The Country Wife E-Book

William Wycherley

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

THE COUNTRYWIFE

byWilliam Wycherley

edited and introduced byTrevor R. Griffiths

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

For Further Reading

Wycherley: Key Dates

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

Act Five

Epilogue

Glossary

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

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 CountryWife, 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, which expressed itself in the form of a cynical and sophisticated Comedy of Manners.

Generally Comedies of Manners are preoccupied with showing the social behaviour of the contemporary rich and leisured class. Sometimes the plays simply reflect their society uncritically; sometimes, like The Country Wife, they are savagely critical of its manners, exploring social codes in ways that lead to a critique of society. In the English theatre the Restoration comedies inaugurated a virtually unbroken Comedy of Manners tradition through Sheridan and Goldsmith to Boucicault, Wilde, Coward, and Ayckbourn.

Like many of his contemporaries, Wycherley draws heavily on Ben Jonson’s satirical Comedy of Humours in naming his characters, giving them names that are an often ironic guide to dominant facets of their personalities. ‘Horner’, for example, suggests someone who gives cuckolds the horns that were metaphorically associated with their state. ‘Pinchwife’ indicates a man whose wife will be pinched, in the sense both of being sexually teased and of being stolen from him. ‘Dainty’ and ‘Squeamish’ belie their names in not being fastidious about anything except pretending to an outward appearance of sexual modesty and honourable behaviour (women’s honour was conceived of as resting entirely in their sexual fidelity). ‘Fidget’ applies differentially to Sir Jaspar and Lady Fidget: he is always rushing off to another appointment, she is itching for sex. ‘Sparkish’ is formed from ‘spark’ a term for the kind of witty gentleman also called wits, but he is only spark-ish because he is a pretender to wit whereas Harcourt and Horner and the shadowy Dorilant are true wits. Even the doctor (Quack) who acts as Horner’s confidant has a name that contributes to the general atmosphere of pretension and hypocrisy.

Such names point to a kind of debasement of values in the world of the play, but there are others that stand outside this mechanistic world. The name ‘Alithea’ suggests ‘other goddess’, and has associations with truth (and in the form ‘Althea’, with wholesomeness) and it quite literally elevates her nominal status above the other characters whose names are almost all associated with physical activity. Since Alithea is Pinchwife’s sister her name is presumably Alithea Pinchwife but she is never referred to by this name. This contrasts with the way that Margery Pinchwife tends to have her identity obscured by being thought of as ‘the country wife’, being dressed as her supposed brother, or being taken to Horner in the belief that she is Alithea. She seems to exist in terms of definitions imposed on her by others. Alithea, on the other hand, is much more of a free agent: she is known by her first name, thus defining herself as her own person rather than someone else’s. Alithea as a name also indicates the character’s separation from the majority of the other characters. Something similar happens with Harcourt who is indeed normally frank and open about his feelings but finds it hard to court Alithea because of her misplaced confidence that Sparkish’s lack of jealousy is based on a genuine respect for her. Their names suggest that Alithea and Frank are a corrective to the materialistic/mechanical cynicism of the other characters.

Love, Marriage and Money

For the aristocracy and gentry who form the Dramatis Personae of The Country Wife, and for their counterparts in the audience, marriage was not primarily, or even necessarily, a matter of romantic attachments between individuals. As Wycherley’s contemporary the poet Samuel Butler wrote, ‘Matrimony’s but a bargain made/To serve the turns of interest and trade;/Not out of love or kindness, but designs/To settle lands and tenements like fines’. The transfer of wealth, property, and lands between families was a key factor in determining who married whom, and the romantic inclinations of the bride and groom were often entirely secondary to any financial or dynastic advantages that might arise from a marriage. This led to many loveless relationships and to cynicism about the institution of marriage as a whole. By concentrating on courtship and marriage, the comic dramatists of the Restoration were able to investigate discrepancies between the social code and underlying emotional realities. In a society effectively without divorce, how could marriage be arranged on anything other than a commercial basis?

Many men and women were trapped in unions without affection, and the inevitable result was distrust, jealousy, and contempt. Sir Jaspar Fidget, for example, needs someone to entertain his wife without causing any scandal, a task Horner is apparently perfectly suited to since he is socially acceptable but appears to be unable to have sex with Lady Fidget. Sir Jaspar’s bargain with Horner is purely economic, a kind of service contract in which Horner acts as a surrogate non-sexual husband in return for free meals. He is quite happy to purchase the outward appearance of a husband because he is unwilling to make the necessary commitment himself. It is this that makes Horner’s sexual relationship with his wife an apt punishment for Sir Jaspar’s posturing: Horner offers his wife more services than Sir Jaspar had bargained for, the substance as well as the appearance. The cuckolding of Fidget is a dramatic comment on the lack of any emotional ties in the marriage and, of course, Lady Fidget is quite happy to follow her husband’s example, providing her outward honour is not compromised.

