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The Country Wife

Storia Moderna (Università degli Studi di Milano)

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The Country Wife

(by William Wycherley)
Analysis
About “The Country Wife”
The Country Wife is a Restoration comedy, that is, an English theatrical comedy written during the period
1660-1710, when theatrical performances resumed in London following their 18-year spell of illegality
under the reign of the Puritan Commonwealth. As a genre, Restoration comedy is notable for displaying a
recrudescence of bawdiness, the public expression of which had been suppressed under the Puritans, and
for taking a satirical, or even cynical, view of marriage and sexuality. As will be seen, these characteristics
owe much to the genre’s social and historical contexts.
Restoration comedy had for its intended audience the English court and other social insiders; whereas the
Elizabethan theater had played to a cross-section of English society, the theater audiences of the
Restoration had a far more specific social identity, and the comedies they enjoyed reflect their attitudes and
values accordingly. The aristocracy had regained its security and visibility with the restoration of the
monarchy in 1660, but it had lost for good much of its political and economic significance; as a result, this
rather aimless class expended its energies on theatergoing and other, more dissolute antics. As if to
compensate for its moral nullity, however, the Restoration aristocracy placed more emphasis than ever on
social virtuosity and the punctilios of comportment; essentially, it proposed outward good breeding, rather
than virtuous moral conduct, as a principle of societal coherence. This valorization of display, of perfect
manners, wit, and the ability to improvise, clearly informs the action and dialogue of Restoration comedies.
Moreover, the minimization of genuine moral virtue can be seen to impact the values, such as they are, that
inform the plays. Among the Restoration aristocracy, sexual libertinism was fashionable and marriage
scorned; consequently, as David Cook and John Swannell put it, marriage generally appears in Restoration
plays “at best as a convenient means of acquiring an income, and at worst as a constant source of jealousy
and frustration.” Husbands, in particular, tend to look absurd, being either compulsively jealous or obtusely
complacent.

In order better to understand this derogation of marriage, it will be convenient to speak of Restoration
comedy, and of the values that animate it, as breaking down into two phases, namely the light comedies of
the 1660s and the cynical comedies of the 1670s. The former, as B. A. Kachur points out, tended to feature
an obligatory couple on the model of Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick; this couple’s “mutual
antagonism-cum-attraction provided the requisite does of benign sexual energy that resolved itself happily
in romantic love and consensual marriage between the subversive libertine and inviolable heroine.” The
plots, then, tended toward a decisive social and moral resolution, imaged in the impending licit sexual union
between the leading characters: the libertine, and the moral subversion he represented, were domesticated
and brought under control by his voluntary submission to the virtuous heroine. By contrast, the comedies of
the 1670s were darker; as Kachur observes, they featured “a preponderance of lecherous men and married
women who opted for dispassionate and illicit sex and denigrated marriage altogether.” The sexual behavior
of these characters tended to effect not resolution but dissolution, and the comedies of the 1670s tended
to have ambiguous conclusions, instilling insecurity rather than social affirmation. The Country
Wife (1675) is, of course, of this latter type.
From the 1660s to the 1670s, a shift had occurred in contemporary attitudes toward the institution of
marriage. This shift was due in part to certain events during the Interregnum, i.e. the period of
parliamentary and military rule under the Commonwealth of England, beginning with the execution of King
Charles I in 1649 and ending with the restoration of the monarcy under Charles II in 1660. One of these
events was the Civil Marriage Act of 1653, passed under the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell; this Act
required a civil ceremony in order for a marriage to be legally recognized, and by shifting jurisdiction of
marriage from church to state, it redefined marriage as a civil contract rather than a sacramental bond.
Inevitably, this redefinition diminished the religious awe in which the institution of marriage had long been
held. It also enabled a revaluation of the power dynamics obtaining between husband and wife:

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traditionally, the husband was sovereign in the domestic sphere and the wife was subservient to him; the
model for this relation, of course, was the sovereignty of the monarch over his subjects, but as the
deposition of Charles I had cast doubt upon the inevitability of the reign of monarchs over the commons, so
the Civil Marriage Act made the reign of husbands over wives depend not on a religious necessity but on
negotiations between the two parties concerned. Perhaps, then, women needed not be the subservient
vassals of their husbands; increasingly, they were viewed as free individuals with rights and personal
agency. The tyrannical or neglectful behavior of husbands therefore became grounds for criticism and satire.

