In the following essay, Jarvis discusses how the ideas of John Locke and other philosophers informed Congreve's writing of Love for Love.

Criticism of Congreve's Love for Love prior to Norman Holland's publication of The First Modern Comedies in 1959 is relatively unimpressive. Writers of articles appearing in scholarly journals have studiously avoided the larger concerns of the play by focusing their microscopes on such minutiae as the attribution of the ballad "A Soldier and a Sailor" in Act III; Sailor Ben's literary genealogy; the identification of the scene in Act III that Congreve in his dedication to the Earl of Dorset claims to have omitted from the first public performance of the play on April 30, 1695, at Lincoln's Inn Fields; and Congreve's possible indebtedness to Dryden's Wild Gallant for scenes in Acts III and V.

Scarcely more impressive are the perfunctory and largely repetitious readings of the play...