyalty and his love for Uncle Toby, then, there is clearly an unconscious process of association that suggests a degree of ambivalence and resentment toward William III.

And if the history of Congreve's time failed to arouse enthusiasm, its literary history fared even worse. Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century of Congreve and his time, Hippolyte Taine concluded that all their literature was “abortive,” and that they left nothing behind but the memory of corruption. In addition, during the decades preceding the celebration of the Revolution of 1688, there had been something resembling a neo- Jacobite movement. What if Dutch William had not invaded?

The serious subject matter of a play such as Crowne's The Married Beau, discussed in the previous chapter, returns us to Vanbrugh's claim to being a “moralist” and the possibility of stage comedies being vehicles for moral statement. Although such a proposition might appear inane enough to any generation that lived to see the comedies of George Bernard Shaw and Bertholt Brecht, it did not seem at all evident to Jeremy Collier in 1698. As I remarked, my approach to Congreve's plays in this volume is through the ideas they convey, broadly philosophical, political, and social. I have no intention of denying that Congreve was eminently a man of the theater. His involvement with Thomas Betterton in listening to readings of the plays performed at the Lincoln Inn Fields theater shows how much he was involved with the intricacies or theatrical representation. Nevertheless, when dealing with a writer such as Congreve, it is necessary to discard the approach to Restoration drama of Robert Hume, who pointedly ignores an intellectual approach to drama as almost irrelevant. A time of political and intellectual strife, the last 40 years of the seventeenth century may well have been best summarized by Jonathan Swift's Tale of a Tub with its whirlwind of ideas on philosophical and religious beliefs— beliefs that led its readers into such complete confusion that insanity might seem a possible way out. Similarly, in matters of politics, many English men and English women, including such writers as John Dryden, Aphra Behn, and Thomas Southerne, remained loyal to the deposed king, James II, and a system of monarchy that gave him complete control over the lives of his subjects. On the other hand, Congreve was seriously committed to the politics surrounding the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the regimes of William and Mary and then of William III. And as his writings reveal, he appears to have been equally committed to the philosophical empiricism of the time, from René Descartes to George Berkeley— a view that acknowledged that we know the world only through our perception of it through our senses.

I began by remarking on the notion that no important critic or historian has suggested that the period of time spanning the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries might be called the “Age of Congreve.” This is hardly surprising. This is a period dominated by John Locke in philosophy and Isaac Newton in the sciences. In literary studies, writers such as John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, and Alexander Pope were in many ways more formidable. Congreve was essentially a dramatist, and a dramatist who had the misfortune to have been writing at a time that was notably condemned for its immorality by the critics of the periods that followed. The authors of the Tatler and Spectator, Sir Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, those arbiters of taste for the early eighteenth century, demonstrated the ethical unworthiness of the comedies of the previous fifty years, and while they spared Congreve, his works were clearly implicated. Later in the century, although Samuel Johnson's condemnation was intended mainly for the writers of the period of Charles II, his remarks in his “Prologue … Opening of the Theatre in Drury Lane 1747” would have been aimed at Congreve and his contemporaries as well:

Once “Shame” and “Virtue” triumphed over the immorality of the period, the playwrights of this period could not find an audience, though they “proudly hop’d to pimp in future Days.” In order to fully recover from what essentially a period of censorship in English drama, Congreve would have had to have been an even stronger, and more popular, writer than he was. Oscar Wilde brought witty comedy back to the English stage in the 1890s, but to some extent many producers have probably felt that audiences might prefer a slightly dated Wilde to an inevitably more dated Congreve.

If, then, Congreve has struggled somewhat on the stage, how has he done on the page, to use the usual dichotomy? Here again, Congreve has not done as well as might be expected.

The Romantic critics, led by Charles Lamb, advanced the argument that the scenes portrayed in Restoration drama belonged to a kind of imaginary world having no relationship to reality. They did so by way of searching for a method of defending these plays against the charges of obscenity and immorality leveled against them by a variety of moralists who followed Jeremy Collier’s examination and condemnation of these works in 1698. As Jonas Barish has demonstrated, “anti- theatrical prejudice” has always accompanied stage productions; even J.- J. Rousseau had weighed in against stage performances in the middle of the eighteenth century. If many thought of the theater as objectionable in principle, how much more unacceptable were plays that dealt openly with sexuality and the details of contemporary life? The Romantic approach prevailed for a time, but it eventually brought with it the possibility of dismissing these plays on the grounds that they had no relevance to ordinary life. Such an attitude dominated the middle of the twentieth century and it has only been during the last thirty- five years that these plays have been regarded as seriously reflecting the Restoration experience. More particularly, critics have become aware of how thoroughly politics pervaded the drama of the time and how entirely the playwrights devoted themselves to political statements and attacks upon the attitudes of their opponents.

By now, almost all of William Congreve's plays have been subjected to political readings. Many years ago I suggested that his sole tragedy, The Mourning Bride, might be read in terms of a Whig allegory in which the old forces of repression are swept away by the triumph of the young lovers, and somewhat later, I argued that The Double Dealer was essentially about the survival of the English family over the conspiracies of “Jack” (Jacobite) Maskwell. Even more recently, Richard Braverman has maintained that The Way of the World embodies another Whiggish triumph— this time over another conspirator, Fainall, and his attempt to take over the wealth of Lady Wishfort. Much the same might be said for Love for Love, with the victory of the true lovers, Valentine and Angelica, over the Hobbist ideas of the tyrannical patriarch, Sir Sampson Legend.

In his book on The Invention of the Newspaper, Joad Raymond remarks that in the early part of the seventeenth century it was customary to greet people with the expression “What News?” He argues that such a greeting is suggestive of a society that was eager to be informed about the events of the time and maintains that this was a development that led to the numerous newsletters that circulated during the period between 1642 and 1660 known as the Interregnum. Indeed, although Ben Jonson's satirical comedy The Staple of News (1626) mocked the notion of an office that distributed news and showed it going belly up, like so many projects of the time, he clearly saw the need for news and the willingness to pay for it as a developing element in society. This scepticism about the value of news was later reflected in Spectator essay no. 452, by Addison and Pope. On 8 August 1712, they wondered about “half a Dozen Ingenious Men, who live very plentifully upon this Curiosity of their Fellow-Subjects,” especially since, with the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, there appeared to be a dearth of news. They then provided a list of trivial stories - happenings of no significance - that might fill up the newspapers. In fact, as newspapers grew in size, there was a need for such filler. But for all such criticism, as Raymond argues, an active press might succeed in creating a coherent nation in England. When large parts of the population shared knowledge of what was happening within England and abroad, there was a possibility of communication among those in the country and those in the towns. Such a system of news had been fully achieved by the early eighteenth century, when writers such as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift were to struggle for command of the kind of public opinion that might influence elections or votes in Parliament.