Moreover, the conduct of Charles II himself, in both his public and his personal capacities, provided grounds
for criticism and even cynicism about both the nation and the marital state. Charles’s governance of England
was culpably inept; by the 1670s, it was clear that the hopes of 1660 were to be disappointed and that the
King was not to orchestrate stability in the realm or establish trust in the regime. Additionally, his personal
example was deplorable: he was infamous for his extramarital affairs and for his illegitimate children, who
numbered above a dozen. The King, then, was not the lynchpin of national harmony that he ought to have
been; neither was he a decent husband. In the cynical comedies of the 1670s, these facts were made to
analogize and comment upon each other. Kachur sums it up: “By the 1670s, marital relationships in the
comedies were dominated by characters, like embittered subjects to a seemingly disloyal and detached
king, whose skepticism and disenchantment over matrimony bespoke the general malaise and
dissatisfaction with the current state of Britain’s restoration, and their want of fidelity, trust, and affection
toward their mates, as well as their illicit sexual liaisons, signalled a covert rebellion against a bond that
neither party found tenable.” Such, clearly, is the social, political, and moral atmosphere that precipitated
Wycherley’s The Country Wife.

Themes
The Untenability of Restoration Marriage Arrangements
Wycherley presents two marriages that are sadly typical of the Restoration period: Jack Pinchwife cultivates
his wife’s ignorance in order to ensure her fidelity and submissiveness, and Sir Jasper Fidget neglects his
young wife and seeks to keep her mind off other men by occupying her with trivial pleasures and “safe”
companions. Wycherley thus takes two common assumptions about marriage—that wives should be kept in
ignorance and that wives can safely be neglected—and shows them to contain contradictions that can only
lead to marital breakdown. Women, no less than men, desire gratifying sexual contact; if long deprived,
they will gladly avail themselves of someone like Horner, whose aphorism proves right: “a foolish rival and a
jealous husband assist their rival’s designs; for they are sure to make their women hate them, which is the
first step to their love for another man.” As P. F. Vernon points out, Horner is merely a “catalyzing agent,”
enabling the married couples around him to fall apart on their own terms: Sir Jasper is so eager to unload
his wife that he actually compels Horner and Lady Fidget to spend time together; and Pinchwife leads his
own wife into adultery, because the precautions he takes against Horner merely give Margery the means to
gratify the very sexual appetite that Pinchwife, the broken-down and tyrannical, stints.

Hypocrisy
Wycherley was repelled by hypocrisy, above all by the commonplace variety—the ordinary desire of men
and women to be thought more virtuous or gifted than they are. Thus, Horner early on curses “all that force
Nature and would be still what she forbids ’em; affectation is her greatest monster,” and Dorilant
generalizes the critique: “Most men are the contraries to what they would seem.” Not only men but
women: Lady Fidget and “the virtuous gang” come in for some of the sharpest criticism in the play, as their
public personas conflict egregiously with their private activities. Indeed, the entire play is predicated on the
pervasiveness of hypocrisy: Horner’s ruse, on which most of the action depends, would fail without the
eagerness of wives and husbands to maintain an extreme disjunction between the true nature of women
and their outward appearance.

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Town and Country, or Innocence and Experience

Margery, the country wife of the title, represents a state of rustic innocence that contrasts strongly with the
sophistication of the town. She has no natural inclination for deceit, and thus she composes what Horner
calls “the first love-letter that ever was without flames, darts, fates, destinies, lying and dissembling in’t”;
she takes things at face value, and thus she expresses disbelief that anyone who professes to love her would
seek to “ruin” her. Some critics argue, however, that in the course of the play Margery picks up the London
tricks of duplicity and pretense, as she tricks Pinchwife into delivering to Horner first the love-letter and
then Margery herself. The question of whether these tricks indicate the corruption of Margery is an
important one, for if she maintains her ignorance throughout the play, then, as B. A. Kachur puts it, “her
remove to Hampshire [at the end] suggests a form of banishment from the real world which cannot
accommodate honesty, simplicity, and ingenuousness.” If, on the other hand, Margery in Act V is on her way
to becoming a Hampshire version of Lady Fidget, then the thesis of the play would seem to be what is
perhaps still more dismal, the idea that civilization is bound to corrupt even such a simple child of impulse
as young Margery.

