Correct Answer: C) Comedy of Manners

Explanation: Congreve is considered the greatest writer of the English Restoration’s Comedy of Manners, a genre that satirizes the behaviors, affections, and especially the “wit” of the upper classes.

Correct Answer: B) Kilkenny College and Trinity College, Dublin

Explanation: Despite being born in England, Congreve was raised and educated in Ireland, where he formed a lifelong friendship with the great satirist Jonathan Swift at Kilkenny and Trinity.

Correct Answer: C) John Dryden

Explanation: The aging John Dryden saw Congreve as his literary heir. He wrote a commendatory poem for Congreve’s play *The Double-Dealer*, passing the torch of English poetry to him.

Correct Answer: C) *Incognita: or, Love and Duty Reconcil’d*

Explanation: Published under a pseudonym, *Incognita* is a short, cleverly plotted novel that demonstrates the same witty and symmetrical style found in his plays.

Correct Answer: C) *A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage*

Explanation: This pamphlet was a major cultural event that signaled a shift in public taste away from the libertine wit of Restoration comedy towards a more moral, sentimental drama.

Correct Answer: C) Retired from writing for the public stage

Explanation: Disgusted by the changing public taste and the negative reception of his finest play, Congreve effectively retired from the theatre at the height of his powers, though he remained a respected literary figure.

Correct Answer: C) The Kit-Cat Club

Explanation: The Kit-Cat Club was London’s leading club for Whig politicians and men of letters, including figures like Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.

Correct Answer: B) Millamant

Explanation: The iconic role of the witty and independent Millamant in *The Way of the World* was written for and first performed by Anne Bracegirdle.

Correct Answer: D) Mirabell and Millamant

Explanation: Mirabell and Millamant are the archetypal “witty couple” of Restoration comedy. Their courtship is a battle of wits and a negotiation of terms for an equal partnership.

Correct Answer: C) Lady Wishfort

Explanation: The ridiculously vain and sexually frustrated Lady Wishfort is the play’s main blocking character, a comic antagonist whom Mirabell must trick to win Millamant’s hand and fortune.

Correct Answer: C) To have his servant disguise himself as a rich suitor, “Sir Rowland,” and trick her into a false marriage

Explanation: Mirabell plans to have his servant Waitwell impersonate his non-existent uncle, “Sir Rowland,” and flatter Lady Wishfort into a marriage contract. Mirabell can then “rescue” her from the socially disastrous match in exchange for her consent to his marriage to Millamant.

Correct Answer: B) Mirabell and Millamant negotiate the terms and conditions of their potential marriage.

Explanation: This iconic scene lays out their “provisos” for marriage, demanding a level of independence and equality that was revolutionary. It’s the ultimate expression of the witty couple defining their relationship on their own terms.

Correct Answer: B) Fainall and Mrs. Marwood

Explanation: Fainall (who is married to Lady Wishfort’s daughter) and his mistress, Mrs. Marwood, scheme to expose Mrs. Fainall’s past affair with Mirabell to secure her fortune.

Correct Answer: D) “My jewel,” “my soul,” and other cloying pet names

Explanation: She declares, “Let us never visit together, nor go to a play together; but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as if we were not married at all.” This rejects the sentimental clichés of love.

Correct Answer: B) It was a resounding failure.

Explanation: The play’s complex plot, subtle wit, and morally ambiguous characters were too sophisticated for the audience, which was beginning to prefer the simpler morality of sentimental comedy. This failure led Congreve to retire from the stage.

Correct Answer: C) A deed signed by Mrs. Fainall before her marriage, entrusting her fortune to Mirabell’s protection

Explanation: This brilliant legal move, made by Mirabell out of foresight and friendship, protects Mrs. Fainall’s inheritance from her villainous husband, Fainall, thereby checkmating him.

Correct Answer: B) Her nephew

Explanation: He is her country nephew, a good-natured but oafish and drunken squire, brought in to be a potential suitor for Millamant. He provides a comic contrast to the refined wit of the London characters.

Correct Answer: B) Lady Wishfort’s scheming servants

Explanation: Like many Restoration comedies, the play features a lively subplot involving the servants who are often just as witty and cunning as their masters. Foible is married to Waitwell (Sir Rowland) and is crucial to Mirabell’s plot.

Correct Answer: B) Valentine

Explanation: Valentine is the witty young man who, having squandered his fortune, must win the love of Angelica and regain his inheritance from his tyrannical father.

