Day 17: The Old Bachelor, by William Congreve

There are a lot of characters with interweaving stories in this play, and keeping track of them all with a first cold reading is tricky. I'm pretty sure I missed a lot of the plot points. That said, while I may not have followed the story much further than to think it's based around similar romantic comedy threads to Much Ado About Nothing, the language I find fascinating. A bit of internet research shows this as written at a time half a century or so after Shakespeare, and while there are similarities, there is also the beginnings of evolution towards more modern speech and slang. It feels deliberately written in that style as well. I've noticed in the process of re-acquainting myself with Shakespeare that there really are several voices - the traditional image of flowery and obviously outdated language tends to be spoken by characters surrounding the court, or wealthy suitors, that sort of thing. I think I've touched on this before, particularly with Henry IV. Going briefly back to the adaptation I covered the other day, it's interesting to me how much more natural and modern Shakespeare's language sounds in a rough Yorkshire accent. It occurred to me that's probably because the dialect as it stands today seems not to have changed very much. Growing up in London, the language has changed significantly just year to year - slang and vernacular have noticably changed just in the decade or so since I left school. With a melting pot of multiple countries, religions, cultures and a huge variation in level of eduaction it's not really a surprise that things shift and change faster. Returning to today's work, Congreve seems to have been writing very much after the style of Shakespeare, but with a bit of a "modern" (for the time) twist. The prologue and epilogue both have written-in digressions and "forgetfulness" and very much play on this being Congreve's first playscript. It will be interesting to go ahead with the rest of the plays in this collection (I have been reading from The Way of the World and other plays) to see how he develops as a playwrite. As I noted at the start, this one feels quite crowded and complex with characters just from reading. Of course, as with any play, they aren't really designed to be read other than by the actors. I'll certainly be looking out for opportunities to see some of his work performed, if I can.