Writers on the English theatre have noted an interesting paradox in the history of William Congreve's The Mourning Bride. Congreve is remembered today almost exclusively for his series of brilliant comedies, but it was in this, his only tragedy, that he achieved the greatest theatrical triumph of his career, and for the same play he has also been most severely criticized. “Strange as it may seem to us,” wrote Bonamy Dobrée, “the work that most swelled his fame with his contemporaries was his tragedy.” “Congreve's ‘Mourning Bride’ is a melodrama, judged by our standards at present,” asserted Ashley Thorndike, “but for many years it was considered one of the greatest tragedies of the language.” And Crane Taylor, writing of the period following the production of the play at Lincoln's Inn Fields, stated that Congreve “was now the foremost writer of tragedy as well as comedy and, while we are apt to think of him only as a comic dramatist, it is well to remember that he enjoyed the distinction of a premier place in both forms of drama to the end of his life.” Montague Summers summed the matter up: “The Mourning Bride long enjoyed a period of universal eulogy, which may, perhaps, be judged a little extravagant: it was then as generally decried.”