The Library of William Congreve
1597
The Library of William Congreve
1597
The Library of William Congreve offers readers a rare glimpse into the intellectual workshop of Restoration comedy's supreme practitioner. Through meticulous reconstruction of his personal collection, we discover the books that sharpened Congreve's satirical edge and informed his unmatched understanding of social hypocrisy. The narrative follows the library's curious fate after Congreve's death in 1729: the tug-of-war between publisher Jacob Tonson and the Duchess of Marlborough, and the painstaking process of cataloging what remained. This is literary biography at its most material, revealing not just what Congreve read, but how a great writer's mind is built from the accumulated treasures of others' genius. For scholars of Restoration drama, the book illuminates the networks of influence that produced works like The Way of the World, showing Congreve's dialogue with Shakespeare, Jonson, Molière, and his contemporaries. But it also appeals to anyone fascinated by the book as object and talisman - the way a writer's library becomes both monument and working tool. The library itself is long dispersed, but Hodges' scholarship reconstitutes its spirit, allowing us to read over the shoulder of the man who defined elegant comedy in English.
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“But say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old.””
— William Congreve
“One no more owes one's beauty to a lover than one's wit to an echo””
— William Congreve
“True, 'tis an unhappy circumstance of life that love should ever die before us, and that the man so often should outlive the lover. But say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old. For my part, my youth may wear and waste, but it shall never rust in my possession.””
— William Congreve
“Of those few fools, who with ill stars are curst,Sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare the worst:For they're a sort of fools which fortune makes,And, after she has made them fools, forsakes.With Nature's oafs 'tis quite a different case,For Fortune favours all her idiot race.In her own nest the cuckoo eggs we find,Over which she broods to hatch the changeling kind:No portion for her own she has to spare,So much she dotes on her adopted care.Poets are bubbles, by the town drawn in,Suffered at first some trifling stakes to win:But what unequal hazards do they run!Each time they write they venture all they've won:The Squire that's buttered still, is sure to be undone.This author, heretofore, has found your favour,But pleads no merit from his past behaviour.To build on that might prove a vain presumption,Should grant to poets made admit resumption,And in Parnassus he must lose his seat,If that be found a forfeited estate.””
— William Congreve
“Well, I shall understand your lingo one of these days, cousin.””
— William Congreve
