The Way Of The World English Hons (Delhi University) Worldview

William Congreve (1670-1729) was an English playwright and poet who was one of the leading practitioners of Restoration comedy of manners, a sub-genre marked by a realistic though satiric portrayal of the fashionable customs, affected manners and sexually licentious behavior of the social beau-monde, witty language and verbal sex duels. Congreve\'s career as a dramatist was brief and his five plays, four comedies and one tragedy, were written and performed between 1693 and 1700. The decade of the 1690s was however characterised by the repercussions that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Revolution was primarily a political succession marked by the deposition of James II and the accession of William III and his wife Mary as the joint monarchs of England but it also signaled profound socio-political, moral and cultural changes that had been affecting the country since the late-1670s. Congreve\'s plays occupy this transitional phase as an older aristocratic libertine ethos was giving way to a newer sober-minded middle-class mercantile ideology. The conflict between these two different world views lends a peculiar ambivalence to his plays. This volume offers an accessible fully annotated scholarly edition of Congreve\'s final and most well-known play The Way of the World (1700) that is accompanied by a comprehensive general introduction on Restoration era politics, religion and culture followed by an in-depth discussion of the play\'s major themes, issues, characters and contexts. It also includes a selection of new and previously published critical essays on various aspects related to the play and an updated bibliography.