Day 30/31: Love for Love, by William Congreve

I took 2 days over reading this play for various reasons - it has not been a smooth start to the week. There was a post outlining why, but I've decided to remove it - dwelling on things going wrong is unhelpful. So, on with the review.

I do struggle a little bit with Congreve's work, the language isn't quite as familiar as Shakespeare and there are certain turns of phrase which are still in use today but with different meanings, which I find trip me up and slow me down a little bit. From a view of the evolution of language that's interesting, but it requires a little more concentration and thought to understand what's being said.

There's a thread in this story where one of the men tries to convince one of the girls that lies and misdirection (about feelings) should form part of any courtship - exactly the attitude I dislike in stories like The Importance of Being Earnest - again, interesting to see how far back that attitude stretches. That said the women, through most of the play, seem to be rather more intelligent than they're given credit for by their respective suitors and have their own agendas.

I think I may need to come back to this one at a later date. The difficulties I have had with my first readings of each of Congreve's plays so far has meant most of what I take away from those first readings is a sense of frustration and not enough of an impression of the story itself.

Day 27: The Double Dealer, by William Congreve

The notes for this play mention that Congreve was basically arrested for lewdness after this play, and I have to agree it's deserved. The sheer amount of debauchery, affairs, and backhandedness is ridiculous. The cast includes one character who is presumably the titular Double Dealer and it's never entirely made clear what he's actually trying to achieve other than making life for his supposed best friend (who is a total doormat) utter misery to the point he stands to lose a lover, a reputation and an inheritance all in one go. Thankfully he does get found out and hauled off in the end, but only after laughing in the face of pretty much every other character in the entire story.

I csn certainly see this being a fun play to perform, and it's probably a lot easier to follow the various intricate relationships between the characters when seen on stage. I think I've mentioned before that I sometimes struggle with complex social structures in literature. In this case I felt that I ended up following what I felt was the main storyline and probably missed some nuances of the other characters and how they fit into the weave.

The sex themes are really not subtle. There are some wonderful turns of phrase though... "..a man can't drink without quenching his thirst.." bemoaning the situation of wanting to see two women over the course of the evening... and yes, the entire play stays at that level. There isn't a single scene which doesn't contain at least one drunk person and/or at least one person trying to get into someone else's pants.

So all in all, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. As a follow-up to yesterday's Importance of Being Earnest it's certainly more interesting and complicated, though the characters are not much more likeable they are certainly a little bit more three-dimensional. And of course the whole thing is infinitely more raunchy, though that's likely as much to do with the period setting and time of writing as it is with the storyline. Once again (as with the last Congreve play I covered) there are threads of story and character types which are recognisable from Shakespeare, but with far less subtlety.

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.