Similarly, the Pinchwife marriage is a matter of convenience rather than love. The ageing Pinchwife’s motives for marrying the young Margery are cynical, self-centred and devoid of anything like emotional commitment. Pinchwife marries a ‘country wife’ in order to avoid the pitfalls associated with sophisticated London women and to profit from the presumed innocence of a girl brought up in the country. Pinchwife’s first line to Margery is ‘You’re a fool’ (1.2). He then instructs her to love him as a matter of duty, and there is never a suggestion that the relationship should be reciprocal. Since he knows that Margery has no reason to be faithful, he becomes increasingly jealous, possessive and violent, thus driving her ever faster into the arms of a lover.

Alithea is Pinchwife’s sister and thus has firsthand experience of a jealous man. She is taken in by Sparkish because he appears to be constitutionally incapable of jealousy, whereas he is simply stupid. Harcourt poses a problem not only because Alithea finds herself attracted to him, but also because Sparkish’s obstinate refusal to be jealous of Harcourt seems in itself to be a proof of his trust in her. Finally, when Sparkish immediately believes Pinchwife’s allegations against her, Alithea feels free to respond to Harcourt who has consistently courted her on the basis that mutual love is more important than mercenary considerations.

Marriage is, then, a vital component of the play. Only Harcourt and Alithea’s relationship seems to suggest a future happy marriage because it is based on mutual esteem rather than on the purely economic and social factors that define the other relationships in the play. The ways in which The Country Wife exposes the failings of one set of approaches to human relationships transcends the immediate context to suggest the dangers of any view of human relationships in which partners are seen either in terms of the property they bring with them or as sex objects.

Horner

Although the treatment of marriage is crucial, the satire of pretensions to honour incarnated in Horner is the most dynamic aspect of the play. Much of the pleasure of watching or reading The Country Wife depends on dramatic irony, the way that the audience shares Horner’s superior position. Because we share his perspective for much of the play, we tend to align ourselves with the satirical attack on those who hide a voracious sexual appetite behind a screen of hypocritical respectability. Horner is clearly the medium for Wycherley’s satire, but is he himself the object of satirical attacks?

Perhaps Horner’s obsession with collecting sexual scalps cuts him off from the kind of happiness that we might postulate for Harcourt and Alithea at the end of the play. Perhaps, isolated and reduced simply to a source of sexual gratification (as in the ‘china’ scene where his sexual supplies are soon exhausted), he becomes just as much a victim of his own stratagem as the Fidgets and the Pinchwifes. His revenge on husbands who treat their wives like objects is to reduce himself to an object, a kind of sex machine. He is not interested in the quality of the sex he gets but rather in its quantity, a glutton rather than a gourmet.

Horner does stand alone in the play: Harcourt and Dorilant are apparently his friends, yet he never shares his secret with them, allowing them to be completely misled, and he is apparently prepared to sacrifice Alithea and Harcourt to preserve his cover. Even at the end of the play, only the audience, Margery, the three hypocritical ladies and the quack know the nature of his pretence. He has quite deliberately cut himself off from other types of social intercourse, in favour of a kind of production-line orgasm. So it is just possible to see him as a kind of victim of his own trick, a man condemned to mechanical sexual encounters at the expense of a full life, but this is to ignore the ways in which Horner appears on stage in the course of the play in production.

Horner is the character who most engages our attention. While he may be a sexual glutton, he does appear to relish his successes. Moreover, he can scarcely be a tragic figure if he doesn’t reach self-knowledge of his predicament or if it is not revealed to other characters. Within the world of the play, we enjoy watching a witty man triumph over ineffective opposition, but his amatory successes are achieved in a world he despises. The way in which we react to Horner parallels the way Wycherley presents his vision of a rotten society: we may well applaud Horner’s technical skill in dealing with his society but simultaneously deplore the heartless nature of his and its behaviour. This polarity in our attitude to Horner reflects two central disjunctions in the society within the play: between marriage as practised by Fidget and Pinchwife and marriage as seen by Alithea and Harcourt, and between techniques or conventions on the one hand and the reality on the other. In other words, we can distinguish between two separate attitudes to Horner: on the one hand we admire his skill but, on the other, we deplore his approach to sex. This duality of response reflects the way in which this society has separated the outward from the inner reality. Horner not only exposes the other characters’ corruption but he also comments on their corruption. By contrast, no one ever comments on Horner; his satirical superiority to the other characters is unchallenged and he remains consistent in his disguise. None of the other characters are able to penetrate his ruse without his help. Our attention is always being directed by him rather than at him.

