Program Essay for "The Country Wife"
Desperate Housewife
by Thomas Canfield
The Country Wife, William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy, was first performed in 1675. However, from 1753 to 1924, it disappeared from the English stage. The play’s unabashed portrayal of a morally-unrestrained, sex-obsessed society led one early nineteenth-century critic, Thomas Davies, to term it “the most licentious play in the English language, . . . in which there is to be found a more genuine representation of the loose manners, obscene language, and dissolute practices of Charles the Second’s reign, than in any other play whatsoever.”
Moral judgment aside, Davies is correct in asserting that the play is both a reflection and a product of its age. Under the Puritan Commonwealth, which governed from 1642-1660, legitimate English theatre was nonexistent. When Charles II, known as the “Merry Monarch,” was restored to the throne, theatre activity returned as well, albeit greatly altered from pre-revolutionary days. English theatre, having suffered an 18-year ban, had to be completely reinvented. Before the theatres closed, all professional players were male. Now, for the first time in the English theatre, actresses took the stage, as had long been the practice on the continent.
The Country Wife premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and was performed by the King’s Company. Charles II loved theatre and, seated in the royal box, he frequently attended productions there. This also may have been where he first met the legendary “Madam Gwyn.” Initially employed at the theatre as an “orange wench” or seller of fruit and confectionaries, Nell Gwyn would later achieve notoriety as the most famous Restoration comic actress, although her stage career came to a close after only seven years. At the age of 21, she retired and became one of the king’s longtime mistresses, eventually bearing him two sons. An early exit from the stage was the fate of many celebrated young actresses, so much that there was sometimes a shortage of leading ladies.
The initiation of women onto the stage also engendered a fashion for “breeches roles,” and an estimated one in four Restoration comedies included them. As the cross-dressing Margery Pinchwife demonstrates, Wycherley’s play is no exception. Viewing the female body in form-fitting, male clothing was considered an erotic novelty, and male audience members in particular relished it, including the king himself. An aura of bawdy self-indulgence permeated the entire age. The king, nurtured on the continental theatre of France during his exile, not only condoned but encouraged a libertine aura of promiscuity, both at court and in the drama of the day. In France, Molière was all the rage, and many critics have noted The Country Wife’s indebtedness to his plays The School for Husbands (1661) and The School for Wives (1662).
Deprived of theatrical fare for nearly two decades, the public had a passionate desire and enthusiasm for new entertainment. What are often labeled as the excesses of Restoration drama were, in part, a backlash against the prohibition on public theatre under the Commonwealth. Celebrating a life of sexual intrigue and conquest, the courtiers of Charles II’s inner circle were poets, playwrights and men of wit who engaged in risqué repartee and double entendre. Sumptuous, colorful silk, lace, powder and wigs in the French fashion replaced the drab, functional clothing and “roundhead” haircuts worn by the Puritans. The theatre space was intimate, and the audience was as much an object of spectacle as the performers. One reason to attend the theatre was to see and be seen; playgoers sometimes wore vizard masks to hide their identities, making the experience even more amusing. It was not unusual for audience members to sit on the stage during performances, and the orange wenches were adept at delivering messages, spreading gossip and arranging secret assignations.
A prime example of the Restoration “Comedy of Manners,” The Country Wife features several intersecting plots. In the first, the rake Harry Horner feigns impotence as the unfortunate result of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. In an age when multiple sexual conquests were a badge of honor for men, venereal disease was not uncommon. Gonorrhea and syphilis were termed the “Great Pox” or the “French disease” by the English, and the standard seventeenth-century treatment was the ingestion of mercury. Although this toxic element would alleviate the symptoms it would not cure the disease, and the side effects were highly unpleasant. This medical practice also gave rise to the popular saying, “One night with Venus, a lifetime of Mercury.”
Wycherley’s second plot involves Jack Pinchwife’s fear of cuckoldry and his “country wife,” Margery. Pinchwife, a reformed “whoremaster,” weds a woman who is ignorant of the morally-dissolute atmosphere of London in hopes of ensuring her purity and continued fidelity. Even so, Margery proves to be a quick study, affording her husband’s suspicion and jealousy a prime opportunity for comic exploitation. In popular tradition, the term “cuckold” originated from the cuckoo, a parasitic bird that lays its eggs in another bird’s nest. The husband with an adulterous wife, compared to the bird that unwittingly nurtures another’s eggs, was the source of sharp ridicule. The hapless man with an adulterous wife was portrayed as having horns on his head, a symbol of his private shame and public mockery. Sir Jasper Fidget thrusts the women under his charge, including his wife, into surprisingly capable hands, inadvertently begging to be crowned with the cuckold’s horns.
A final plot involves Master Pinchwife’s sister, Alithea. Her impending marriage to the ridiculous fop Sparkish stands in sharp contrast to the romance that blossoms between Alithea and Harcourt. Envisioning himself as a witty man about town and would-be rake, Sparkish is an object of ridicule to Horner, Harcourt and Dorilant, his ostensible coterie of gallants. In his blind lack of jealousy, Sparkish is the antithesis of his future brother-in-law, Pinchwife, and is a constant source of aggravation.
Despite a 171-year absence from the English stage and the harsh charges of immorality leveled against it, today The Country Wife is the most frequently performed Restoration comedy. Since its rediscovery in the early twentieth century, the play’s popularity demonstrates that it is not merely a window into an age when wit and eloquence were used to satisfy primitive sexual desires; Wycherley’s work is also a timeless example of high comic art that appeals to today’s sensibilities.
