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. 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.
About The Country Wife in brief
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. It is based on several plays by Molière, with added features that 1670s London audiences demanded: colloquial prose dialogue. 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. 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. 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 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. Audiences were fascinated to see real women reverse the Elizabethan cross-dressing and appear in tight-fitting male outfits in the popular breeches roles, to even outdo the repartee and entendre.
Charles II was extremely fond of him upon account of his wit, 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 Wychersley. The play is more neatly constructed than most Restoration comedies, but typical of its time in having three wives and having all three in a boy’s outfit. It has also been suggested that he used the all three women on display to emphasise in an almost voyeuristic way the immodest knowingness of the immobile innocence of the women as well as the voyeurism of the men. It’s also suggested that Mr. Pinch has been suggesting that he has been a man in a girl’s outfit in all three of his comedies and having Mr Pinch disguise his wife in a man’s outfit, and having the three wives in separate roles. The title itself contains a lewd pun with regard to the first syllable of ‘country’ ; The play was controversial for its sexual explicitness even in its own time. The scandalous trick and the frank language have for much of the play’s history kept it off the stage and out of print, and has been kept out of view for more than 100 years. It was written to celebrate a lifestyle of sensual intrigue and conquest, especially conquest that served to humiliate the husbands of the London middle classes.
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This page is based on the article The Country Wife published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 16, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