True Wit vs. Foppery

As David Cook and John Swannell suggest, one of the major themes of the play is “man’s intellectual
ascendency over those conditions which tend to hem him in and diminish him.” In this context, the vitality
of Horner, which he expresses in the form of intellectual as well as sexual dominance, entitles him as a
heroic figure who triumphs (albeit in a morally ambivalent fashion) over the deadening thought-patterns of
specious “honor.” By contrast, Sparkish’s feeble pretensions to wit degrade not only the human intellect but
the human moral faculties. His brand of cynicism functions not to expose the failings of society but to
reinforce them: his attitudes toward marriage, including his desire to feed his vanity by having “rivals in a
wife,” reveal moral idiocy rather than moral insight.

The Cash Principle

Sir Jasper Fidget is a specimen of a new type, the bourgeois man of business. The Restoration saw the rise in
earnest of capitalism, as social fluidity and developing markets allowed many entrepreneurs to achieve
wealth in the modern way. Whatever admirable qualities may be attributable to the aspiring man of
business, the besetting sins of his type are avarice and materialism. Sir Jasper exhibits this debasement of
values and priorities, as he is constantly abandoning his wife to attend to “[his] pleasure, business,” placing
business contacts and opportunities above the marital bond. The Fidgets, then, typify not only the new
economic patterns but also the more specific issue of the commercialization of marriage, the basing of
marriage on financial interest rather than love. “Almost certainly contracted as a commercial enterprise,”
says W. R. Chadwick, their marriage “has foundered on materialism, and Lady Fidget has every right to feel
neglected.”

The Poverty of Loveless Sex

The basic target of the audience’s laughter in The Country Wifeis, most simply, the sexual impulse and the
absurdities to which it sometimes drives its human subjects. Not that sex is categorically absurd in
Wycherley’s view: the mutual attraction of Alethea and Harcourt, for instance, is ultimately not at all risible.
Rather, Wycherley encourages the audience to laugh at sexual relations in which the participants view each
other as objects, as means simply to personal pleasure. As B. A. Kachur says, “loveless, mechanical
copulation is, as portrayed by a master like Wycherley, embarrassingly titillating, brutally honest, and
inherently disquieting.” Horner epitomizes what Wycherley considers the dehumanizing effects of this
impoverished view of sex: although he is in one sense the most commanding character in the play,
controlling events by means of his ruse, nevertheless his compulsive sexuality renders him, most clearly in
the “china scene,” a passive and mechanical sexual instrument, passed among various partners and utilized
to the point of physical depletion.

Same-Sex Solidarity
From the first scene of the play, in which Horner and his friends sound the hackneyed note of derogating
women and praising male friendship, there persists a motif of the conventional notion that the truest

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companionship obtains among members of the same sex (especially the male sex). The three wits, however,
never realize that ideal very successfully: Horner keeps an important secret from his two friends, Harcourt’s
deepest personal connection is with a woman (Alethea), and Dorilant scarcely exists as a distinct
personality. Interestingly, what is perhaps the most successful instance in the play of this clichéd sexist
bonding occurs not among the male wits but among the “virtuous gang” of ladies, plus Horner, in the
“banquet scene” of Act V. Here, the ladies drink, sing songs, and derogate the opposite sex, quite after the
traditional pattern of male tavern behavior, but with more reason and more honesty; as a result, their
bonding session ends with the sharing of secrets, as they each admit the relation they bear to Horner, and a
swift laying-aside of differences in the interest of collaboration in the ruse. Perhaps Wycherley means to
suggest that the men’s commitment to besting each other in the romantic arena precludes any genuine
bonding, while the women’s oppression in the conventional sexual scheme gives them incentive to be, as
Lady Fidget puts it, “sister sharers” in more ways than one.

Quotes and Analysis

• “[Y]our women of honour, as you call ’em, are only chary of their reputations, not their persons,
and ’tis scandal they would avoid, not men.”

Act I, Scene 1, lines 151-43; p. 197

At the beginning of the play, in the course of explaining the ruse that consummately exposes the corruption
of his society, Horner voices most concisely the play’s indictment of “honour” as it is practiced in the
Restoration. Echoing the famous funeral speech of Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Cæsar, with its
sarcastic refrain of “Brutus is an honorable man,” Horner exposes the emptiness of a concept of honor in
which the eye of the world, not conscience or the eye of God, is the authoritative monitor.

