William Wycherly
William Wycherley (c. 1640 – January 1, 1716) was an English dramatist of the Restoration period.
Life
William Wycherly was born at Clive, in England, near the county of Shrewsbury, where his family was settled on a moderate estate of about £600 a year. Like Vanbrugh, Wycherley spent his early years in France, where he was sent, at fifteen, to be educated in the heart of the precious circle of Madame de Montausier, formerly Madame de Rambouillet, on the banks of the Charente. Wycherley was though by many, including his friend, Major Pack, to have improved in culture and taste from such an education, where Wycherly became ever fond of nature and all of its wonders. Athough the harmless affectations of the circle of Madame de Montausier, are not chargeable with the refinements of Wycherley's comedies, they seem to have been much more potent in regard to the refinements of Wycherley's religion. His time and association in this circle is said to have a great affect on his life and career in general.
After his time in France, he returned to England shortly before the restoration of King Charles II, and lived at Queen's College, Oxford where Thomas Barlow was provost. Under Barlow's influence, Wycherley returned to the Church of England, from which he had previously strayed. Wycherley only lived (according to Wood) in the provost's lodgings, being entered in the public library under the title of "Philosophiae Studiosus" in July 1660. There is no evidence, however, to suggest that Wycherly too classes of any kind of even worked towards a degree during his time at Oxford.
During this time, Wycherly turned his back on Roman Catholicism once more, which many, including Macaulay hinted that this had something to do with the patronage and unwonted liberality of the future James II. As a professional fine gentleman, at a period when, as the genial Major Pack says, "the amours of Britain would furnish as diverting memoirs, if well related, as those of France published by Rabutin, or those of Nero's court writ by Petronius", Wycherley became somewhat of a loose cannon in such a society, as he felt constrined by such extremities. However, his nickname of "Manly Wycherley" seems to have been earned by his straightforward attitude to life.
After he left Oxford, he took up residence at the Inner Temple, where he had been entered in 1659. Although his family intended him for law, Wycherley gave little attention to the study and practice of law. It was obvious from early on that his only interests were the stage, and the pleasure that he endured from writing and wathcing plays being performed.
In his younger years, Wycherly also spent time in the service, as a naval officer, though little is known about the specifics of his experience there. Whether Wycherley's experiences as a naval officer, which he alludes to in his lines "On a Sea Fight which the Author was in betwixt the English and the Dutch", occurred before or after the production of Love in a Wood is a point upon which opinions differ, but probably took place not only after the production of Love in a Wood but after the production of The Gentleman Dancing Master, in 1673. Macaulay claims that he went to sea simply because it was the polite thing to do so because he was a gentleman. In the epilogue to The Gentleman Dancing Master, his second play, Wycherly writes, "all gentlemen must pack to sea", further continuing this theory of his reasoning behind his service.
Wycherley's efforts to bring to Buckingham's notice the case of Samuel Butler shows that the writer of even such heartless plays as The Country Wife may have generous impulses, while his defence of Buckingham, when the duke in his turn fell into trouble, show that the inventor of so shameless a fraud as that which forms the pivot of The Plain Dealer may in actual life possess that passion for fair play which is believed to be a specially English quality. But among the "ninety-nine" religions with which Voltaire accredited England there is one whose permanency has never been shaken — the worship of gentility. To this Wycherley remained as faithful to the day of his death as Congreve himself. And, if his relations to that "other world beyond this", which the Puritans had adopted, were liable to change with his environments, it was because that "other world" was really out of fashion altogether.
It was after the success of The Plain Dealer that the turning point came in Wycherley's career. The great dream of all the men about town in Charles's time, as Wycherley's plays all show, was to marry a widow, young and handsome, a peer's daughter if possible — but in any event rich, and spend her money upon wine and women. While talking to a friend in a bookseller's shop at Tunbridge, Wycherley heard The Plain Dealer asked for by a lady who, in the person of the countess of Drogheda (Letitia Isabella Robartes, eldest daughter of the 1st Earl of Radnor and widow of the 2nd Earl of Drogheda), answered all the requirements. An introduction ensued, then love-making, then marriage — a secret marriage, probably in 1680, for, fearing to lose the king's patronage and the income therefrom, Wycherley still thought it politic to pass as a bachelor.
He had not seen enough of life to learn that in the long run nothing is politic but "straightforwardness". Whether because his countenance wore a pensive and subdued expression, suggestive of a poet who had married a dowager countess and awakened to the situation, or whether because treacherous confidants divulged his secret, does not appear, but the news of his marriage oozed out — it reached the royal ears, and deeply wounded the father anxious about the education of his son. Wycherley lost the appointment that was so nearly within his grasp — lost indeed the royal favour for ever. He never had an opportunity of regaining it, for the countess seems to have really loved him, and Love in a Wood had proclaimed the writer to be the kind of husband whose virtue prospers best when closely guarded at the domestic hearth. Wherever he went the countess followed trim, and when she did allow him to meet his boon companions it was in a tavern in Bow Street opposite to his own house, and even there under certain protective conditions. In summer or in winter he was obliged to sit with the window open and the blinds up, so that his wife might see that the party included no member of a sex for which her husband's plays had advertised his partiality.
