The Country Wife
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The Country Wife | |
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Written by | William Wycherley |
Characters |
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Date premiered | January 1675 |
Place premiered | Theatre Royal, Drury Lane |
Original language | English |
Genre | Restoration comedy |
Setting | London |
The Country Wife is a
The scandalous trick and the frank language have for much of the play's history kept it off the stage and out of print. Between 1753 and 1924, The Country Wife was considered too outrageous to be performed at all and was replaced on the stage by
Background
After the 18-year
Like Charles II, Wycherley had spent some Commonwealth years in France and become interested in French drama, and throughout his short playwriting career (1671–1676) he would borrow plotlines and techniques from French plays, particularly Molière. However, in contrast to the French, English audiences of the 1670s had no enthusiasm for structurally simple comedies or for the neoclassical unities of time, place, and action, but demanded fast pace, many complications, and above all "variety". To achieve the much denser texture and more complex plotting that pleased in London, Wycherley would combine several source plays to produce bustling action and clashing moods, ranging from farce through paradox to satire.
A Restoration novelty of which Wycherley took advantage was the readiness of public opinion to accept women on stage, for the first time in British history. Audiences were fascinated to see real women reverse the
Plots
The Country Wife is more neatly constructed than most Restoration comedies, but is typical of its time and place in having three sources and three plots. The separate plots are interlinked but distinct, each projecting a sharply different mood. They may be schematised as Horner's
1. Horner's impotence trick provides the play's organising principle and the turning-points of the action. The trick, to pretend impotence to be allowed where no complete man may go, is distantly based on the classic Roman comedy Eunuchus by Terence. The upper-class town rake Harry Horner begins a campaign to seduce as many respectable ladies as possible, thus cuckolding or "putting horns on" their husbands: Horner's name serves to alert the audience to what is going on. He spreads a false rumour of his own impotence, to convince married men that he can safely be allowed to socialise with their wives. The rumour is also meant to assist his mass seduction campaign by helping him identify women who are secretly eager for extramarital sex, because those women will react to a supposedly impotent man with tell-tale horror and disgust. This diagnostic trick, which invariably works perfectly, is one of The Country Wife's many running jokes at the expense of hypocritical upper-class women who are rakes at heart.
Horner's ruse of impotence is a success: he has sex with many ladies of virtuous reputation, mostly the wives and daughters of citizens or "cits", i.e. upwardly mobile businessmen and entrepreneurs of the City of London, as opposed to the Town, the aristocratic quarters where Horner and his friends live. Three such ladies appear on stage, usually together: Lady Fidget, her sister-in-law Mrs Dainty Fidget, and her tag-along friend Mrs Squeamish – names that convey both a delicate sensitivity about the jewel of reputation, and a certain fidgety physical unease or tickle – and the dialogue gives an indefinite impression of many more. The play is structured as a farce, driven by Horner's secret and by a succession of near-discoveries of the truth, from which he extricates himself by aplomb and good luck. A final threat of exposure comes in the last scene, through the well-meaning frankness of the young country wife Margery Pinchwife. Margery is indignant at the accusations of impotence directed at "poor dear Mr. Horner", which she knows from personal experience to be untrue, and is intent on saying so at the traditional end-of-the-play public gathering of the entire cast. In a final trickster masterpiece, Horner averts the danger, joining forces with his more sophisticated lovers to persuade the jealous Pinchwife to at least pretend to believe Horner impotent and his own wife still innocent. Horner never becomes a reformed character but is assumed to go on reaping the fruits of his planted misinformation, past the last act and beyond.
2. The married life of Pinchwife and Margery is based on Molière's The School for Husbands (1661) and The School for Wives (1662). Pinchwife is a middle-aged man who has married a naive country girl in the hope that she will not know to cuckold him. However, Horner teaches her, and Margery cuts a swath through the complexities of London upper-class marriage and seduction without even noticing them. Restoration comedies often contrast town and country for humorous effect, and this is one example of it. Both Molière in the School For Wives and Wycherley in The Country Wife get much comic business out of the meeting between, on the one hand, innocent but inquisitive young girls and, on the other hand, the sophisticated 17th-century culture of sexual relations which they encounter. The difference, which would later make Molière acceptable and Wycherley atrocious to 19th-century critics and theatre producers, is that Molière's Agnes is naturally pure and virtuous, while Margery is just the opposite: enthusiastic about the virile handsomeness of town gallants, rakes, and especially theatre actors, she keeps Pinchwife in a state of continual horror with her plain-spokenness and her interest in sex. A running joke is the way Pinchwife's pathological jealousy always leads him into supplying Margery with the very type of information he wishes her not to have.