• “A pox on ’em, and all that force Nature, and would be still what she forbids ’em. Affectation is
her greatest monster.”

(Act I, Scene 1, lines 243-44; p. 200)

Horner speaks this line to Harcourt and Dorilant, apropos of the approaching Sparkish. It is a concise
summation of one of the great themes of the play, the moral failing that goes by the name of “affectation”
or “hypocrisy,” i.e. the desire to be seen as better or more virtuous than one really is. Horner, speaking in
character as an embittered and misanthropic eunuch, naturally uses strong language in enunciating this
theme: speaking of poxes and monsters, he channels the hardcore cynic’s disgust with the follies of those
around him. Horner is perhaps not the most credible spokesman against affectation, since his ruse involves
precisely his pretending to be what he is not; nevertheless, the basic concern is Wycherley’s, and indeed
Horner’s ruse, in its smashing success, tends rather to expose and condemn society’s pervasive hypocrisy
than to mitigate or excuse it.

• “[M]ethinks wit is more necessary than beauty, and I think no young woman ugly that has it, and
no handsome woman agreeable without it.”

(Act I, Scene 1, lines 385-87; p. 203)

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In one of his more attractive moments, Horner distances himself from Pinchwife’s strategy of marrying a
fool. This sentiment suggests that Horner may not be given over entirely to cynicism, and indeed the
impression that he is capable of valuing including women for the right reasons will be substantiated later in
the play, when he expresses his regret over the impending marriage of Alethea to Sparkish rather than to
Harcourt, who loves her. In addition to the light it sheds on Horner’s characterization, however, this quote
enunciates a tantalizing possibility for human relations, namely that women, no less than men, might be
valued primarily for the qualities of their personality and intellect, and only secondarily for their eligibility as
sexual partners. It is a possibility that is realized (perhaps) in the Harcourt-Alethea relationship but,
unfortunately, nowhere else in the play.

• “’Tis my maxim: he’s a fool that marries, but he’s a greater fool that does not marry a fool. What
is wit in a wife good for, but to make a man a cuckold?”

(Act I, Scene 1, lines 388-90; p. 203)

Coming directly after Horner has articulated quite an opposite sentiment, this quote is a concentrated
expression of Pinchwife’s highly unattractive views on marriage and women. Because his conception of
marriage is totally self-interested, Pinchwife’s overriding anxiety is not for his wife’s happiness but for her
abstention from adultery. His opinion that “wit in a wife” is good for nothing but mischief bespeaks a basic
contempt for women and indicates that he subscribes to the view, common among the husbands in the
play, that wives are not companions and equals but simply long-term prostitutes.

• “Indeed, as the world goes, I wonder there are no more jealous, since wives are so neglected.”

(Act II, Scene 1, lines 342-43; p. 214)

Lady Fidget, discoursing on husbands’ jealousy with the rest of the “virtuous gang,” voices a not
unreasonable complaint: women who receive no attention or affection from their husbands are likely to
seek it elsewhere—so if husbands feel they have cause to be jealous of their wives, they must bear some of
the blame for it themselves. Coming from Lady Fidget, this complaint has an interesting resonance: on the
one hand, her marriage would seem to be Exhibit A in support of this observation, as Sir Jasper’s
indifference to her creates the conditions for her dalliance with Horner; on the other hand, Wycherley
certainly does not go out of his way to generate sympathy for Lady Fidget, and most readers will probably
feel that her behavior is hardly less selfish than her husband’s.

• Sir Jasper: “What, avoid the sweet society of womankind? That sweet, soft, gentle, tame, noble
creature woman, made for man’s companion—”

Horner: “So is that soft, gentle, tame, and more noble creature a spaniel, and has all their tricks—
can fawn, lie down, suffer beating and fawn the more; barks at your friends, when they come to
see you; makes your bed hard, gives you fleas, and the mange sometimes. And all the difference is,
the spaniel’s the more faithful animal, and fawns but upon one master.”