Correct Answer: B) Insane

Explanation: To avoid signing a deed that would disinherit him in favor of his younger brother, Valentine feigns madness. This allows him to speak satirical truths and cause comic chaos.

Correct Answer: C) Ben

Explanation: Ben is the “sea-beast” brother who returns from his voyages full of nautical slang. He is a comic character who represents nature and bluntness in contrast to the city’s artifice.

Correct Answer: D) Astrology

Explanation: Foresight is a “humours” character who consults the stars for every decision, making him an easy target for the witty manipulations of the other characters. He is a satire of irrational belief.

Correct Answer: D) Foresight’s awkward and naive country-bred daughter

Explanation: Miss Prue is a hilarious portrayal of an uncultured country girl who is desperate to learn the scandalous ways of the city. She provides a comic foil to the refined Angelica.

Correct Answer: C) By pretending she will marry his father, Sir Sampson

Explanation: She forces him into a corner where he must choose between her and his inheritance. When he proves his love is genuine by offering to sign the deed that disinherits him, she reveals her plot and agrees to marry him.

Correct Answer: C) It was an enormous success.

Explanation: *Love for Love* was one of the biggest stage hits of the 1690s. Its blend of high wit with more broadly comic “humours” characters made it far more accessible and popular than Congreve’s later, more refined masterpiece.

Correct Answer: B) *The Old Bachelor*

Explanation: *The Old Bachelor* (1693) was Congreve’s first play, and its wit and lively characters made it an instant hit, launching his career.

Correct Answer: D) *The Double-Dealer*

Explanation: *The Double-Dealer* was more serious in tone than his other comedies. The central villain, Maskwell, is a cynical manipulator whose machinations are more cruel than comic, which may be why audiences did not like the play as much.

Correct Answer: C) *The Mourning Bride*

Explanation: While known for his comedies, Congreve’s sole tragedy, *The Mourning Bride* (1697), was paradoxically his biggest commercial success in his lifetime.

Correct Answer: B) “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast”

Explanation: This famous line, often misquoted as “savage beast,” is from the opening of Congreve’s tragedy. Another famous line from this play is “Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d, / Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.”

Correct Answer: C) Its perfect balance, rhythm, and wit

Explanation: Congreve is celebrated for writing some of the most polished and artistically crafted prose in English drama. His dialogue is known for its balance, symmetry, and epigrammatic force.

Correct Answer: C) A man obsessed with his clothes, wit, and fashionable manners

Explanation: The fop, such as Tattle in *Love for Love* or Witwoud in *The Way of the World*, is a common target of satire. He pretends to have wit but only possesses artifice and affectation.

Correct Answer: C) A linguistic and intellectual brilliance; the ability to perceive similarities in dissimilar things

Explanation: For Restoration writers, “wit” was more than just humor. It was a sign of intelligence, verbal dexterity, and the ability to control situations and people through clever language. Mirabell is a true wit; Witwoud is a “witwoud” or pretender to wit.

Correct Answer: C) Molière

Explanation: Molière’s witty dialogue, his use of stock characters, and his satire of social affectations were a primary model for Congreve and his contemporaries.

Correct Answer: A) *The Double-Dealer*

Explanation: This line reveals the self-aware villainy of Maskwell, whose plotting is far more sinister than the comic deceptions in Congreve’s other plays.

Correct Answer: D) Millamant

Explanation: Millamant speaks this line in *The Way of the World*, explaining the artificial game of love in her society, where a woman’s perceived cruelty (i.e., her aloofness and refusal to commit) is her primary source of power over her suitors.

Correct Answer: D) Ben

Explanation: Ben Legend is the sailor brother whose every utterance is filled with sea jargon. He represents a kind of “natural man,” comically out of place in the artificial drawing-room society.

Correct Answer: B) A legal contract or “proviso scene”

Explanation: For Congreve’s witty couples, courtship is a battle that ends not in a romantic surrender, but in a carefully negotiated treaty (the “proviso scene”) that lays out the terms for a marriage of equals.

Correct Answer: C) Their supposed lewd language and mockery of the clergy

Explanation: Collier was offended by what he saw as the profanity, blasphemy, and immoral tone of the plays. He accused them of rewarding vice and punishing virtue, directly challenging the foundations of the genre.

