Capital Relations and The Way of the World

William Congreve is best remembered for his trenchant social satire. As a near contemporary of both Dryden and Swift, he is, not surprisingly, often overlooked as a political writer. Yet Congreve was a political creature, and political concerns find their way, openly or subtly, into his works. In 1695, William III made Congreve Commissioner of Hackney Coaches in the hope that he would become a propagandist for the new regime. Though the playwright did not fulfill the immediate expectations of his benefactor, his tragedy The Mourning Bride, produced in 1697, was a thinly veiled political allegory upholding the legitimacy of the succession. According to Maximillian Novak, the play "was eventually to create a Whig myth of rebellion against a tyrant as an antidote to the Tory myth which Dryden spent some thirty years erecting. "'