(Act II, Scene 1, lines 459-67; p. 217)

This exchange between Horner and Sir Jasper is a good example both of Horner’s aptitude for his chosen
role of impotent misanthrope and of his ability, as a satirist, to draw out the flaws and meannesses of
others. Horner’s comparison of women to dogs is vividly nasty, as is the single point on which he will allow
that the two species contrast. More subtle, however, is Horner’s implicit comment on the values of Sir
Jasper: in pointing out that Sir Jasper’s complimentary description could describe a spaniel as well as a

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human female, Horner indicates that the only virtues Sir Jasper can appreciate in women are insipid virtues,
attributes that tend to make women submissive and self-effacing. If woman is indeed as Sir Jasper portrays
her, then she really is “made for man’s companion”: she is so much assimilated to his wants as to be
practically an extension of him, and he need not consider her as a person in her own right. Just such a
neglectful, dehumanizing concept of women is of course very much apparent in Sir Jasper’s interactions
with his own wife.

• “I love to be envied, and would not marry a wife that I alone could love. … I love to have rivals in
a wife; they make her seem to a man still but as a kept mistress.”

(Act III, Scene 2, lines 342-46; p. 232)

This quote encapsulates nicely the moral idiocy of Sparkish. His resistance to romantic jealousy is simply
perverse: that his wife should love him is less important to him than that other men should see him as the
lord and master of an attractive woman. Moreover, Sparkish’s habit of avowing such repulsive attitudes
reveals him to be as stupid socially as he is morally. One of the tenets of fashionable libertinism in the
Restoration was that marriage was a burden and an inferior state to unmarried promiscuity; accordingly, in
seeking to model himself on the wits of his acquaintance, Sparkish openly proclaims a disdain for marriage
and a preference for illicit relations. No truly witty libertine, however, would fail to leaven his misogynistic
sentiments with verbal cleverness: whereas Horner or Dorilant might harbor as deplorable views of women,
they would never state them so crudely. In taking the direct route to misogyny and cynicism, Sparkish
misses the point and tries too hard, demonstrating that his personality has literally no redeeming features,
either of the moral sort or of the intellectual.

• “But what a devil is this honour? ’Tis sure a disease in the head, like the megrim, or falling-
sickness, that always hurries people away to do themselves mischief. Men lose their lives by it;
women what’s dearer to ’em, their love, the life of life.”

(Act IV, Scene 1, lines 30-34; p. 239)

Lucy speaks these lines to her mistress Alethea in an effort to talk some sense into her regarding the relative
merits of Harcourt and Sparkish. Alethea’s determination to remain with Sparkish, whom she has come to
regard with contempt, derives largely from her devotion to her own honor: she will not be seen to break
her word to a man she has agreed to marry. Lucy points out, however, that there are more important things
in the world than honor and that a sense of honor that requires the sacrifice of love and life has become
pathological. As it turns out, Alethea’s sense of honor, while not as shallow as that of Lady Fidget,
nevertheless has tended to place too much emphasis on what other people think of her; consequently, her
moral development will consist largely of her coming to understand that there is nothing dishonorable, if
“honor” means anything, about abandoning a foolish and selfish man and marrying a decent and lovable
one instead.

• “[Y]our bigots in honour are just like those in religion: they fear the eye of the world more than
the eye of heaven, and think there is no virtue but railing at vice, and no sin but giving scandal.”

(Act IV, Scene 3, lines 20-23; p. 249)

In this remark to The Quack, Horner skewers the respectable ladies whose behavior amongst themselves,
which he has been privileged recently to witness, diverges so sharply from their behavior before the rest of
the world. The epigrammatic quality of this remark has led to its being one of the most quoted passages in
the play, and indeed it captures one of the play’s great themes—hypocrisy—admirably. Perhaps more

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interesting than the content of the quote, however, is its context: Horner dispenses his satiric insight, one of
the fruits of his ruse, not to the great world or even to his close friends, but to The Quack, a factotum whom
he despises. It is a measure of the lonely course to which Horner’s sexual and satirical impulses have
committed him, that his most cutting commentary has no worthy onstage audience.
• “Women and Fortune are truest still to those that trust ’em.”

(Act V, Scene 4, line 390; p. 280)

Near the end of the play, Alethea utters a fine-sounding epigram, and most readers will feel that, due to her
intelligence and her demonstrated willingness to learn and change, she has earned the right to make this
resonant pronouncement. Context, however, may undercut her somewhat. The action of the play has
shown that not all forms of trust are admirable: Sir Jasper, like Sparkish in an earlier phase, has displayed
excessive trust arising from self-centeredness, and in both cases this negative form of trust has led to the
defection of the lady in the case. Worse, the action of the play’s final scene has brought about a restoration
of that form of trust which is really just cynical obliviousness: in agreeing to believe once more in Horner’s
clearly bogus impotence for the sake of everyone’s reputation, the assembled company affirm the cynical
belief that a transgression is not a transgression until it is acknowledged publicly.