Correct Answer: B) *Amendments of Mr. Collier’s False and Imperfect Citations*

Explanation: Congreve’s response was largely academic and legalistic, picking apart Collier’s arguments and accusing him of misquoting the plays. However, the tide of public opinion was already turning against him.

Correct Answer: B) A witty poem spoken directly to the audience, often by an actress

Explanation: The epilogue was a chance to break the theatrical illusion and speak directly to the audience, often making clever, satirical comments about the play, the audience, and contemporary society.

Correct Answer: B) *The Old Bachelor*

Explanation: This early expression of a now-famous sentiment (later rephrased by Tennyson) appears in Congreve’s first play.

Correct Answer: C) A little black box

Explanation: The black box contains the crucial deed of conveyance, becoming the central “MacGuffin” or plot device of the final act.

Correct Answer: C) A committee of ladies to drink and gossip

Explanation: This is a scene where Lady Wishfort and her circle of female friends gather to drink, complain about men, and viciously gossip, showcasing the female social world of the play.

Correct Answer: B) 1670

Explanation: Congreve was born in 1670, making him a true child of the Restoration era. He produced all his major plays before the age of 30.

Correct Answer: A) Telling secrets and gossip

Explanation: As his name suggests, Tattle is a compulsive gossip who cannot resist telling secrets, which makes him a useful and comical tool for the other characters’ plots.

Correct Answer: D) George Bernard Shaw

Explanation: The great playwright George Bernard Shaw was a huge admirer of Congreve’s technical skill, praising his dialogue for its perfect “music” and rhythm.

Correct Answer: B) Millamant

Explanation: This is part of Millamant’s witty reluctance to commit to marriage, expressing her fear that becoming a “wife” means losing her independent and desirable self.

Correct Answer: B) A purely pragmatic and loveless marriage based on money and social status

Explanation: They represent the “way of the world” that Mirabell and Millamant seek to avoid: a cynical, loveless union where both partners despise each other and are involved in affairs and schemes.

Correct Answer: B) In Westminster Abbey

Explanation: His immense literary reputation secured him a burial spot in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, a high honor.

Correct Answer: C) The inherent goodness of humanity and rewarded virtue

Explanation: The shift in public taste, influenced by critics like Collier, led to a new kind of comedy that aimed to inspire tears and admiration for virtue rather than laughter and scorn for vice, a style Congreve found unappealing.

Correct Answer: C) He is Valentine’s witty and loyal friend who helps him with his schemes.

Explanation: Scandal is the classic “witty second,” a confidant and fellow plotter who helps the hero navigate the complexities of society.

Correct Answer: C) 1700

Explanation: Its performance in 1700 symbolically marks both the peak and the end of the high Restoration Comedy of Manners.

Correct Answer: B) The libertine who loves the chase more than the conquest

Explanation: Vainlove is a satiric portrait of a man who is only interested in women who are indifferent to him. As soon as a woman returns his affection, he loses all interest.

Correct Answer: B) *The Mourning Bride*

Explanation: The original line, spoken by Zara, is “Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d, / Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.”

Correct Answer: B) Gout and cataracts leading to blindness

Explanation: Congreve’s later life was marked by ill health, including painful gout and eventual blindness.

Correct Answer: B) Lady Wishfort

Explanation: Mrs. Fainall is Lady Wishfort’s widowed daughter, whom she pressured into a loveless marriage with Fainall.

Correct Answer: B) Love and duty

Explanation: The novel’s subtitle is “*or, Love and Duty Reconcil’d*.” It follows the story of two friends who fall in love with women at a masquerade, not knowing they are the very women their fathers have chosen for them, thus reconciling their personal desires with their family duty.

Correct Answer: C) The Whigs

Explanation: Congreve was a committed Whig, and his success allowed him to gain several minor but comfortable political appointments that supported him after he retired from the theatre.

Correct Answer: C) Foreign influences, particularly French farce

Explanation: The prologue suggests that the audience’s taste has become corrupted by low French comedies and farces, and that they may no longer have the capacity to appreciate the genuine wit of his play.

Correct Answer: B) A pretender to wit, a foolish man who thinks he is clever

Explanation: The character Witwoud in *The Way of the World* perfectly embodies this. He is all affectation and borrowed phrases, a pale imitation of a true wit like Mirabell.

Correct Answer: C) Tyrannical and stingy

Explanation: Sir Sampson is the classic heavy father, who threatens to disinherit his son and cares more about controlling the family fortune than about his son’s happiness.

