The Country Wife
By William Wycherley.
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Introduction
The Country Wife was written, according to its author’s own statement, about the year 1671 or 1672. Its production upon the stage was subsequent to that of The Gentleman Dancing-Master, to which allusion is made in the prologue, and antecedent to that of the earlier-written Plain Dealer, in the second act of which the author inserted some critical observations upon The Country Wife. The first performance of The Plain Dealer, as will afterwards appear, admits not of a later date than that of March, or the very beginning of April, 1674; it follows then that The Country Wife was brought forward some time between the early spring of 1672 and that of 1674. It was acted by the King’s Company, established during these two years at the theatre in Portugal Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and was published in the year 1675.
If we can overlook the immorality which, in this play, is more offensive and pronounced than in any of Wycherley’s other dramas, we shall find in The Country Wife a brilliantly written and skilfully constructed comedy, superior to either of the preceding dramas from the same pen, and surpassed, among comedies of the Restoration, only by its author’s own masterpiece, The Plain Dealer. The plot of The Country Wife is partly based upon two comedies by Molière—L’Ecole des Femmes and L’Ecole des Maris. From the former of these Wycherley derived his conception of the jealous man who keeps under close restraint a young and ignorant woman, with the vain hope of thereby securing her fidelity to him. Agnes’s innocent confessions to Arnolphe of her lover’s stratagems and her own esteem for him find a counterpart in the Country Wife’s frankness on a similar occasion, but beyond these points of coincidence there is little resemblance between the two plays. From L’Ecole des Maris, again, Wycherley has borrowed one or two incidents: the imprisoned girl’s device of making her would-be husband (in the English play, her actual husband) the bearer of a letter to her gallant, and the trick by which Isabella causes her tyrant, under the impression that she is another woman, to consign her with his own hands to his rival.
Steele has published, in the Tatler of April 16, 1709, a very just criticism upon this play, which, as it cannot fail to interest the reader, I venture to subjoin.
“Will’s Coffeehouse, April 14.
“This evening the Comedy, called The Country Wife, was acted in Drury Lane, for the benefit of Mrs. Bignell. The part which gives name to the Play was performed by herself. Through the whole action she made a very pretty figure, and exactly entered into the nature of the part. Her husband, in the Drama, is represented to be one of those debauchees who run through the vices of the town, and believe, when they think fit, they can marry and settle at their ease. His own knowledge of the iniquity of the age makes him choose a wife wholly ignorant of it, and place his security in her want of skill to abuse him. The Poet, on many occasions, where the propriety of the character will admit of it, insinuates that there is no defence against vice but the contempt of it: and has, in the natural ideas of an untainted innocent, shown the gradual steps to ruin and destruction which persons of condition run into, without the help of a good education to form their conduct. The torment of a jealous coxcomb, which arises from his own false maxims, and the aggravation of his pain by the very words in which he sees her innocence, makes a very pleasant and instructive satire. The character of Horner, and the design of it, is a good representation of the age in which that Comedy was written: at which time love and wenching were the business of life, and the gallant manner of pursuing women was the best recommendation at Court. To this only it is to be imputed that a Gentleman of Mr. Wycherley’s character and sense condescends to represent the insults done to the honour of the bed without just reproof; but to have drawn a man of probity with regard to such considerations had been a monster, and a Poet had at that time discovered his want of knowing the manners of the Court he lived in, by a virtuous character in his fine gentleman, as he would show his ignorance by drawing a vicious one to please
