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William Wycherley the Country Wife

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William Wycherley the Country Wife new mermaids General Editors: William C. Carroll, Boston University Brian Gibbons, University of Münster Tiffany Stern, University of Oxford The interior of a Restoration theatre drawn by C. Walter Hodges new mermaids new mermaids The Alchemist The Old Wife’s Tale All for Love The Playboy of the Western World Arden of Faversham The Provoked Wife Arms and the Man Pygmalion william wycherley Bartholmew Fair The Recruiting Officer The Beaux’ Stratagem The Relapse The Beggar’s Opera The Revenger’s Tragedy The Changeling The Rivals A Chaste Maid in Cheapside The Roaring Girl The Country Wife The Rover The Critic Saint Joan The country Doctor Faustus The School for Scandal The Duchess of Malfi She Stoops to Conquer The Dutch Courtesan The Shoemaker’s Holiday wife Eastward Ho! The Spanish Tragedy Edward the Second Tamburlaine Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedies The Tamer Tamed Epicoene or The Silent Woman Three Late Medieval Morality Plays Every Man In His Humour Mankind Gammer Gurton’s Needle Everyman An Ideal Husband Mundus et Infans The Importance of Being Earnest ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore The Jew of Malta The Tragedy of Mariam The Knight of the Burning Pestle Volpone Lady Windermere’s Fan The Way of the World London Assurance The White Devil Love for Love The Witch Major Barbara The Witch of Edmonton The Malcontent A Woman Killed with Kindness The Man of Mode A Woman of No Importance Edited by James Ogden Marriage A-La-Mode Women Beware Women A New Way to Pay Old Debts Formerly University College Wales, Aberystwyth With a new introduction by Tiffany Stern University College, University of Oxford Methuen Drama • London Bloomsbury Methuen Drama contents An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford50 Square Bedford Square 13851385 Broadway Broadway acknowledgements . vi LondonLondon New New York York WC1B 3DPWC1B 3DP NY NY 10018 10018 introduction . vii UKUK USAUSA About the Play . vii Plot . vii www.bloomsbury.com Genre . viii Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Structure . ix Characters . x Copyright © 2014 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Men . x Women . xiv First New Mermaid edition 1973 Themes . xvi Copyright © 1973 Ernest Benn Limited Original Staging . xxi Recent Performances . xxiii All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced A Note on the Text . xxv or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval Date and Sources . xxv system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. The Author . xxvi abbreviations . No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization xxviii acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material further reading . xxix in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. the country wife . 1 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Persons . 3 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Prologue . 5 The Text . 7 ISBN: PB: 978-1-4081-7989-5 ePDF: 978-1-4081-7990-1 Epilogue . 151 ePub: 978-1-4081-7991-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Country Setting, Kingsdown, Kent ct14 8es Printed and bound in India acknowledgements introduction Copy to come? About the Play The Country Wife is a hilariously bawdy and subversive drama that pokes fun at the jealous and humourless. Condemning hypocrisy, praising dissolution, and elevating innuendo into an art form, the play is titillating, disquieting and witty; it has provoked powerfully mixed reactions over the years. The seventeenth century libertine king Charles II loved it enough to see it three times, and is said to have joined the ‘dance of cuckolds’ at the end of one performance; the eighteenth-century actor-playwright David Garrick dubbed it ‘the most licentious play in the English language’; the Victorian critic Thomas Babington Macaulay compared it to a skunk, because it was ‘too filthy to handle and too noisome even to approach’.1 These days it is heralded as a Restoration masterpiece. Sexually frank, this play tells a number of vigorous lust stories and perhaps a love story too. Its virtuosity, linguistic energy, brilliant wit and naughtiness make it a staple of the contemporary stage. Plot A ‘Machiavel in love’, no one is hornier than Horner (4.3.69). As his name indicates, he is highly sexed, and highly skilled at cuckolding (putting horns on the head of) husbands. His latest scheme is to bribe a quack doctor to spread the rumour that he is impotent. This gives him access to ladies keen on ‘the sport’ (1.1.141–2), whose husbands will think he is not a threat. Invited by Sir Jaspar Fidget to ‘play at cards with my wife after dinner’ (1.1.106–7), Horner embarks on