3. The courtship of Harcourt and Alithea is a conventional love story without any direct source. By means of persistence and true love, the witty Harcourt, Horner's friend, wins the hand of Pinchwife's sister Alithea, who is, when the play opens, engaged to the shallow fop Sparkish. The delay mechanism of this story is that the upright Alithea holds fast virtuously to her engagement to Sparkish, even while his stupid and cynical character unfolds to her. It is only after Alithea has been caught in a misleadingly compromising situation with Horner, and Sparkish has doubted her virtue while Harcourt has not, that she finally admits her love for Harcourt.
Key scenes
Notorious scenes in the play include "the china scene", a sustained double entendre dialogue mostly heard from off stage, where Horner is purportedly discussing his china collection with two of his lady friends. The husband of Lady Fidget and the grandmother of Mrs. Squeamish are listening front stage and nodding in approval, failing to pick up the double meaning obvious to the audience. Lady Fidget has already explained to her husband that Horner "knows china very well, and has himself very good, but will not let me see it lest I should beg some. But I will find it out, and have what I came for yet" (IV.iii.110). Dialogue such as this made "china" a dirty word in common conversation, Wycherley later claimed.
In another famous scene Lady Fidget's self-styled "virtuous gang" meet up at Horner's lodging to carouse, throw off their public virtue, and behave exactly like male rakes, singing riotous songs and drinking defiant toasts. Finally each of the ladies triumphantly declares that Horner himself is the very lover they have been toasting, and a mayhem of jealousy breaks out as they realise that their friends have also been receiving Horner's favours. But they quickly realise they have no choice but to keep the scandalous secret: "Well then, there's no remedy, sister sharers, let us not fall out, but have a care of our honour" (V.iv.169).
A scene of the Pinchwife plot that combines farce and nightmare is Pinchwife's attempt to force Mrs Pinchwife to write a haughty farewell letter to Horner, using the Freudian threat to "write whore with this penknife in your face" (IV.ii.95). Like all Pinchwife's efforts it misfires, giving Mrs Pinchwife instead an opportunity to send Horner a fan letter.
Themes and analysis
The dynamics of marriage
People marry for the sake of outward appearances, for example Alithea feels that she has no choice but to marry Sparkish because her status in society expects her to. Wives are treated as property as made evident by Pinchwife who locks Margery in her room and forbids her from speaking to men. Sir Jasper's marriage to Lady Fidget is beneficial to his business; therefore he treats her as his asset. He constantly asks Horner to “watch” her so that she will have no opportunity to make a cuckold out of him. Furthermore, there is a struggle for dominance between men and women. As Pinchwife says, ‘”If we do not cheat women, they’ll cheat us” is the very basis for the chief plot of the play, “which centers upon the exchange of positions of dominance within his own family.”[5] Pinchwife decides to marry a country woman in the hopes that she will not be clever enough to know how to cheat, but his extremes in preventing her exposure to men leads to his downfall. Only the women are expected to remain faithful to their husbands. As a result, Lady Fidget “uses sex as a means of revenge against their husbands and achieve a kind of moral victory over them by making them what they most fear to be – cuckolds.”[6]
Horner’s position of power
Initially, Horner is confident that he can seek out the married women who are willing to have affairs because they are the ones who do not care about their honour. Horner seems to believe he is in a position of power over the women because their extramarital affair is with him, but his power wanes during the duration of the play. In Act 5, Scene 4, Lady Fidget, Dainty Fidget, and Mistress Squeamish barge into Horner's lodgings despite his protest, conveying “his lower position that alludes to his disguise: a lowly eunuch.”[6] They talk about him as if he was not present, referring to him as a ‘beast,’ ‘toad,’ and eunuch. Cohen says, “As the ladies grow in aggressive self-confidence, Lady Fidget also ‘claps him on the back’ thereby revealing the altered socio-sexual roles that are now presented.”[6] While Horner thinks he is manipulating the women, he has “exhausted his sexual resources and has, in reality, become that impotent and useless object with the world publicly recognises him to be.”[6] Horner's true power is not in relationship to the women, but to the men. He shows his dominance over the men he cuckolds.
