Wycherley The Country Wife

Full Text and Introduction (NHB Drama Classics)
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78001-680-1
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 0, 188 Seiten

Reihe: NHB Classic Plays

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price A classically bawdy Restoration Comedy, widely regarded as one of the filthiest and funniest plays ever written. The City of London in the seventeenth century. Harry Horner wants to seduce as many women as possible, but he needs to convince their husbands that he's physically incapable of any such thing. Cannily, his faux impotence also allows him to sniff out and unmask those respectably virtuous ladies who secretly ache for him. William Wycherley's The Country Wife was first performed in January 1675, by the King's Company, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

William Wycherley (1641-1716) was an English dramatist of the Restoration period, best known for the plays The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wycherley, William

Leseproben

Introduction

William Wycherley (1641-1715)

William Wycherley was baptised on 8 April 1641 at Clive, near Shrewsbury. He was educated as a gentleman and sent to France to complete his education in 1656, returning to England in 1660. He briefly attended Oxford University before entering the Inner Temple, which offered the legal equivalent of a university education. Wycherley probably accompanied the British ambassador to Spain in January 1664 and served in a naval battle, probably the battle off Harwich in 1665. His first published work was a satirical poem, Hero and Leander in Burlesque (1669), but he achieved considerable success with his first play, Love in a Wood: or, St James’s Park (1671). Its success led to an affair with the Duchess of Cleveland that gained Wycherley entry to court circles and established him as a wit alongside such figures as the Earl of Rochester and Sir Charles Sedley. Wycherley’s second, less successful, play, The Gentleman Dancing Master (1672), adapted from Calderón, was followed by what is now generally regarded as his masterpiece, The Country Wife (1675). His 1676 drama The Plain Dealer gained him the epithet ‘Manly’ after its leading character. His career was virtually ended in 1678 by a severe illness, probably encephalitis, that appears to have affected his memory and his writing skills. He wrote no more plays and many of his published poems may have been polished by the young Alexander Pope, who befriended him in the early eighteenth century.

Although the last half of Wycherley’s life was theatrically unproductive, aspects of it were themselves highly theatrical, offering proof that the world of Restoration drama was not as remote from reality as some later critics have tried to claim. In 1679 Wycherley married the Countess of Drogheda who, according to the seventeenth-century critic John Dennis, insisted that if he went to the local tavern he should always be visible from their lodgings across the road so that she could check that there were no women with him. When she died in 1681 her family made every effort to prevent him from getting hold of her estate, and the various claims and counter-claims were not settled until 1700. Wycherley fell out of favour at court as a result of his marriage and was even imprisoned for debt for several years. On his eventual release he lived quietly at Clive until his father’s death in 1697 when he returned to London. Intrigue and domestic drama re-entered his life just before his death almost twenty years later. Apparently as part of a plot to disinherit his nephew, Wycherley married a much younger woman, Elizabeth Jackson. After Wycherley’s death she married Thomas Shrimpton, who had introduced her to Wycherley in the first place and whose mistress she had been. Wycherley’s nephew subsequently alleged that he had been coerced into the marriage but lost his case. Wycherley died on New Year’s Eve, 1715.

What Happens in the Play

1  Horner is pretending to be a eunuch as a strategy to allow him free access to women. Sir Jaspar Fidget introduces his wife, Lady Fidget, and sister, Dainty, to Horner. Horner, rightly, assumes that they reject him because they like sex – which as a eunuch he is unable to provide for them. Pinchwife, unaware of Horner’s pretended status, admits he has married the young and innocent Margery, the country wife of the title.

2  Margery complains to Alithea, Pinchwife’s sister, that Pinchwife is preventing her from enjoying London. Pinchwife inadvertently lets her know that Horner had said he had fallen in love with her. Alithea, engaged to Sparkish, a would-be wit, meets Harcourt who falls in love with her and courts her in front of Sparkish. Horner explains the truth about his condition to Lady Fidget.

3  Pinchwife takes Margery out disguised as a boy but Horner goes off with her. Harcourt continues to court Alithea and Sparkish continues to misunderstand the situation.