sexual relationships with the entire Fidget clan: Lady Fidget, her sister-in-law Mrs Dainty Fidget, and their friend Mrs Squeamish – a set of hypocritical women who call themselves the ‘virtuous gang’ (5.2.96). The virtuous gang prove to be as voracious for sex as they are to keep their reputations as ‘honourable’ women. In a parallel plot, Pinchwife has married a country girl, Margery, in the belief that she is too naive to be unfaithful to him. He continually worries about being cuckolded, however, and seeks ever more complicated ways to hide Margery from his friends, locking her up and, when he takes her out, dressing her as a boy. Horner, who regards Pinchwife’s desire not to be 1 Laura J. Rosenthal, ‘All Injury’s Forgot: Restoration Sex Comedy and National Amnesia’, Comparative Drama, 42 (2008), 7–28 (25); Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq (1780), 120. vii the country wife introduction cuckolded as a challenge, immediately decides to sleep with Margery. be Virtues Bane, / In pointed Satyr, Wycherley shall Reign’. 2 Yet satires As Margery is ignorant rather than innocent, she willingly accepts Horner’s usually have moral aims, while The Country Wife teaches, if anything, attentions. cheating, lying, hypocrisy and the art of cuckolding husbands and getting A third plot follows Pinchwife’s virtuous sister, Alithea, who is engaged away with it. As, moreover, it is difficult to say where the play’s ridicule to dull-but-affected Sparkish. Alithea wrongly believes Sparkish’s lack of starts and stops, it is not even obvious what – or who – its satirical focus jealousy illustrates his love for her; actually Sparkish views Alithea as a might be. Horner, the man who exposes corruption in others, and might conquest to show off. Continually thrusting Alithea into the company of therefore be said to have the voice of satire, is himself highly corrupt, and the admiring Harcourt, Sparkish virtually ensures that the two will fall often exhibits the very qualities he criticises. He taunts Pinchwife for in love. As Alithea is too decent to be unfaithful to Sparkish, however, picking a ‘silly’ wife when ‘methinks wit is more necessary than beauty’ Harcourt has to adopt extravagant methods to win her hand. (1.1.371), but then seduces her himself, for instance. So some have thought The three plot strands come together when Pinchwife delivers ‘Alithea’ the play is a satire about Horner, or at least that he is a ‘parasite-satirist’ (actually Margery, disguised as Alithea) to Horner’s apartment, believing who exposes and feeds off society’s vices.3 These conflicted critical the two have an assignation. There, the other characters converge. Sparkish, approaches, however, merely mirror the ambiguity of the play itself. In a assuming Alithea has been unfaithful to him, reveals that he was only ever plot where, as Hume points out, Sir Jaspar Fidget, the virtuous gang, interested in her dowry. As a result of his public defamation, the genuine Pinchwife, Sparkish and Horner are all ridiculed, ‘questions of motive and Alithea is able to accept Harcourt. Margery remains naive enough to moral value’ – and hence questions of satire – ‘disappear’.4 imagine she too can marry the man she loves, Horner; her enraged hus - As the intentions of The Country Wife are hard to gauge, it has at band Pinchwife offers to draw his sword on her. Lucy the maid saves the various points been called romantic and unromantic; feminist and anti- day when she comes up with a plausible explanation for Margery’s protes - feminist; a confirmation of Hobbes’ feeling that civilized society is tations and her presence in disguise in Horner’s house. The virtuous gang, revert ing to a state of nature, and an attack on Hobbes’ belief that ‘the best and eventually Margery, assure the assembled men that they are innocent society is the one founded upon enlightened self-interest’.5 friends of Horner’s; in fact, they have all had sexual encounters with him. Given that The Country Wife simultaneously criticizes society and Pinchwife, half-aware that Margery has duped him, resolves to take her criticizes the act of criticism, the play is perhaps best defined as an exercise back to the country for good. Horner’s secret remains safe, and a cuckold’s in irony. Irony, moreover, both shapes the plot and is a linguistic device dance concludes the comedy. throughout. Alternatively, as most characters are, from name onwards, comic stereotypes – the hypocrite, the cuckold, the libertine – the play, Genre which is improbable, exaggerated and funny, may be better defined as a ‘Most men’, announces Harcourt, ‘are the contraries to that they would farce – unless the very question of genre is too conventional for a play of seem’ (1.1.237). The Country Wife, which compares seeming frigid this transgressive nature.
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