William Wycherley, The Country Wife – Flashcards

- Dor. "A Mistress should be like a little Country retreat near the Town, not to dwell in constantly, but only for a night and away; to taste the Town the better when a Man returns" - Alithea: "I have no obligation to you." Har. "My love!" - Har. "Damn'd sensless, impudent, virtuous Jade; well since she won't let me have her, she'll do as good, she'l make me hate her." - Lad. "poor Gentleman, cou'd you be so generous? So truly a Man of honour, as for the sakes of us Women of Honour, to cause yourself to be reported no Man? No Man! And to suffer yourself the greatest shame that cou'd fall upon a Man?" - "Cuckolds and bastards, are generally makers of their own fortune." - Har. "Have women only constancy when 'tis a vice, and like fortune only true to fools?" - Alth. "He only that could suspect my virtue, shou'd have cause to do it; 'tis Sparkish's confidence in my truth, that obliges me to be so faithful to him." -Mrs P to horn. "he's a proper, goodly strong man, 'tis hard, let me tell you, to resist him." -Mr P. "why should women have more invention in love than men? It can only be, because they have more desires, more soliciting passions, more lust, and more of the devil." -Mr P. "Write as I bid you, or I will write ***** with this Penknife in your Face." -Horn. "Oh women, more impertinent, more cunning, and more mischievous than their Monkey's." -35. Lady Fidget's song. - "our virtue is like the State-man's Religion, the Quakers Word, the Gamesters Oath, and the Great Man's Honour, but to cheat those that trust us." - "For I assure you, women are least mask'd, when they have the Velvet Vizard on" (Prostitute) - All the ladies think Horner lied just for them. -Spark. "What drawn upon your Wife? You shou'd never do that but at night in the dark when you can't hurt her." - "Our Sisters and Daughters like Usurers money, are safest, when put out; but our Wifes, like their writings [legal documents relating to property], never safe, but in our Closets under Lock and key." -Lucy. "And any wild thing grows but the more fierce and hungry for being kept up, and more dangerous to the keeper." Alithea: "There's doctrine for all husbands, Mr Harcourt." - A Dance of Cuckolds - very mocking. Mr Pinch. "I will not be a Cuckold Sir, I will not" - "tis as hard to find an old Whoremaster without jealousy and the gout, as a young one without fear or the Pox". -last lines: "But he who aimes by women to be priz'd/ First by the men you see must be despis'd." -Epilogue, Mrs Knep. Last line - "we Women, 'there's no cous'ning us!"

- "Where do we dine": Chateline's, Cock, Do, Partridy - lists real taverns in real parts of London. - Mulberry Garden, St. James' Park, New Exchange (scene 2 setting). - "you Country Gentlemen rather than not purchase, will buy anything" - "Why, I have marry'd no London Wife" - Hor. "Come, come, I have know a clap gotten Wales, and there are cozens, Justices, Clarks and Chaplains in the Country" - Mr P. "you must love me only, and not be like the naughty Town Women, who only hate their Husbands and love every man else, love Plays, Visits, fine Coaches, fine Cloaths, Fiddles, Balls, Treates, and so lead a wicked Town-life. - Sparkish: "Why, d'ye think I'll seem to be jealous, like a Country Bumpkin" - Lucy. "The Country is as terrible I find to our young English Ladies, as a Monastry to those abroad." -Mrs P. "I have got the London disease, they call love." - Sparkish to Mrs P. "I see every day at London here, women leave their first Husbands."

