Quotidian | Quotes | William Congreve

British playwright and poet, not to be confused with an English inventor of the same name (born a century later).

Congreve was educated at Trinity College in Dublin, where he met and befriended Jonathan Swift (author of Gulliver's Travels). He went on to write some of the most popular plays of the English Restoration period, but his fame was short-lived. Public opinion turned against Congreve's high-brow sexual comedy, thanks to a man named Jeremy Collier, who sought to remind people that the purpose of drama was to teach.

Discouraged with "the caprices of an audience," Congreve left the theater and produced little else of significance for the next twenty-nine years. He died in a carriage accident (of all things) in London, and is buried in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.