Horner's true intentions towards women
Andrew Kaufman claims that although Horner may seem to pretend to despise women because of his pretended state as a eunuch, his hatred towards women is real. When asked whether he enjoys the company of women, "Horner's language in a constant barrage of hostile wit, discharging hostility which cannot, at the moment, be directly expressed. His characteristic action, verbally, is to 'unmask' women."[7]
First performance
The Country Wife was first performed in January 1675, by the King's Company, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.[8][a] This luxurious playhouse, designed by Christopher Wren, had opened less than a year before and provided a more modern stage to accommodate innovations in scenic design, while still allowing a close connection between actors and the audience.[10]
The original cast was listed in the first edition of The Country Wife, as was standard practice, and modern scholars have suggested that this information throws light on Wycherley's intentions.[11] Wycherley wrote with the original actors in mind, tailoring the roles to their strengths. Also, since the audience consisted mostly of habitual playgoers, authors and directors could use the associations of an actor's previous repertoire to enrich or undercut a character, effects familiar on television and in the cinema today.
Several of the actors were specialised comedians, notably Joseph Haines who played the false-wit character Sparkish, Alithea's original fiancé. At the outset of his high-profile career as comedian and song-and-dance man, young Haines already had a reputation for eccentricity and dominant stage presence, suggesting that Sparkish is not merely a comic butt for the truewits Horner, Harcourt, and Dorilant to mock, but also a real threat to the romance of Harcourt and Alithea.
The male leads Horner and Harcourt were played by the contrasted actors
John Harold Wilson argues that the famously virile stage presence of Hart as Horner must be taken into account when interpreting the play. As personified by Hart, Horner will have won women not so much through clever trickery as "the old-fashioned way", by being "dangerously attractive", and it is only fools like Sir Jaspar Fidget who really believe him harmless.[18] Harcourt/Kynaston, although by 1675 a well-regarded and skilful actor of male roles, would clearly have been overshadowed by Horner/Hart. The actresses associated with each hero must also have tended to make the Horner plot more striking on the stage than the true-love plot. Horner's primary mistress Lady Fidget, spokeswoman for "the virtuous gang" of secretly sex-hungry town wives, was played by the dynamic Elizabeth Knepp, who Samuel Pepys declared "the most excellent, mad-humoured thing, and sings the noblest I've ever heard", talents that the famous drinking scene in Horner's lodging seems designed to do justice to. By contrast, the choice of the bit-part actress Elizabeth James as Alithea would have de-emphasised the Harcourt-Alithea plot. Such historical considerations have made modern critics sceptical of Norman Holland's classic 1959 "right way/wrong way" interpretation of the play, which positions the true-love plot as the most important one.
Stage history
The play had a good initial run, although Horner's trick and the notorious china scene immediately raised offence. Wycherley laughed off such criticisms in his next play, The Plain Dealer (1676), where he has the hypocritical Olivia exclaim that the china scene in The Country Wife "has quite taken away the reputation of poor china itself, and sullied the most innocent and pretty furniture of a lady's chamber". Olivia's sensible cousin Eliza insists that she'll go see The Country Wife anyway: "All this will not put me out of conceit with china, nor the play, which is acted today, or another of the same beastly author's, as you call him, which I'll go see."
Adaptations
Expurgated versions
The bawdy elements of The Country Wife inspired multiple adaptations to
Other adaptations
She Shall Have Music, a 1959
In 1977, the BBC's Play of the Month broadcast a production of The Country Wife with Anthony Andrews as Horner, Helen Mirren as Margery and Bernard Cribbins as Pinchwife; it was later released on DVD.[22]
The 1975 film
In 1992, The Country Wife was adapted into a musical called Lust. Written by the
On 13 April 2008, an adaptation was broadcast on BBC Radio 3, directed by David Blount and featuring Ben Miller as Horner, Geoffrey Whitehead as Pinchwife, Clare Corbett as Mrs. Margery Pinchwife, Nigel Anthony as Sir Jasper Fidget, Celia Imrie as Lady Fidget and Jonathan Keeble as Harcourt.[25]
Critical reception
From its creation until the mid-20th century, The Country Wife was subject to both aesthetic praise and moral outrage.
It was Macaulay, not Hunt, who set the keynote for the 19th century. The play was impossible equally to stage and to discuss, forgotten and obscure.
Academic critics of the first half of the 20th century continued to approach The Country Wife gingerly, with frequent warnings about its "heartlessness", even as they praised its keen social observation. At this time nobody found it funny, and positive criticism tried to rescue it as satire and social criticism rather than as comedy. Macaulay's "licentious" Mrs. Pinchwife becomes in the 20th century a focus for moral concern: to critics such as Bonamy Dobrée, she is a tragic character, destined to have her naiveté cruelly taken advantage of by the "grim, nightmare figure" of Horner.[28]
Modern criticism
The past fifty years have seen a major change, and academic critics have acknowledged the play as a powerful and original work. Norman Holland's widely influential proposal in 1959 of a "right way/wrong way" reading took Wycherley's morality with innovative seriousness and interpreted the play as presenting two bad kinds of masculinity – Horner's libertinism and Pinchwife's possessiveness – and recommending the golden mean of Harcourt, the true lover, the representative of mutual trust in marriage. A competing milestone approach of the same generation is that of Rose Zimbardo (1965), who discusses the play in generic and historical terms as a fierce social satire.
