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Restoration Versus Eighteenth Century, LOVE FOR LOVE PREFIGURES 18TH…

- - - - Love for love got caught up in the debate of whether plays were acceptable:
      - • Congreve wrote a pamphlet refuting Collier’s attack
      - • Congreve pamphlet war
    - - […] ‘Pray, Ladies, how have you been entertained with the play?’
      - ‘Want of entertainment,’ said Mrs. Mirvan, ‘is its least fault; but I own there are objections to it, which I should be glad to see removed.’
      - ‘I could have ventured to answer for the Ladies,’ said Lord Orville, ‘since I am sure that this is not a play that could be honoured with their approbation.’
      - ‘What, I suppose it is not sentimental enough!’ cried the Captain, ‘or else it’s too good for them; for I’ll maintain it’s one of the best comedies in the language, and has more wit in one scene, than there is in all the new plays put together.’
      - Frances Burney, Evelina (1778; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 79, 81-2)
      - The play was Love for Love, and tho’ it is fraught with wit and entertainment, I hope I shall never see it represented again; for it is so extremely indelicate, – to use the softest word I can, – that Miss Mirvan and I were perpetually out of countenance, and could neither make any observations ourselves, nor venture to listen to those of others. […]
  - - - The cause of Congreve was not tenable: whatever glosses he might use for the defence or palliation of single passages, the general tenour and tendency of his plays must always be condemned. It is acknowledged, with universal conviction, that the perusal of his works will make no man better; and that their ultimate effect is to represent pleasure in alliance with vice, and to relax those obligations by which life ought not to be regulated.
      - • Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets (1779)
      - • Clear that Congreve’s work is morally unacceptable.