- Blames a French surgeon. - "he's but too much of a French fellow, such as hate Women of quality and virtue, for their love to their husbands" (109) -Mr Pin. "I'm sure when I left the house he was the lewdest fellow in't." Quack. "I tell you sir he has been in France since." (445) - "he an errant French Capon." (Castrated cock)

- "The Orange Wenches at the Play-houses" - Dor. Horner's appearance at the play. "With a most Theatrical impudence; nay more than the Orange-wenches show there, or a drunken vizard Mask, or a great belly'd Actress; nay, or the most impudent of Creatures, an ill Poet; or what is yet more impudent, a second-hand Critick" - Pin. "How the Divel, did he see my Wife then? I sate there that she might not be seen; but she shall never go to a play again." (570) - Spark. "if I sate in the Box, I shou'd be thought no Judge, but of trimmings." - "Pshaw, a Mask makes People but the more Inquisitive, and is as ridiculous a disguise, as a stage-beard; her shape, stature, habit will be known." - Spark. "the reason why we are so often lowder than the Players, is, because we think we speak more wit, and so become the Poet's Rivals in his audience." -500. Mrs P's disguise totally fails. Parody of Renaissance practice.

- Mrs P. "Lord, what a power of brave signs are here! Stay - the Bull's-head, the Rams-head, and the Stags-head" - Mr P. "Nay, if every Husband's proper sign here were visible, they wou'd be all alike" (proper sign = the horns of a cuckold) - Sparkish of the ladies - "they hapned to talk of the fine new signes in Town." (365) - "Enter Mistress Pinchwife in Man cloaths, running with her hat under her arm, full of Oranges and dried fruit, Horner following." (650) - Mr P. "You have only squeez'd my Orange, I suppose." -Fidget. "you must promise to have a care of my dear Honour." -230. The piece of China, symbolic. -Insult. "Alas she has an innocent, literal understanding." -Lucy of Sparkish. "He has been a great bubble [dupe] by his similes as they say" (10)

- "your Bigots in Honour, are just like those in Religion; they fear the eye of the world, more than the eye of heaven."

- Popular at the time, but was considered too rude to be performed later. - One way of seeing the play - entirely resistant to political messages etc.

- The spirit of restoration is more... free. Link with new direction of English culture. - Dryden H.O - break from typical English reserve. Loosening up of the language on stage. Therefore, we have the libertine. Horner and Wilmor (of the Rover) - All modelled on John Wilmot - Earl of Rochester. Freeness and excess. 2nd Earl. No nobility of father who fought in the war. Rochester is a close friend of Wycherley. - Wycherley's work is not merely obscene - gives an accurate depiction of the libertine culture. - Country Wife, according to lecturer, is a "peculiarly joyless world." Weakness. Humiliation. Little about pleasure. All about sex, but characters don't take any pleasure in it. Wycherley - "upon the impertinence of knowledge." Mentions pleasure to highlight its absence. Suggests jaded view of Libertinism. - Move from embracing Charles' sexuality to unease about it. Dryden poem - "love f*cking much." Milton's Adam & Eve - evil sex and holy sex. Libertines. Theatrical. Essentially, the culture of libertinism is up for debate at time. - Horner enables everyone to be themselves/free. Whereas Pinchwife gives no respect, and restricts. Misogynistic, but in rescuing Libertine reputation in this way, gives power and agency to the ladies - they want the sex too. Female lust being a big theme. - Note sexual violence is associated with Pinchwife, not Horner. - Scene with the Pinchwifes in bedchamber, v. violent. Reputation of Libertine's based on violence towards women - the play saves this view. - Husbands making themselves cuckolds - women are naturally contrary. - The cuckold: In early modern society is a very shameful position. Pinchwife will do anything to stop it. 5.4 Dance of Cuckolds is quite sadistic. - Identity becomes dependent on a woman and her loyalty.

- Note the association of actors with other roles - Mrs Pinchwife was Cleopatra, Horner was Antony. - Lack of understanding of life around her - Pinchwife v. naïve. Sort of a reversal, then? - Play referring to the theatre. Mrs Pinchwife. Theatre associated with sexual assignation. - H.O 14. How to behave in a theatre (satirical). All about sex and prostitution - no interest in the play itself. Links between the way prostitution operates with sex in Country Wife.