Both these types of reading have now fallen out of favour; there is little consensus about the meaning of The Country Wife, but its "notorious resistance to interpretation"
Notes
References
- ^ a b Ogden, xxxiii.
- ^ Richardson Pack, Memoirs of Mr. Wycherley's Life (1728), 8; quoted by Ogden, 4.
- ^ Howe, 64.
- ^ Zimbardo 1965, p. 154.
- ^ Vieth, David M. “Wycherley’s The Country Wife: An Anatomy of Masculinity.” Papers on Language and Literature 2, no. 4 (fall 1966): 335–50.
- ^ a b c d Cohen, Derrick. “The Revengers’ Comedy: A Reading of The Country Wife.” Durham University Journal. 76 (1983): 33.
- JSTOR 2737598.
- ^ Holland, 73.
- ^ Friedman 1979, p. 242.
- ^ Kachur 2004, pp. 24–29.
- ^ See Ogden, xxix–xxx, and Wilson.
- ^ Thomas Betterton's description of Boutell, quoted by Ogden, xxx.
- ^ Howe, 181; note however that the records for this time are extremely incomplete.
- ^ a b Ogden, xxx.
- ^ Dixon, 430.
- ^ Howe, 20.
- ^ Pepys, quoted by Ogden, xxix.
- ^ Wilson.
- ^ The Plain Dealer, II.i.431–33, 442–44, quoted from Dixon (ed.), The Country Wife and Other Plays.
- ^ a b Friedman 1979, p. 243.
- ^ Dietz 2010, pp. 402–403.
- ^ Fisher, Philip. "The Country Wife". British Theatre Guide. Retrieved 30 June 2021.
- ^ Ogden, xxxiv.
- ^ Dietz 2010, pp. 271–272.
- ^ "Programme Index: Drama on 3: The Country Wife". BBC. Archived from the original on 14 April 2021. Retrieved 30 June 2021.
- ^ Kachur 2004, p. 144.
- ^ Hunt 1840, pp. xxi–xxii.
- ^ Dobrée, 94.
- ^ Burke, 239.
- ^ Sedgwick 1985, p. 57.
- ^ Sedgwick 1985, pp. 62–63.
- ^ Canfield, 129.
Bibliography
- Burke, Helen M. (1988). "Wycherley's 'Tendentious Joke': The Discourse of Alterity in The Country Wife," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29, 3 (Fall 1988): 227–41.
- Canfield, Douglas (1997). Tricksters and Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky.
- Dietz, Dan (2010). Off Broadway Musicals, 1910-2007: Casts, Credits, Songs, Critical Reception and Performance Data of More Than 1,800 Shows. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-3399-5.
- Dixon, Peter (1996). William Wycherley: The Country Wife and Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Dobrée, Bonamy (1924). Restoration Comedy 1660–1720. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Friedman, Arthur, ed. (1979). The Plays of William Wycherley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-811861-9.
- Holland, Norman N. (1959). The First Modern Comedies: The Significance of Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- Howe, Elizabeth (1992). The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- OCLC 1008459284.
- Kachur, B. A. (2004). Etherege and Wycherley. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-57540-6.
- Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1841). Review of Leigh Hunt, ed. The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, in Critical and Historical Essays, Vol. 2. Retrieved 6 February 2005.
- Ogden, James (ed., 2003.) William Wycherley: The Country Wife. London: A&C Black.
- Pepys, Samuel (ed. Henry Benjamin Wheatley, 1880). The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Retrieved 14 March 2005.
- ISBN 0-231-05860-8.
- Wilson, John Harold (1969). Six Restoration Plays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- OCLC 750918356.
Further reading
- Hughes, Derek (1996). English Drama, 1660–1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-811974-6.
- Wycherly, William (2001) [1675]. The Country Wife. London: ISBN 978-1-85459-225-5.
External links
- The Country Wife at Standard Ebooks
- The Country Wife public domain audiobook at LibriVox
- Photos from Garrick's The Country Girl
- The Country Wife at the Internet Broadway Database
- The Country Wife at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
- The Country Wife at Theatricalia.com