4  Pinchwife forces Margery to write to Horner rejecting him but she substitutes her own love letter. Horner is visited by Lady Fidget and makes love to her offstage, under the guise of showing her some china, leaving Sir Jaspar onstage. Mrs Squeamish then tries to extract some china from Horner, who declares that his supplies are exhausted. Sir Jaspar assures Mrs Squeamish’s grandmother, Old Lady Squeamish, that Horner poses no danger to her chastity. Pinchwife delivers Margery’s letter to Horner and arrives home to find Margery writing to Horner again.

5  Pinchwife forces Margery to complete the love letter to Horner but she signs it ‘Alithea’ and lies that Alithea was planning to marry Horner. Pinchwife agrees to take a heavily muffled Alithea to Horner, but it is actually Margery. Pinchwife convinces Sparkish that Alithea is going to marry Horner and Sparkish repudiates Alithea.

At Horner’s, the drunken Lady Fidget, her sister Dainty Fidget and Mrs Squeamish all admit to their liaison with Horner but agree to share him. Pinchwife appears, determined to make Alithea marry Horner, believing that she has been having an affair with him. Horner cannot reveal the truth without compromising Margery, but she bursts from hiding when she thinks Pinchwife is about to attack Horner. Everything seems to be about to be revealed but the other women persuade Margery to stop claiming that Horner is sexually potent, Sir Jaspar convinces Pinchwife that he isn’t and the pretence is maintained. Harcourt and Alithea agree to marry and the play ends with a dance of cuckolds – men whose wives have been unfaithful to them.

Restoration Society and Restoration Theatre

When Charles II was invited back as king in 1660, eleven years after a republican government had executed his father, Charles I, the world had changed. The old social order had been based on a relatively static world view in which wealth and power derived from the ownership of land and where religion, rank, and social duty constituted a pyramid of interlocking social obligations, with the king at its apex. But the growth of trade and the rise of a wealthy merchant class had gradually imposed strains that ultimately led to the Civil War, the breakdown of the old absolutes and a search for a new order. The very fact that Charles I had been deposed, tried, and executed meant that the world could never be the same again.

The term ‘Restoration’ tends to be associated with a vision of the merry monarch surrounded by his courtiers, his spaniels and his bevy of mistresses, including the one-time orange-seller and actress Nell Gwynne, and a general atmosphere of libertinism. However, this grossly oversimplifies the complex interactions of a period which also saw the publication of John Milton’s epic poems, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, John Locke’s psychology, Newton’s physics and Thomas Hobbes’s political theory – all attempts to map out the terrain of a new world in which old certainties had been displaced by new doubts.

Plays had been banned in the republican period of the Commonwealth and the theatres closed down. When they reopened officially at the Restoration there were two significant departures from the past: the old large open air amphitheatres such as Shakespeare’s Globe were finally abandoned in favour of much smaller indoor theatres, and actresses were introduced for the first time to play female roles instead of the trained youths familiar from the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. The new theatres of the Restoration adopted the kinds of changeable scenery that had been introduced to the English theatre through the elaborate court masques of the early seventeenth century. The scenery was made up of shutters that moved in grooves, so that scene changes consisted of opening and closing these shutters behind the actors. In The Country Wife, for example, the painted scenery for the first act would have represented Horner’s lodgings and would have opened to reveal the next scene, Pinchwife’s lodgings. Actors entered through doors at either side of the proscenium arch, or from between the scenery shutters at the side, or, sometimes, were discovered as the shutters parted and then came forward onto the large forestage to act the scene. This meant that, although the performers still shared the same space as the audience, they were now acting against a background of pictures that in some way illustrated the play. Since the auditorium and the stage were evenly lit by candelabras throughout the performance, the audience could see themselves as well as they could see the actors. This probably added an extra dimension to the sense of theatre as a reflection of life since the stage was peopled with characters in the same kind of fashionable dress as their audience, using contemporary turns of speech, moving against a background of scenery depicting the world as it might be found outside the theatre.

Restoration Comedy: Comedy of Manners, Comedy of Humours

Restoration comedies deal almost obsessively with the sexual behaviour and moralities of a very narrow section of late seventeenth-century society, the leisured gentlefolk found in a contemporary London of chocolate houses, parks, fashionable soirées, and the theatres in which they watched themselves being staged. The ending of the ban on organised theatre, the return of monarchical rule, and the arrival of actresses encouraged a great sense of release,...