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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
When Dryden read the manuscript of William Congreve's Old Bachelor in 1692, he pronounced it the best “first play” that he had ever seen. Dryden's appreciation of Congreve's first play has been seconded by later critics. Dr. Jonson, for instance, found the comedy “the work of very powerful and fertile faculties; the dialogue ... quick and sparkling, the incidents such as seize the attention, and the wit so exuberant that it ‘o'er-informs its tenement.‘” Macaulay pronounced it “inferior indeed” to Congreve's “other comedies, but, in its line, inferior to them alone.” The dialogue, continued Macaulay, “resplendent with wit and eloquence ... preserves a certain colloquial air, a certain indescribable ease, of which Wycherley had given no example and which Sheridan in vain attempted to imitate.”
page 971 note 1 See the manuscript notes by Thomas Southerne, British Museum Add. MSS 4221, f. 341.
page 971 note 2 Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1905), ii, 216, 217.
page 971 note 3 Edinburgh Review for January, 1841.
page 971 note 4 D. Crane Taylor, William Congreve (Oxford, 1931), p. 28.
page 972 note 5 Dryden (London, 1800), i.
page 972 note 6 The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar (London, 1840), p. xxii.
page 972 note 7 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1887), iii, 187.
page 972 note 8 The Complete Works of William Congreve (London, 1923), I, 12.
page 972 note 9 See the edition by G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1905), ii, 212.
page 972 note 10 For an interesting note, however, see R. G. Howarth, “The Date of The Old Bachelor,” LTLS, June 13,1936, p. 500.
page 973 note 11 Page 28.
page 973 note 12 Page 61.
page 973 note 13 See Albert S. Borgman, The Life and Death of William Mountfort (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), p. 171.
page 973 note 14 See the Dedication to The Old Bachelor.
page 973 note 15 Amendments of Mr. Collier's False and Imperfect Citations, ed. Bonamy Bobrée, in The Mourning Bride, Poems, & Miscellanies (Oxford, 1928), p. 423.
page 974 note 16 See John C. Hodges, “On the Date of Congreve's Birth,” Modern Philology, xxxiii (1935), 83–85.
page 974 note 17 Apology, ed. R. W. Lowe (London, 1889), i, 321.
page 975 note 18 British Museum Add. MSS 4221, f. 341.
page 975 note 19 British Museum, Add. MSS 4293.