James Thompson In the following essay, Thompson explores themes in Love for Love, particularly reading and it's influence on the characters' actions and the roles they assume.

In Love for Love Congreve turned to Jonsonian humors characters and a romance plot that is quintessential New Comedy. This conservatism appears to be quite deliberate, as the playwright displays his mastery of the history and techniques of the stage in this particularly literary play. The characters and action come not so much from life as from literature, which makes Love for Love, as Arthur Hoffman notes, highly allusive; Valentine's madness, for example, recalls Achilles, Ajax, Hercules, Amadis, Orlando, Quixote, Hamlet and Lear. Congreve also invests his characters with selfconscious theatricality, for they talk about acting, while they adopt and abandon various roles, patterning their behavior on models that are often explicitly literary.

Literary models appear in the opening scene...