She died, however, in the year after her marriage and left him the whole of her fortune. But the title to the property was disputed; the costs of the litigation were heavy — so heavy that his father was unable (or else he was unwilling) to come to his aid; and the result of his marrying the rich, beautiful and titled widow was that the poet was thrown into the Fleet prison. There he remained for seven years, being finally released by the liberality of James II. James had been so much gratified by seeing The Plain Dealer acted that, finding a parallel between Manly's "manliness" and his own, such as no spectator had before discovered, he paid off Wycherley's execution creditor and settled on him a pension of £200 a year.
Other debts still troubled Wycherley, however, and he never was released from his embarrassments, not even after succeeding to a life estate in the family property. In coming to Wycherley's death, we come to the worst allegation that has ever been made against him as a man and as a gentleman. At the age of seventy-five he married a young girl, and is said to have done so in order to spite his nephew, the next in succession, knowing that he himself must shortly die and that the jointure would impoverish the estate.
Works
His first play, Love in a Wood, was produced early in 1671 at the Theatre Royal in London's Drury Lane. It was published the next year, with Wycherley insisting to many, until he was finally believed, that he wrote it the year before he went to Oxford. This would mean that Wycherly wrote such a play at the tender age of nineteen, which many believe to be inconcieveable. However, due to Wycherly's persistent boasting, many have reconsidered such a possibility. Wycherley's boast of having written such scenes as a nineteen-year-old is probably untrue. Such a debate has continued from the time of Wycherly, with him fighting for his word himself, to more recent times as well. Some factual evidence that he did not write it when he was nineteen solely remains in the historical details of the play. Macaulay points to many of these anachronisms, such as the allusions in the play to gentlemen's periwigs, to guineas, to the vests which Charles ordered to be worn at court, to the Great Fire of London, etc, as showing that the comedy could not have been written the year before the author went to Oxford. However, many argue that even if the play had been written in that year, and delayed in its production till 1672, it is exactly this kind of allusion to recent events which any dramatist with an eye to freshness of colour would be certain to weave into his dialogue. The debate is still alive, and it may never be known when he wrote the play with any certainty, but what is known is the authenciticity of the authorship of Wycherly.
Regardless of the timing behind the play, many consider a speech in this play, being Wycherly's first, to be one of the finest written pieces of his work. It appears in a speech in the third scene of the third act of this very play, where the vain, foolish and boastful rake Dapperwit, having taken his friend to see his mistress for the express purpose of advertising his lordship over her, is coolly denied by her and insolently repulsed. "I think", says Dapperwit, "women take inconstancy from me worse than from any man breathing."
This second comedy was published in 1673, but was probably acted late in 1671. In The Gentleman Dancing Master, the mingling of discordant elements destroys a play that would never in any circumstances have been strong.
— comedies which caused even his great admirer Voltaire to say afterwards of them, "Il semble que les Anglais prennent trop de liberté et que les Françaises n'en prennent pas assez" (It seems that the English take too much liberty and the French don't take enough)
Works
It is, however, on his two last comedies — The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer — that Wycherley's fame rests. The Country Wife, produced in 1672 or 1673 and published in 1675, is full of wit, ingenuity, high spirits and conventional humour.
Wycherley wrote verses, and, when quite an old man, prepared them for the press by the aid of Alexander Pope, then not much more than a boy. But, notwithstanding all Pope's tinkering, they remain contemptible. Pope's published correspondence with the dramatist was probably edited by him with a view to giving an impression of his own precocity. The friendship between the two cooled, according to Pope's account, because Wycherley took offence at the numerous corrections on his verses. It seems more likely that Wycherley discovered that Pope, while still professing friendship and admiration, satirized his friend in the Essay on Criticism. Wycherley died on the 1st of January 1716, and was buried in the vault of the church in Covent Garden.
William Wycherly may have coined the expression "nincompoop" in one of his plays. The Oxford-English dictionary also cites Wycherly as the first user of the phrase "happy-go-lucky" in 1672.
The Country Wife
The Country Wife is a Restoration comedy written in 1675 by William Wycherley. 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. Even its title contains a lewd pun. 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 in order 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 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.[1] 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.
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 schematized 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 organizing principle and the turning-points of the action. The trick, to pretend impotence in order 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 mounts a campaign for seducing as many respectable ladies as possible and 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, in order to convince married men that he can safely be allowed to socialize 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 great success, and 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 hair-raising 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 School For Husbands (1661) and School For Wives (1662). Pinchwife is a middle-aged man who has married an ignorant country girl in the hope that she will not know to cuckold him. However, Horner teaches her, and Margery cuts a swathe 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 a lot of 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, Horner's friend Harcourt wins the hand of Pinchwife's sister Alithea, who is when the play opens engaged to the foppish 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.
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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
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