William Congreve achieves sudden fame in March…

William Congreve achieves sudden fame in March 1693 with the production at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, of The Old Bachelour, written, he said, in 1690 to amuse himself during convalescence.

Warmly heralded by John Dryden, who declares that he has never read so brilliant a first play, though it needs to be given “the fashionable Cutt of the Town,” it is an enormous success, running for the then unprecedented length of a fortnight.

His next play, The Double-Dealer, plays in November or December at Drury Lane but does not meet with the same applause (it will later become the more critically admired work, however).

Its published form contains a panegyrical introduction by Dryden.

Entered in 1691 as a law student at the Middle Temple but never a serious reader in law, Congreve had published in 1692 under the pseudonym Cleophil a light but delightfully skillful near-parody of fashionable romance, possibly drafted when he was seventeen, Incognita: or, Love and Duty reconcil'd.

He had quickly become known among men of letters, had some verses printed in a miscellany of the same year, and became a protégé of John Dryden, the greatest English poet of the later seventeenth century.

In that year, Dryden had published his translation of the satires of Juvenal and Persius (dated 1693), in which Congreve collaborated, contributing the complimentary poem “To Mr. Dryden".