World of play is world of its audience. Play refers repeatedly to geography - London. Shops and eating places. Refers to theatre. Margery is the only person in entire building excluded from this in-talk. This is "made more piquant by previous roles of actress." Town and country: knowledge of city space suggests that you're not innocent.

- Viewer alienated from language. Meaning has been leeched. Words have lots of meaning and can't be trusted. - Language relating to sex - links to food. Sparkish. - Sex also like purchase of a horse. Characters object to this simile. Horner makes it more offensive by unpacking the simile. - The world depends on not calling things by their proper names. Constant danger of openness in the Country Wife. - Signs are a big motif. (Important feature of Early modern London.) Innuendo, literal and figurative. - Instability of language - Lady Fidget, using the word "honour" to justify adultery. Meaning of the word changes multiple times. - "kindness" to signify adultery. - Misuse of words can be both comic and disturbing. - "Coyness is the sign of a kind woman" - Oranges are a recurring motif.

"The Country Wife is more neatly constructed than most Restoration comedies, but is typical of its time and place in having three sources and three plots. The separate plots are interlinked but distinct, each projecting a sharply different mood. They may be schematised as Horner's impotence trick, the married life of Pinchwife and Margery, and the courtship of Harcourt and Alithea."

"The Dynamics of Marriage People marry for the sake of outward appearances, for example Alithea feels that she has no choice but to marry Sparkish because her status in society expects her to. Wives are treated as property as made evident by Pinchwife who locks Margery in her room and forbids her from speaking to men. Sir Jasper's marriage to Lady Fidget is beneficial to his business; therefore he treats her as his asset. He constantly asks Horner to "watch" her so that she will have no opportunity to make a cuckold out of him. Furthermore, there is a struggle for dominance between men and women. As Pinchwife says, '"If we do not cheat women, they'll cheat us" is the very basis for the chief plot of the play, "which centers upon the exchange of positions of dominance within his own family." Pinchwife decides to marry a country woman in the hopes that she will not be clever enough to know how to cheat, but his extremes in preventing her exposure to men leads to his downfall. Only the women are expected to remain faithful to their husbands. As a result, Lady Fidget "uses sex as a means of revenge against their husbands and achieve a kind of moral victory over them by making them what they most fear to be - cuckolds." Horner's Position of Power Initially, Horner is confident that he can seek out the married women who are willing to have affairs because they are the ones who do not care about their honor. Horner seems to believe he is in a position of power over the women because their extramarital affair is with him, but his power wanes during the duration of the play. In Act 5, Scene 4, Lady Fidget, Dainty Fidget, and Mistress Squeamish barge into Horner's lodgings despite his protest, conveying "his lower position that alludes to his disguise: a lowly eunuch." They talk about him as if he was not present, referring to him as a 'beast,' 'toad,' and eunuch. Cohen says, "As the ladies grow in aggressive self-confidence, Lady Fidget also 'claps him on the back' thereby revealing the altered socio-sexual roles that are now presented." While Horner thinks he is manipulating the women, he has "exhausted his sexual resources and has, in reality, become that impotent and useless object with the world publicly recognizes him to be." Horner's true power is not in relationship to the women, but to the men. He shows his dominance over the men he cuckolds."

