The Mourning Bride was Congreve's only dramatic tragedy. Performed in 1697, it was a triumphant success and ran for thirteen days at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Set in the south of Spain, it dramatizes earlier historical conflicts between Granada and Valencia and the part played in this struggle by Moorish expeditions from the north coast of Africa. But the plot is fictional and characters are drawn not from history, but from earlier heroic plays.

When The Old Batchelour, Congreve's first play, was printed in 1693, it was an immediate success and its author hailed as John Dryden's successor. Indeed, Dryden helped Congreve, who was only twenty-three years old at the time, prepare the play for the theatre. This first play, like his later comedies, mirrored the manners of fashionable society. It can be enjoyed for its sheer gaiety and youthful energy, but it also provides a contrast to later works where maturity affords him a more original style and a more discerning attitude to the society he evokes.

William Wycherley's play The Country Wife is one of the best examples of early Restoration comedy. Born in 1640, thirty years before Congreve, Wycherley is often regarded, along with Sir George Etherege, as one of Congreve's most important literary predecessors. Although there is disagreement about when Wycherley's play was first performed, most scholars put it between 1672 and 1675. The play takes a satirical look at the jealous husband, concluding that jealousy is indeed a monster that consumes those who suffer from it most.

More than any other English playwright, Ben Jonson probably had the most influence on the comic tradition of which Congreve is a part. He was a primary force in the rise of the comedy of "humours" during the Elizabethan period. His play Volpone, or The Fox, first performed in 1606, provides one of the best examples of comedy at work in the service of social satire.

When Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage was published in 1698, several playwrights of the period, including Congreve, responded to this attack. Indeed, Collier's book is one of several popular works of Puritan piety that Lady Wishfort tells Mrs. Marwood to entertain herself with when she hides in the closet in the third act of The Way of the World. Collier's book is considered one of the most articulate expressions of the Puritanical attempt to reform the stage and purge it from the perceived evils and corruption of the day.