Correct Answer: C) Centers of fashionable male social life, news, and gossip

Explanation: Places like White’s Chocolate House were the hubs of upper-class male society, and scenes set there allowed Congreve to realistically portray the world where wits and fops socialized and competed.

Correct Answer: B) *The Way of the World*

Explanation: Spoken after the play had famously failed, this epilogue takes a parting shot at the critics and the audience for being overly fastidious (“nice”) and fashionable (“caprice”) rather than possessing true judgment.

Correct Answer: B) John Dryden and Nahum Tate

Explanation: As a young man under Dryden’s mentorship, Congreve was invited to contribute to Dryden’s major project of translating the satires of Juvenal and Persius.

Correct Answer: B) A prude who is secretly promiscuous

Explanation: Lady Plyant is a classic example of a Restoration comic type, a woman who makes a great show of her “honour” and virtue in public, but is easily seduced in private.

Correct Answer: B) Witty dialogue filled with double entendres about sex

Explanation: While Congreve’s wit is often considered more refined, his work still partakes in the Restoration tradition of using clever dialogue where the characters are ostensibly talking about one thing (like collecting china) while actually talking about sex.

Correct Answer: D) By pretending to be a fan of her “cabal” and playing cards with her

Explanation: In the past, Mirabell pretended to love the aging Lady Wishfort to get close to her niece, Millamant. When she discovered his deception, she banished him, setting the entire plot in motion.

Correct Answer: B) The restoration of the monarchy with Charles II

Explanation: The period began in 1660 when the monarchy was restored after the Puritan Interregnum, leading to the reopening of theatres and a new, more libertine court culture.

Correct Answer: C) Henry Purcell

Explanation: The great English Baroque composer Henry Purcell wrote music for several plays by Congreve and his contemporaries, including *The Old Bachelor* and *The Double-Dealer*.

Correct Answer: C) A confirmed misogynist and bachelor who is finally tricked into marriage

Explanation: Heartwell is a cynical “woman-hater” who believes he is too clever to be caught in the trap of marriage, making his eventual (and unwilling) entanglement the focus of the main plot.

Correct Answer: A) A great deal of “spleen” but very little “judgment”Explanation: He attacks the audience’s lack of taste, suggesting they judge based on ill-temper and fashion (“spleen”) rather than true critical discernment (“judgment”).

Correct Answer: A) *The Judgement of Paris*

Explanation: This masque, based on the classical story of the Trojan prince Paris choosing among the goddesses, was the result of a music prize competition set up in 1700.

Correct Answer: D) The poetry of Suckling

Explanation: She is reading poems by Sir John Suckling, a Cavalier poet known for his witty and nonchalant love lyrics. Her choice of reading material perfectly establishes her character’s witty and fashionable persona.

Correct Answer: C) An extended “apron” stage that jutted out into the audience

Explanation: The Restoration stage had a large forestage or “apron” where much of the witty dialogue was delivered, creating an intimate connection between the actors and the audience.

Correct Answer: B) An actress dressing in male attire (breeches)

Explanation: With the introduction of actresses, the “breeches role” became immensely popular, allowing audiences to admire the actress’s figure and wit in a male disguise. Angelica in *Love for Love* dons one.

Correct Answer: C) Seemed ashamed of his work and preferred to be known as a “gentleman”

Explanation: Voltaire was annoyed that the great playwright seemed to value his status as a private gentleman above his literary achievements, telling him that if he had been *only* a gentleman, he would not have come to visit him.

Correct Answer: C) 1729

Explanation: He died in 1729 after a long retirement, having outlived the theatrical era he so perfectly defined.

Correct Answer: B) Intellectually equal, or superior, to the male protagonists

Explanation: Unlike the sentimental heroines who followed, Congreve’s heroines are sharp, witty, and fiercely independent, able to match the hero’s wit and negotiate the terms of their own lives.

Correct Answer: B) Mirabell’s serving-man

Explanation: Waitwell is Mirabell’s manservant, whom he employs to impersonate his fictitious uncle, Sir Rowland, in the plot against Lady Wishfort.

Correct Answer: C) It has both positive (wit) and negative (deceit) connotations

Explanation: This is a central tension. Artifice is celebrated in the witty couple (Mirabell, Millamant) as a form of sophisticated self-creation, but it is condemned in the villainous couple (Fainall, Marwood) as hypocrisy and malicious deceit.