Analysis of Act I
Horner is our nominal protagonist: his first speech opens the play, as if he were the author’s spokesman,
and his machinations propel the plot, suggesting a further affinity with the playwright. By taking the
audience into his confidence with his frequent asides, Horner makes us virtual accomplices in his trickery,
which we, in turn, largely approve because it provides entertainment and the moral satisfaction of seeing
corruption exposed. His hero-status must remain only nominal, however, because Horner is no less
licentious and duplicitous than his victims—indeed, in depravity he may be said to outdo them all. Nor do
Horner’s considerable intellect and moral insight effect any positive change in any of the characters: his wit
is entirely negative, exposing and exploiting, never correcting.
Still, Wycherley does not encourage audience contempt for Horner, as he does for Horner’s victims; as B. A.
Kachur puts it, “[Wycherley] does expect theatregoers to applaud Horner’s wit, intelligence, and ingenuity
as the ultimate satirist who exposes hypocrisy and corruption.” As we see in the case of his dissecting
Pinchwife’s motives for marrying, Horner is able to articulate brilliantly Wycherley’s own condemnation of
Restoration society. He is admirable at least in his clear-eyed understanding of himself and others.

Act I also introduces several other important male characters, including two bad husbands and one bad
would-be husband. As Jack Pinchwife exits the scene, Harcourt remarks with brutal flippancy that he has
gone home “[t]o beat his wife”—and indeed Pinchwife is the archetypal jealous husband, the grim watcher
of a much-younger bride. His views on marriage, which Horner cleverly draws out, are as debased as they
are conventional. The crude terms in which he speaks of his sister’s dowry are quite revealing: “I must give
Sparkish tomorrow five thousand pound to lie with my sister.” A wife, to Pinchwife’s mind, is essentially a
long-term prostitute whose sexuality requires that money should change hands. Accordingly, he looks on
the new Mrs. Pinchwife as a sexual object, to whose services he has guaranteed access; she is in this sense
an improvement over the mistresses who, in his life as a London rake, would take his money and then move
on. For Pinchwife, then, marriage is not so much a covenant as a business transaction: a wife is a kind of
chattel, and once the husband has acquired her, his main interest is in maintaining her value; if she turns
out to be “a whore” whom he cannot “keep … to [him]self,” then his investment will have backfired.

Sir Jasper, though a less clearly odious figure than Pinchwife, has his own unpleasant qualities. His smirking
at Horner’s supposed debility shows him to be careless of other people’s feelings. Worse, behind his fussily
civil facade he is contemptuous and neglectful of his wife. His strategy is different from Pinchwife’s: rather
than keeping her secluded from the world, he seeks to keep Lady Fidget harmlessly occupied with “an
innocent diversion.” He is constantly running off, as in this scene, to attend to his all-important business,

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with the consequence that he has no time to spend on Lady Fidget. He resembles Pinchwife in taking no
interest in his wife except to seek measures to prevent her disgracing him through adultery.

Young Mr. Sparkish is a vain fop who considers himself a terribly sophisticated “wit”; in fact, his wittier
acquaintances view him as a pretender and a dolt—as Horner says, “the greatest fop, dullest ass, and the
worst company.” Sparkish is, in other words, a caricature of the many slow-witted poseurs of the day who
tried to imitate the fashionable London libertines but who lacked the requisite intelligence and flair. Nor is
Sparkish’s intellectual inferiority offset by any moral superiority. In this respect, Horner’s purported
impotence acts as a touchstone, revealing Sparkish’s character through his reaction to it: whereas Harcourt
and Dorilant jested about Horner’s impotence only lightly, as a means of cheering their unhappy friend,
Sparkish immediately (like Sir Jasper) starts in with witless mockery “upon the report in town of thee, ha-
ha-ha.” As will be seen, Sparkish’s frivolity goes hand-in-hand with a potential for unfeeling nastiness.

