The Country Wife is a Restoration comedy written by William Wycherley and first performed in 1675. A product of the tolerant early Restoration period, the play reflects an aristocratic and anti-Puritan ideology, and was controversial for its sexual explicitness even in its own time. The title contains a lewd pun with regard to the first syllable of "country". It is based on several plays by Molière, with added features that 1670s London audiences demanded: colloquial prose dialogue in place of Molière's verse, a complicated, fast-paced plot tangle, and many sex jokes.
It turns on two indelicate plot devices: a rake's trick of pretending impotence to safely have clandestine affairs with married women, and the arrival in London of an inexperienced young "country wife", with her discovery of the joys of town life, especially the fascinating London men. The implied condition the Rake, Horner, claimed to suffer from was, he said, contracted in France while "dealing with common women". The only cure was to have a surgeon drastically reduce the extent of his manly stature; therefore, he could be no threat to any man's wife.
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 David Garrick's cleaned-up and bland version The Country Girl, now a forgotten curiosity.Ogden, xxxiii. The original play is again a stage favourite today, and is also acclaimed by academic critics, who praise its linguistic energy, sharp social satire, and openness to different interpretations.
Background
After the 18-year Puritan stage ban was lifted at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the theatrical life of London recreated itself quickly and abundantly. During the reign of Charles II (1660–1685), playwrights such as John Dryden, George Etherege, Aphra Behn, and William Wycherley wrote comedies that triumphantly reassert aristocratic dominance and prestige after the years of middle class power during Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth.Richardson Pack, Memoirs of Mr. Wycherley's Life (1728), 8; quoted by Ogden, 4.
Reflecting the atmosphere of the Court, these plays celebrate a lifestyle of sensual intrigue and conquest, especially conquest that served to humiliate the husbands of the London middle classes and to avenge, in the sensual arena, the marginalisation and exile suffered by royalists under Cromwell. Charles' personal interest in the stage nourished Restoration drama, and his most favoured courtiers were poets, playwrights, and men of wit, such as John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, and William Wycherley.Richardson Pack, Memoirs of Mr. Wycherley's Life (1728), 8; quoted by Ogden, 4.
Wycherley had no title or wealth, but had by 1675 already recommended himself by two well-received comedies and had been admitted to the inner circle, sharing the conversation and, sometimes, the mistresses of Charles, who "was extremely fond of him upon account of his wit".Richardson Pack, Memoirs of Mr. Wycherley's Life (1728), 8; quoted by Ogden, 4. In 1675, at age 35, he created a sensation with The Country Wife, greeted as the bawdiest and wittiest play yet seen on the English stage.
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 borrowed plotlines and techniques from French plays, particularly Molière. 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 cross-dressing of the Elizabethan boy actors and appear in tight-fitting male outfits in the popular breeches roles, and to hear them match or even outdo the rake heroes in repartee and double entendre. Charles' choice of actresses as mistresses, notably Nell Gwyn, helped keep the interest fresh, and Wycherley plays on this interest in The Country Wife by having Mr. Pinchwife disguise his wife (the eponymous 'country wife') in a boy's outfit. It has also been suggested that he uses the allure of women on display to emphasise in an almost voyeuristic way Margery's provocative innocence, as well as the immodest knowingness of "town" wives like Lady Fidget.Howe, 64.
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 impotence trick, the married life of Pinchwife and Margery, and the courtship of Harcourt and Alithea.
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 to Horner a letter of praise.
Themes and analysis
The dynamics of marriage