"The male leads Horner and Harcourt were played by the contrasted actors Charles Hart and Edward Kynaston (or Kenaston). The forcefully masculine 45-year-old Hart "was celebrated for superman roles, notably the arrogant, bloodthirsty Almanzor inJohn Dryden's Conquest of Granada", and also for playing rakish comedy heroes with nonchalance and charisma. Many critics credit the personalities and skills of Hart and Nell Gwyn with creating, as much as any playwright did, the famous flirting/bantering Restoration comedy couple. The beautiful androgynous Kynaston, probably in his early thirties, was a different kind of hero. He had started his career in 1660 as the outstanding Restoration female impersonator —"the prettiest woman in the whole house" —before real women entered the profession in the fall of 1660. (The 2004 movie Stage Beauty is loosely based on Kynaston's career.) John Harold Wilson argues that the famously virile stage presence of Hart as Horner must be taken into account when interpreting the play. As personified by Hart, Horner will have won women not so much through clever trickery as "the old-fashioned way", by being "dangerously attractive", and it is only fools like Sir Jaspar Fidget who really believe him harmless. Harcourt/Kynaston, although by 1675 a well-regarded and skilful actor of male roles, would clearly have been overshadowed by Horner/Hart. The actresses associated with each hero must also have tended to make the Horner plot more striking on the stage than the true-love plot. Horner's primary mistress Lady Fidget, spokeswoman for "the virtuous gang" of secretly sex-hungry town wives, was played by the dynamic Elizabeth Knepp, who Samuel Pepys declared "the most excellent, mad-humoured thing, and sings the noblest I've ever heard", talents that the famous drinking scene in Horner's lodging seems designed to do justice to. By contrast, the choice of the bit-part actress Elizabeth James as Alithea would have de-emphasised the Harcourt-Alithea plot. Such historical considerations have made modern critics sceptical of Norman Holland's classic 1959 "right way/wrong way" interpretation of the play, which positions the true-love plot as the most important one."

"After the 18-year Puritan stage ban was lifted at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the theatrical life of London recreated itself quickly and abundantly. During the reign of Charles II (1660-1685), playwrights such as John Dryden, George Etherege, Aphra Behn, and William Wycherley wrote comedies that triumphantly reassert aristocratic dominance and prestige after the years of middle class power during Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth. Reflecting the atmosphere of the Court, these plays celebrate a lifestyle of sensual intrigue and conquest, especially conquest that served to humiliate the husbands of the London middle classes and to avenge, in the sensual arena, the marginalisation and exile suffered by royalists under Cromwell. Charles' personal interest in the stage nourished Restoration drama, 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 Wycherley. Wycherley had no title or wealth, but had by 1675 already recommended himself by two well-received comedies and had been admitted to the inner circle, sharing the conversation and sometimes the mistresses of Charles, who "was extremely fond of him upon account of his wit". In 1675, at age 35, he created a sensation with The Country Wife, greeted as the bawdiest and wittiest play yet seen on the English stage. Like Charles II, Wycherley had spent some Commonwealth years in France and become interested in French drama, and throughout his short playwriting career (1671-1676) he would borrow plotlines and techniques from French plays, particularly Molière. However, in contrast to the French, English audiences of the 1670s had no enthusiasm for structurally simple comedies or for the neoclassical unities of time, place, and action, but demanded fast pace, lots of complications, and above all "variety". To achieve the much denser texture and more complex plotting that pleased in London, Wycherley would combine several source plays to produce bustling action and clashing moods, ranging from farce through paradox to satire. A Restoration novelty of which Wycherley took advantage was the readiness of public opinion to accept women on stage, for the first time in British history. Audiences were fascinated to see real women reverse the cross-dressing of the Elizabethan boy actors and appear in tight-fitting male outfits in the popular breeches roles, and to hear them match or even outdo the rake heroes in repartee and double entendre. Charles' choice of actresses as mistresses, notably Nell Gwyn, helped keep the interest fresh, and Wycherley plays on this interest in The Country Wife by having Mr. Pinchwife disguise his wife (the eponymous 'country wife') in a boy's outfit. It has also been suggested that he uses the allure of women on display to emphasise in an almost voyeuristic way Margery's provocative innocence, as well as the immodest knowingness of "town" wives like Lady Fidget."