Analysis of Act II
Immediately upon her first appearance in the play, the country wife Margery shows her innocence and
ingenuousness: her question, “Jealous? What’s that?” bespeaks not only her verbal inaptitude but also her
unfamiliarity with the emotional categories of men and women in society. Her own inclination is, like a
child, simply to trust and love that which is familiar to her: hence she says to Pinchwife, “You are mine own
dear bud, and I know you; I hate a stranger.” She appears to bear toward her unlikeable husband all the
customary wifely deference and affection: in this scene, her natural kindliness holds out despite the fact
that he treats her brusquely at best, insults her casually upon his entrance, and subjects her to a hysterical
degree of surveillance. Even at this early stage, however, the possibility of rebellion is discernible: she
recognizes that “the playermen are finer folks” than the churlish man with whom she lives, and this capacity
for independent judgment and for disappointment in her own lot may spell trouble in the future.
The Pinchwifes’ is not the only marriage showing signs of weakness in Act II. By comparison with the two
other pairings introduced in the previous Act (Pinchwife and his bride, Sparkish and his fiancée), the Fidgets’
marriage is a long-standing one. Outwardly they are a respectable couple, but their marriage is certainly
loveless: Sir Jasper takes all his “pleasure” in “business” and none in his wife, though he is considerate
enough (after a fashion) to provide her with a non-threatening male chaperone who will give the illusion of
compensating for Sir Jasper’s neglect of her. Notwithstanding some superficial differences, then, Sir Jasper
and Pinchwife have, at bottom, comparable views of women. Sir Jasper is neglectful and apathetic toward
his wife, while Pinchwife is vigilant and possessive toward his—what the husbands have in common is a
view of their spouses as inferior beings with whom sexual bonds are the only desirable form of intimacy.

Insofar as Sir Jasper has anything at all in common with Lady Fidget, their affinity would seem to depend on
their mutual love of money. If the husband is eager to go to “[his] pleasure, business,” the wife is equally
eager to capitalize, literally, on her own pleasures, namely casual entertainments. Initially averse to
spending any time with the eunuch Horner, she suddenly warms to the prospect when Sir Jasper suggests
that she might win money from him at cards; with remarkable crudeness she then remarks, “money makes
up in a measure all other wants in men.” Tellingly, Wycherley has the Fidgets residing in the city, i.e. the
commercial district of London; Sir Jasper is a specimen of the new-style man of business who was coming
into prominence during the 17th century. The Interregnum had disrupted the traditional way of becoming
wealthy (that is, through inheritance): many ancient estates had been seized, leaving historically wealthy
families at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the new entrepreneurs of the bourgeois class. As a result, many old
families sought to recuperate their fortunes by procuring wealthy bourgeois spouses for their children, and
one supposes that a mercenary motive of this sort is what delivered Lady Fidget into her marriage with Sir
Jasper. That marriages constructed on this model often faltered through mutual indifference or repulsion, or
even sexual betrayal, is not terribly surprising.

Sparkish presents yet another variant of the self-interested view of marriage: he is the spokesman for the
fashionable, libertine view this institution, and in giving this perspective a spokesman who is such a
pretentious buffoon, Wycherley exaggerates and debunks it. Sparkish disavows sexual jealousy because he
considers it a bourgeois attitude; as he says to Pinchwife, “d’ye think I’ll seem to be jealous, like a country

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bumpkin?” He disavows, in fact, any kind of strong emotion, claiming that any demonstration of feeling on
his part is simply an act and a spur to his wit: “we wits rail and make love often, but to show our parts.” A
successful wit, such as Horner, always has his emotions (such as they are) under control, but Sparkish takes
this restraint to indicate a total absence of genuine emotion; hence, as Katharine M. Rogers points out, “he
thinks it ill bred to take anything seriously, including his marriage. He pretends to be equally unaffected by
love, jealousy, or anger.”

In a sense, indeed, Sparkish really is incapable of jealousy: he is imperturbable as Harcourt courts Alethea
right under his nose. He is imperturbable, however, not because of his great sophistication, but rather
because he is too self-centered to imagine that other people could have interests that conflict with his.
Alethea, like a new suit of clothes, exists only to adorn Sparkish; as he says, the pleasure he takes in
introducing her to his friends is like the pleasure he takes in “shew[ing] fine clothes, at a play-house the first
day, and count[ing] money before poor rogues.” Thus, not unlike Pinchwife (who is jealousy personified and
subscribes to a more conventional, “respectable” view of marriage), Sparkish essentially conceives of
marriage as a purchase of the wife by the husband: Alethea is a fashionable possession. If his ownership of
her induces envy in others, who would accordingly wish to cuckold him, then all the better for Sparkish’s
vanity.