The Visual and the Verbal

All the characters reveal the true nature that lies under their masks to Horner; the play’s action is organised to manifest this linguistically as well as visually. It is particularly concerned with the questions of disguise and unmasking (as in the case of Margery being dressed as a boy) and with the demonstration of self-deception and hypocrisy (as in the ‘china’ scene where Horner conceals the Quack behind the scene so that he can watch the process in action and comment on it like a chorus). At the end of 5.1 when Margery manages to pretend to be Alithea so that she can escape from Pinchwife, the jealous husband unwittingly brings his wife to the man who wants to make love to her because his jealousy has made him blind to the deception. The outward appearance that Margery is Alithea takes Pinchwife in, just as elsewhere in the play, people are taken in by Horner’s outward appearance of being a eunuch or by Lady Fidget’s pretence to honour. When Pinchwife cannot see beyond his sister’s gown to his wife beneath, we have an actual embodiment of the kinds of blinkered perception that prevents most of the characters penetrating the others’ surface pretensions to honour and chastity.

The actual language of the play is important for the way in which it consistently suggests differences between outward appearance and inner realities. The many references to the theatre, for example, remind us that what we are watching and tacitly assuming to be ‘real’ is a fiction. The whole play is also peppered with similes and analogies, particularly between animal and human life. The use of nature imagery tends to be reductive: when Wycherley has Harcourt and Horner talk of drones, or Horner compares women and spaniels, or Alithea and Margery talk of their existence in terms of being caged birds, we are asked to see animal life as a degradation of human potential. This reductive approach in nature imagery is matched by a consistent reduction of human emotions and values to questions of appetite, disease or economic value. Everyone except Alithea and Harcourt sees love, marriage, emotion and honour in strictly pragmatic terms, as sex, contract, appetite and pretence. Alithea and Harcourt stand somewhat outside this linguistic pattern as they stand somewhat outside the world of cuckoldry. Harcourt refers to Alithea in terms, which suggest her quasi-divine status, and, in a comedy where disguises are rife, his is as a priest.

Town and Country

Pinchwife is under the impression that the country is a virtuous place just as the town is vicious. Often in seventeenth-century literature the country was held up as a superior place. This partly reflects the classical interest in pastoral, partly the sense that towns were increasingly large and complex places so that the country could be seen as a kind of idyllic escape from urban pressures and vices. In part it related to disquiet with the growth of trade and a conservative nostalgia for a simpler life, in part to the complex interactions of the post-Commonwealth period. However, as Horner remarks ‘I have known a clap gotten in Wales’ and the very innocence of the country is betrayed by the sexual pun in the word itself. The difference between town values and country values is the difference between Margery and Lady Fidget, between an honest delight in sex and a hypocritical one. Pinchwife is wrong in his assumptions about the merits of town and country because he does not understand that what matters is the human nature under the mask of manners; that it is the individual heart and mind that produce chastity, not the physical stress on chastity that produces chaste attitudes.

The Country Wife and Contemporary Theatre

In the nineteenth century, Macaulay wrote that Wycherley’s ‘indecency’ ‘protected him against critics in the same way that a skunk was protected against hunters: it is safe because it is too filthy to handle and too noisome even to approach’. In the theatre this view held from the mid-eighteenth century when Garrick produced his sanitised The Country Girl. The play was revived in the 1920s and its theatrical reputation has grown steadily ever since, even surviving a Glasgow Citizens Theatre 1970s version reduced to mono-dimensional satire without the Alithea/Harcourt plot.

Although Macaulay’s view still has some supporters, it confuses explicit interest in sex with pornography. The Country Wife does present human relationships reduced to the mechanical and materialistic but its world is not a pornographic one: it is very clearly aware of the dangers of promiscuous sex in the form of venereal disease, since Horner’s whole stratagem is based on being impotent as the result of treatment for veneral disease. Equally, Alithea and Harcourt offer a marked contrast to the mechanistic Newtonian attitudes of the Fidgets, the Pinchwifes and Horner.