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| The Country Wife | |
|---|---|
 The first edition ofThe Country Wife | |
| 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 aRestoration comedy written byWilliam Wycherley and first performed in 1675. A product of the tolerant earlyRestoration period, the play reflects anaristocratic 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 byMolière, with added features that 1670s London audiences demanded:colloquialprosedialogue in place of Molière'sverse, a complicated, fast-paced plot tangle, and many sex jokes.
It turns on two indelicate plot devices: arake's trick of pretendingimpotence 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 whilst "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 byDavid Garrick's cleaned-up and bland versionThe Country Girl, now a forgotten curiosity.[1] The original play is again a stage favourite today, and is also acclaimed byacademic critics, who praise its linguistic energy, sharp social satire, and openness to different interpretations.
After the 18-yearPuritan stage ban was lifted at theRestoration of the monarchy in 1660, the theatrical life of London recreated itself quickly and abundantly. During the reign ofCharles II (1660–1685), playwrights such asJohn Dryden,George Etherege,Aphra Behn, and William Wycherley wrote comedies that triumphantly reassert aristocratic dominance and prestige after the years of middle class power duringOliver Cromwell'sCommonwealth.[2]
Reflecting the atmosphere of theCourt, 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 byroyalists under Cromwell. Charles' personal interest in the stage nourished Restoration drama, and his most favouredcourtiers were poets, playwrights, and men of wit, such asJohn Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, and William Wycherley.[3]
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 themistresses of Charles, who "was extremely fond of him upon account of his wit".[4] In 1675, at age 35, he created a sensation withThe 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, particularlyMolière. In contrast to the French, English audiences of the 1670s had no enthusiasm for structurally simple comedies or for theneoclassicalunities 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 fromfarce throughparadox 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 thecross-dressing of the Elizabethan boy actors and appear in tight-fitting male outfits in the popularbreeches roles, and to hear them match or even outdo therake heroes inrepartee anddouble entendre. Charles' choice of actresses as mistresses, notablyNell Gwyn, helped keep the interest fresh, and Wycherley plays on this interest inThe 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 almostvoyeuristic way Margery's provocative innocence, as well as the immodest knowingness of "town" wives like Lady Fidget.[5]
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'simpotence trick, the married life of Pinchwife and Margery, and the courtship of Harcourt and Alithea.[6]
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 classicRoman comedyEunuchus byTerence. The upper-class town rake Harry Horner begins a campaign to seduce as many respectable ladies as possible, thuscuckolding 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 ofThe 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 finaltrickster 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 onMolière'sThe School for Husbands (1661) andThe 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 Londonupper-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 theSchool For Wives and Wycherley inThe 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'spathological 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 shallowfop 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.
Notorious scenes in the play include "the china scene", a sustaineddouble entendredialogue 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.
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.[7]
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".[8]
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".[9]
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".[9]
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".[9] 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".[9] Horner's true power is not in relationship to the women, but to the men. He shows his dominance over the men he cuckolds.
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."[10]
The Country Wife was first performed in January 1675, by the King's Company, at theTheatre Royal, Drury Lane.[11][a] This luxurious playhouse, designed byChristopher Wren, had opened less than a year before and provided a more modern stage to accommodate innovations inscenic design, while still allowing a close connection between actors and the audience.[13]
The original cast was listed in the first edition ofThe Country Wife, as was standard practice, and modern scholars have suggested that this information throws light on Wycherley's intentions.[14] 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, notablyJoseph 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.
Pinchwife was played by the elderlyMichael Mohun, who was best known for playing menacing villains, such asVolpone andIago. Mrs. Pinchwife wasElizabeth Boutell or Bowtel, a young actress who had "a childish look. Her voice was weak, tho' very mellow; she generally acted theyoung innocent lady whom all the heroes are mad in love with".[15] Boutell's previous recorded roles had in fact all been unmarried as well as innocent girls, and Margery was her first married role.[16]
Matching Boutell and Mohun as a couple would emphasise "her youth and innocence against Mohun's age and violence".[17] The other husband to becuckolded by Horner, Sir Jaspar Fidget, was played by another elderly actor,William Cartwright, best known for comic parts such asFalstaff. This casting suggests that Sir Jaspar was played as a straightforwardly comic part, while Pinchwife would be "alarming as well as funny".[17]
The male leads Horner and Harcourt were played by the contrasted actorsCharles Hart andEdward Kynaston (or Kenaston). The forcefully masculine 45-year-old Hart "was celebrated for superman roles, notably the arrogant, bloodthirsty Almanzor inJohn Dryden'sConquest of Granada", and also for playing rakish comedy heroes with nonchalance and charisma.[18] Many critics credit the personalities and skills of Hart andNell Gwyn with creating, as much as any playwright did, the famous flirting/bantering Restoration comedy couple. The beautifulandrogynous Kynaston, probably in his early thirties, was a different kind of hero. He had started his career in 1660 as the outstanding Restoration female impersonator[19] – "the prettiest woman in the whole house"[20] – before real women entered the profession in the fall of 1660. The 2004 movieStage Beauty is loosely based on Kynaston's career.
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.[21] 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 dynamicElizabeth Knepp, whoSamuel 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.