- Susan J. Owen, - "we must be careful about assuming that both plays [TCW and the Rover] are typical Restoration comedies". They belong to the "sex-comedy" sub-genre, popular in the 1670s. "Prior to that, comedy tended to be political and satirical; and this type of comedy was revived in the Exclusion crisis, 1678-83, when sex-comedy declined." So sex-comedy has only a brief hey-day. Elements of the heroic play persist in them. a) the virtuous characters (eg Florinda and Belville), and b) the rake character's "excess of words and deeds". Doesn't have the idealism, but has the same "over-inflated ego and total commitment to social and personal autonomy." "most sex comedies also endorse the values of a particular "cavalier" class, upholding the town-based, upper-class wits, at the expense of country dolts, upstarts city gentry, tradesmen, the professional classes and other outsiders." -Generic debt to past writers - Jonson's humour comedies, and Fletcher's comedies of love and wit. Behn and Wycherley owe more to Fletcher than Jonson. -Charles Hart (Horner) was previously a macho masculine hero in The Conquest of Granada. "His prologue eschewes the common effeminising analogy of poet-prostitute in favour of the 'manly' image of the playwright as cudgelled bully" but Hart's persona shifts from "huffing hero to effeminized quasi-cuckold" What type of man is Horner? Successful, effeminised and emasculated by the scheming women? - "Horner's name has a three-fold significance, suggesting a cuckold maker... a wild beast with animalistic sexuality and the horned devil." - Boasting, "normal" men, who are all about their image, are thus mocked. "in not caring about outward show", Horner can be seen as more of a man. "Yet the question remains: in a society so much concerned with appearances, can he really be manly if he has lost the reputation of manhood?" A manliness marker is wit, real wit. - "The witty cavalier has taken the place of the clever-servant" Horner also reveals hypocrisy. - Horner's plot is flawed though, as "once won, women become a burden to be shed, an obligation to be evaded." - But it's not satirical - Wycherley "writes as an insider, and the mockery is an insider's joke" - "Yet the exchanges about true and false manhood in the play have a comic provisionality". The false men, with their wit etc. aren't that different from the true men Sparkish "manifests cavalier qualities taken to their logical extreme, being over-committed to the idea of wit and to male friendship" "it says something about this society that heroic values of friendship, trust and freedom from jealousy and suspicion become foolish" - None of the men are truly good or heroic - all are mocked at points, and Horner is just as morally bad as Pinchwife Frank Harcourt, whose names suggests honesty and courtliness, is also a libertine and joins in Horner's coercive tactics. "Mistresses are like books." But unlike Horner he does grow emotionally throughout the play. - "all perspectives interrogate one another. Both love and friendship - and the pursuit of them - are treated ironically ... Wycherley is poking fun at his society .., yet he does not distance himself from them to the extent of suggesting that there is any alternative or privileged perspective." - "it is possible to see Horner as a man sensitive to women's needs, and Wycherley by implication as critical of his society's notions of sex and gender roles." But seeing Horner as "the agent of women's sexual liberation" ignores the Restoration satirical idea of women as essentially "begging for it" If Wycherley was "simply pro-women or pro-sex, lines such as Horner's to lady Fidget, "your virtue is your greatest affectation, madam" would lose their comic force. Women in charge would be neither comic or grotesque." - The women co-opt Horner's trick for their own advantage, taking control. They have power, but are presented as hypocritical and grotesque, as their very names suggest. "It is very hard to see how such hypocrisy could be presented as at all attractive." "But they are winners in the sexual game as they manipulate oppressive social codes for their own advantage and make the best of a bad world." - The China scene and looking at appearances. Horner does not have power over the women. "It is also no accident that the word [honour] sounds like his own name" - The fact that the women understand the secret meaning of "china" and Sir Jasper does not further shows "women's privileged relationship to language and communication in the play." - Horner. "The women have stolen the man's china" - "In the conventional cuckolding paradigm the woman is a pawn in a power-play between men. Here the women affirm their power to drink and make a noise, assert their sexual needs, and order Horner to tell them the secret's of men's sexual behaviour." "His eunuch pretence has shifted from empowering ploy to a trap which places him in the power of women who know the truth." It is Lucy who works out a way to get Mrs Pinchwife and Horner together, not Horner. - Margery is "somewhat ludicrous in her naivety, something of a grotesque" But she "very quickly becomes socially adept" - Pinchwife's penknife is phallic, symbolises impotency. - "that the knowing Alithea comes closer to being undone than the gullible Margery, are comments upon society" - Alithea's name derives from the greek word for truth - Lady Fidget has "redefined honour as social reputation" - "Wycherley seems primarily interested not in character but in opportunities for comic situations, and for a display of qualities through bringing together different types. He shares the Restoration prediliction for doublings and opposites" - "drink is a marker of manhood which women in this society assume for themselves" "Drink is a rival for their husbands affections, but instead of competing with it they possess it for themselves" drink "is both literally and metaphorically the key to understanding how the play's society is to be understood" - The play is about signs. "There is a disjunction between sign and substance" - The signs often "slip from their supposed signification" They aren't arbitrary though. "word play seems render everything fluid, but there is meaning, even symbolism, not complete arbitraryness." - China is "a marker of self-indulgence and the new consumerism" - Slippery signs and multiple meanings: "the instability of meaning can be linked to a new Restoration world view, whether the focus is on a revolution in language, a questioning of the dominant culture of "wit", pragmatism in philosophy, secularism in a formerly religious climate, capitalism undermining previous economic certainties, or new configurations of the gender battle." But "it is doubtful that there is any strong social critique" "Wycherley is not 'making a point'" - "Wycherley is quite scathing about his society, but too much of an insider to suggest any alternatives" - "The ending of the play seems to confirm not that truth will prevail but that society values appearances" - "The preservation of appearance is in stark contrast to Renaissance anticedents" e.g Jonson "Since there is no exposure, there can be no change or moral progress"