Correct Answer: B) His younger son, Ben

Explanation: Sir Sampson plans to trick Valentine into signing away his birthright to the sailor Ben, setting up the play’s central inheritance plot.

Correct Answer: D) Vainlove

Explanation: Vainlove is a major character in Congreve’s first play, *The Old Bachelor*. The other three are characters in *The Way of the World*.

Correct Answer: C) *Love for Love*

Explanation: Scandal says this line, reflecting on the fate of those who are deceived by idiots, a key theme in a play filled with fops and pretenders to wit.

Correct Answer: C) The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane

Explanation: The first Theatre Royal, built for the King’s Company in 1663, was one of the two patent theatres that dominated London’s theatrical life and staged the works of writers like Dryden and Congreve.

Correct Answer: C) A legal document

Explanation: In *The Way of the World*, Mirabell produces a deed of conveyance from a black box to protect Mrs. Fainall’s fortune from her husband. The deed, made before her marriage to Fainall, had transferred all of her property to Mirabell’s keeping. Thus, Fainall is defeated and gets no money.

Correct Answer: C) *Love for Love*

Explanation: Valentine and Angelica are the central witty couple in *Love for Love*, whose plot revolves around Valentine’s attempts to win her and his inheritance.

Correct Answer: C) Maskwell

Explanation: Maskwell is the villain who pretends to be a loyal friend to Mellefont while secretly plotting with Lady Touchwood to ruin him and marry Cynthia for himself.

Correct Answer: C) Samuel JohnsonExplanation: In his *Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets*, Samuel Johnson gave this famous, if somewhat critical, assessment of Congreve’s specific brand of dialogue and wit.

Correct Answer: B) She fears losing her freedom and social power.

Explanation: Her witty reluctance and her conditions in the “proviso scene” are all about negotiating a marriage that will not diminish her independence. She is “unwilling to be delivered up” to the traditional, subservient role of a wife.

Correct Answer: C) By agreeing to give up his inheritance for her sake

Explanation: When he believes she will marry his father, Valentine offers to sign the document that disinherits him to ensure she will be happy and well cared-for. This selfless act proves his love is genuine, winning her over.

Correct Answer: C) Captain Bluffe

Explanation: Captain Bluffe is a classic “miles gloriosus” or braggart soldier, a stock character of comedy who boasts of his bravery but is exposed as a fraud.

Correct Answer: C) Vanity and sexual frustration

Explanation: Congreve satirizes her as an aging woman desperate to maintain her allure. Her preparations to receive “Sir Rowland,” applying makeup and practicing poses, are a masterpiece of comic vanity.

Correct Answer: B) Etherege and Wycherley

Explanation: Sir George Etherege (*The Man of Mode*) and William Wycherley (*The Country Wife*) pioneered the Comedy of Manners, but William Congreve is credited with perfecting it, making the dialogue more witty and the characters more psychologically complex.

Correct Answer: C) The corrupt, cynical, and materialistic nature of high society

Explanation: The title refers to the social game where marriage is about money, reputation is a commodity, and true love and wit must struggle to survive amidst deceit and self-interest.

Correct Answer: D) Comic foils to the artificiality of city life

Explanation: These characters, with their lack of social grace and bluntness, serve to highlight the polished but often deceptive manners of the urban wits and fops.

Correct Answer: B) A lyric poem

Explanation: This famous line is from a short lyric poem by Congreve titled “Pious Selinda.” It is not from his plays.

Correct Answer: B) A series of trick marriages performed by a disguised character

Explanation: The clever parson, Setter, arranges a series of false or mistaken marriages to resolve the play’s romantic entanglements, a common Restoration plot device.

Correct Answer: C) The virtuous, but naive, hero

Explanation: Mellefont is an unusually earnest and honorable hero for a Restoration comedy, which makes him vulnerable to the truly villainous deceptions of Maskwell and Lady Touchwood.

Correct Answer: C) Alexander Pope

Explanation: The great poet Alexander Pope, who admired Congreve’s artistry, was entrusted with his literary estate and oversaw the publication of his works after his death.

Correct Answer: C) The great era of the Comedy of Manners

Explanation: His departure, prompted by the failure of his most brilliant play, signaled the end of the dominance of cynical, aristocratic wit and the rise of a new, more middle-class and moralistic sentimental comedy.