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 inThe 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 seeThe 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."[22]
Writing himself intoThe Plain Dealer as the "beastly author" of the china scene, Wycherley seems more amused than repentant.The Country Wife did in fact survive the complaints to become a dependablerepertory play from 1675 till the mid-1740s, but by then public taste had changed too much to put up with the sex jokes any longer. Its last eighteenth century performance was on 7 November 1753, followed by a hiatus of 171 years, until the successful Phoenix Society production in 1924 at the Regent Theatre in London. The first-ever American performance of Wycherley's originalCountry Wife took place in 1931. Wycherley's play is now again a stage classic, with countless professional and amateur performances, an actors' favourite because of the high number of good parts it offers.
The bawdy elements ofThe Country Wife inspired multiple adaptations tobowdlerise it. The first was byJohn Lee, whose 1765 revision eliminated the Horner character and cut the play from five acts to two in an attempt to make it "inoffensively humorous".[23] A more successful adaptation was made the following year byDavid Garrick. He retained the five-act structure, but renamed the characters and called itThe Country Girl. Peggy, the renamed Margery, is a virginal country girl who wants to marry against the wishes of her guardian, Jack Moody, the reimagining of Pinchwife.[23]
In this cleaned-up form,The Country Wife continued a shadowy existence into the twentieth century, as Garrick's version was very popular, going through at least twenty editions and reaching the New York stage in 1794. The few modern critics who have read Garrick's version typically dismiss it as "sentimental and boring, whereThe Country Wife is astringent and provocative".[1]
She Shall Have Music, a 1959musical comedy, mixedThe Country Wife with other Restoration comedies such asThe School for Scandal andLove for Love. It debutedOff-Broadway on 22 January 1959.[24]
In 1977, the BBC'sPlay of the Month broadcast a production ofThe Country Wife withAnthony Andrews as Horner,Helen Mirren as Margery andBernard Cribbins as Pinchwife; it was later released on DVD.[25]
The 1975 filmShampoo, withWarren Beatty as the Horner character, is a somewhat distant version ofThe Country Wife after exactly 300 years, reportedly inspired by theChichester Festival production of 1969.[26]
In 1992,The Country Wife was adapted into a musical calledLust. Written by theHeather Brothers, it was first performed at theQueens Theatre in Hornchurch in the London Borough of Havering in 1992. It later transferred to theTheatre Royal Haymarket in London's West End, starringDenis Lawson as Horner. Lawson travelled with the production to New York for anOff-Broadway run at the John Houseman Theatre in 1995.[27]
On 13 April 2008, an adaptation was broadcast onBBC 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 andJonathan Keeble as Harcourt.[28]
From its creation until the mid-20th century,The Country Wife was subject to both aesthetic praise and moral outrage.[29] Many critics through the centuries have acknowledged its linguistic energy and wit, including even Victorians such asLeigh Hunt, who praised its literary quality in a selection of Restoration plays that he published in 1840,[30] itself a daring undertaking, for reputedly "obscene" plays that had been long out of print.
In an influential review of Hunt's edition,Thomas Babington Macaulay swept aside questions of literary merit, claiming with indignation that "Wycherley's indecency is protected against the critics as a skunk is protected against the hunters. It is safe, because it is too filthy to handle and too noisome even to approach." Margery Pinchwife, regarded in Wycherley's own time as a purely comic character, was denounced by Macaulay as a scarlet woman who threw herself into "a licentious intrigue of the lowest and least sentimental kind".
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 approachThe 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.[31]
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 ofRose 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 ofThe Country Wife, but its "notorious resistance to interpretation"[32] is having an invigorating rather than damping effect on academic interest. The play's ideological dimension has been emphasised recently[when?]. It was written by a courtier for a courtly andaristocratic audience, and Douglas Canfield has pointed to an unusual complication for a courtly play.
Horner's acts ofcuckolding aggression are directed not only at disrupting middle-class families of "the City", in the usual way of the aristocraticRestoration rake, but also at his own, upper, class, the inhabitants of "the Town" – the new and fashionable quarters (the future West End) that had sprung up west of the medieval City walls after theGreat Fire of London in 1666. The courtier code proposed by Wycherley is of a sexual game.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued inBetween Men that the game is played not between men and women, but between men by means of women, who are merely the "conduits" ofhomosocial desire between men.[33] The hierarchy of wits meant that the wittiest and most virile man would win at the game.[34] Thus Horner, as Canfield puts it, "represents not just class superiority, but that subset of class represented by the Town wits, a privileged minority that ... is the jet set identified with the Town and the Court as the loci of real power in the kingdom."[35]
The aggressive attack mounted in the china scene against the class and the generation by which Wycherley waspatronised with the expectation that he would defend it (against Sir Jaspar Fidget and Lady Fidget), suggests Canfield, would only let an audience of that class laugh comfortably if Horner were punished by actual impotence in the end, which he is not. "When the play concludes with no poetical justice that makes Horner really impotent", writes Canfield, "leaving him instead potent and still on the make, the audience laughs at its own expense: the women of quality nervously because they have been misogynistically slandered; the men of quality nervously because at some level they recognize that class solidarity is just a pleasing fiction."[36]
The Country Wife public domain audiobook atLibriVox