John Dryden, who specialized in poetry involving elaborate and occasionally exaggerated encomiums, praised William Congreve as a playwright who might equal Shakespeare. Commenting upon Congreve's second play, The Double Dealer, Dryden argued that Congreve's writings appeared to have the “strength” of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights combined with the “skill” of the writers of the Restoration.

Congreve certainly had a major reputation during his lifetime. But no modern literary historian has suggested naming any part of the period in which he lived “the Age of Congreve,” in the way such a designation has frequently been assigned to his contemporaries: Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, or even Joseph Addison. Yet his contribution of four excellent comedies and a tragedy to the literature of the English Stage was far from insignificant. Three of his plays have been revived in productions of the National Theatre and, of course, university classes in the history of the English drama are almost certain to contain one of his comedies. If he never achieved the heights of greatness imagined by Dryden, he is still to be regarded as a major British playwright.

His importance has frequently been ascribed to his witty dialogue and the charming nature of his lovers— especially Angelica and Valentine in Love for Love and Millamant and Mirabell in The Way of the World. But much of such admiration has its origin in Charles Lamb's vision of Restoration comedy as depicting an artificial milieu having little connection with a real world of sexual desire and betrayal. Whereas Lamb viewed the stage of his own time as being deeply involved in questions of morality, he argued that Congreve’s plays revealed a “privation of moral light.” Lamb's criticism was constructed to protect Restoration comedy from a century of attacks depicting it as entirely immoral.