You may end up being offended by The Country Wife--a number of people in the last part of the 17th century did, for instance.  In the 1698 essay "A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage," Jeremy Collier takes particular aim at Wycherley's characters, saying "I'm sorry the author should stoop his wit thus low and use his understanding so unkindly." Collier's comments show how the popular taste started to shift after the Restoration era--if the libertine Restoration was a sort of reaction against Puritan repressiveness, there was also a reaction against the libertine Restoration.

Wycherley's satire of the society of his time is sometimes savage.  The play is inhabited by a host of characters who value "reputation" but have no sense of moral value.  In the character of Horner, Wycherley creates a wonderful rake hero whose prime characteristic is his ability to manipulate social hypocrisy to his advantage.  It's important to understand Horner's plan: he's pretending to have no remaining capacity to perform sexual acts--and he circulates this story in the belief that it will serve his larger purpose, which is to "sleep" with as many women as possible.  (The euphemism for "sleeping with someone" that is used in this play is "buying china"--you'll see.)   But as you read, try to figure out how you evaluate these characters.  Do you approve of them? Are we supposed to?

There's a more conventional subplot, with a virtuous heroine (Alithea) and her more-or-less virtuous suitor (Harcourt) who is trying to woo her away from her foppish fiancée, Sparkish.  As you read the play, look at the way the contrast between the two plots influences our interpretation of each.

Wycherley was born in Shropshire in 1640. He was educated in France (where he converted to Catholicism) and at Oxford, and practiced law in London, though much of his effort went into his writing.  He wrote four successful plays; in addition to this play, they are The Plain Dealer (1676), Love in a Wood (1671) and The Gentleman Dancing-Master (1672).  This play was produced in 1675. Late in his life, he befriended the very young Alexander Pope in London. He died in 1716.

The Collier Controversy

Here's a brief excerpt from Collier's condemnation of the immorality of the Restoration stage; his description tends to suit the characters portrayed in The Country Wife.  Keep reading, and you will see some of the answers to Collier's arguments--and those answers, as well, can be said to apply to The Country Wife.

Jeremy Collier, from A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698):

I shall endeavor to prove . . . the misbehavior of the stage with respect to morality and religion. Their liberties in the following particulars are intolerable, viz., their smuttiness of expression; their swearing, profaneness, and lewd application of Scripture; their abuse of the clergy, their making of their top characters libertines and giving them success in their debauchery. . . 

To sum up the evidence. A fine gentleman is a fine whoring, swearing, smutty, atheistical man. These qualifications, it seems, complete the idea of honor. They are the top improvements of fortune and the distiguishing glories of birth and breeding! This is the stage-test for quality. . . .

Thus we see what a fine time lewd people have on the English stage. No censure, no mark of infamy, no mortification must touch them. They keep their honor untarnished and carry off the advantage of their characters. They are set up for the standard of behavior and the masters of ceremony and sense. And at last, that the example may work the better they generally make them rich and happy and reward them with their own desires.

from an anonymous pamphlet, A Vindication of the Stage (1698):

. . . if the audience will not be pleased with anything but immorality, etc., pray why have not the clergy, whose business it is to instruct the people, taught them better? . . . So that we see it is rather the clergy’s fault than the poet’s crime that our dramas are irregular on this head. And Mr. Collier has laid his argument just wrong, for if the world be good, plays would be good also; but if the world be bad, plays will be bad too.

William Congreve, Amendments of Mr. Collier’s Citations (1698):

Comedy (says Aristotle) is an imitation of the worse sort of people. . . . He does not mean the worse sort of people in respect to their quality, but in respect to their manners. . . . The vices most frequent, and which are the common practice of the looser sort of livers, are the subject matter of comedy. He tells us farther, that they must be exposed after a ridiculous manner. For men are to be laughed out of their vices in comedy; the business of comedy is to delight as well as to instruct; and as vicious people are made ashamed of their follies or faults by seeing them exposed in a ridiculous manner, so are good people at once both warned and diverted at their expense.

Cuckolds

Text of The Country Wife (in Word)

The Politics of the Restoration and 18th C.

What is satire?

The Collier Controversy

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