- Ruth Lunney - "the degree to which dramatic rhetoric in the period depended upon visual symbolism" - "the sign drew attention not to itself but to an underlying reality" Can be ironic, have multiple and alternate meanings, can be deceptive - Iconoclasm: essentially religious opposition to privileging image over the Word and signed continued "to be used in the old way as indices to the "reality" beyond, a receiver was to recognise as 'true'" - The importance of symbolic naming. -Visual meaning for audience understanding - scenes such as Tamburlaine coming in on a chariot count as signs. The chariot works as a sign, so I think it's basically symbolism, is what we're talking about. - "Renaissance culture ... invested even more heavily in visual signs than had the medieval" - "an increasing emphasis on the visual as key to making sense of reality" "The late sixteenth century was, especially, the age of the emblem". Emblem books, costume etc. - The sign becomes increasingly complicated and less transparent. - "When an image is combined with commentary, the words organise perception and response, leading to the construction of a narrative to make sense of what is seen". And vice-versa - "for the late 16th century playwright, the dramatic emblem afforded a useful means of making the audience aware of issues involved in the action" Usually have orthodox simple meanings etc, but Marlowe "adapts the device of the dramatic emblem for complex rhetorical and narrative purposes" Tamburlaine complicates idea of truth behind signs, e.g "the focus of the spectator's interest becomes the opportunism of Tamburlaine" How Marlowe revolutionises signs: "The traditional allegorical uses are included in, but now appropriated by and subordinated to, narrative and rhetorical ones. The visual sign loses some of its transparency and becomes increasingly arbitrary in nature" - In Faustus, "the role of interpreter is, in effect, handed from text to spectator" - "This recognition of the rhetorical power of signs in Tamburlaine and Faustus; and instances abound of late 16th century spectators being expected to distrust spectacle and become aware of their own spectating" -"later plays call upon the audience to do more than read through and recognise conventional meanings" go beyond the "choric and allegorical" and "shifting its emphasis from the didactic and informative to the persuasive and affective" "images of individual, non-representative experience" - "By exploiting the allegorical potential of visual signs for other, non-allegorical purposes, the dramatic emblems of Marlowe's plays broke the link for spectators between the visual sign and and traditional perspectives and values."