Analysis of Act III

Pinchwife’s comic flaw is his obsessive jealousy—but it is a particularly ugly kind of jealousy, proceeding not
from love but from his sense that Margery is his property. There is nothing romantic about the May-
December pairing of Pinchwife (49) and his bride (whom most critics take to be under 20): Pinchwife has
married simply in order to have a reliable sexual partner—or as Horner has put it, “to keep a whore to
[him]self”; he has chosen Margery precisely because he has contempt for her and expects that she will be
easy to control—as he himself has said, “he’s a fool that marries, but he’s a greater that does not marry a
fool.” B. A. Kachur summarizes Pinchwife’s “chauvinistic tenets” as holding that “women are inherently
inferior, malleable, and servile”: he can neglect his wife, lock her up in town, strand her in the countryside,
speak cruelly to her, even (in the next Act) threaten her physically, and all the while expect her to submit
faithfully and keep her marriage vows.
With Act III, Wycherley begins to show Sparkish to be not merely frivolous but almost pathologically self-
centered, as Sparkish’s feeble emulation of the London wits underscores the morally subversive nature of
the wits’ libertine tenets. One of the conventional poses of the town wit is the misogynistic denigration of
women and marriage, and the corresponding praise of male friendship. (Horner, Harcourt, and Dorilant
gave voice to these attitudes at some length in Act I.) Accordingly, Sparkish in an unguarded moment
reveals his opinion that “matrimonial love” is not the “best and truest love in the world.”

He certainly does not seem to love his intended wife, as his main interest in her appears to derive from her
ability to inspire envy in other men: “I love to be envied and would not marry a wife that I alone could love.”
He “love” he bears Alethea, then, values her not for her intrinsic worth but as a piece of property, the
ownership of which reflects well on him and feeds his vanity. His immunity to jealousy, which shocks
Alethea, derives not (as he unctuously suggests) from his confidence in her virtue but rather from his total
lack of any emotional investment in her. As one of his comments in Act II makes clear, Sparkish has taken
the ideal of the wit’s emotional self-possession and perverted it to mean total insensibility: “we wits rail and
make love often but to show our parts; as we have no affections, so we have no malice.” Such emotions as
Sparkish has are all bound up in himself and his self-presentation as a man of “parts,” i.e. wit.

Harcourt contrasts strongly with Sparkish, being both more truly witty and more truly gentleman-like, and
he appears to value Alethea for the intelligence, virtue, and honour that make her so drastically
overqualified as a mate for Sparkish. In running verbal rings around Sparkish, Harcourt demonstrates
Sparkish’s inferiority not only to Harcourt himself but also to Alethea, who understands, as her thick-headed
fiancé does not, the mocking import of Harcourt’s banter. Moreover, despite his penchant for such daring
advances as those that terrorize Alethea in Scene 2, Harcourt is essentially benign; he certainly displays
neither Horner’s and Dorilant’s tendency to sexual debauchery nor the former’s egotistical drive to expose

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and manipulate other people. It is vital that Harcourt should be not merely urbane, as the average London
rake is, but decent, as the average London rake is not: if he is to convince Alethea to break her engagement
to Sparkish and thereby compromise her own honor, which she values so highly, he will have to
demonstrate that he, too, possesses and values honor.

Some critics, however, have felt that the Harcourt-Alethea plot is one of the weaker elements of the play.
First, while Harcourt’s actions and feelings are doubtless admirable, the fact remains that he is not fleshed
out as a unique and substantial character to the degree that the other principal characters are. Second,
Alethea’s liveliness and good sense make it seem unlikely that she would need Harcourt’s assistance to
discover the vapidity of Sparkish; the effect of this glitch in characterization is to give the awkward
impression that, despite the needs of Wycherley’s love-plot, a certain disparity obtains between Alethea’s
merits and those of her Mr. Right. Perhaps, however, the seeming inconsistency in Alethea’s
characterization can be justified: as David Cook and John Swannell argue, the playwright may have
“deliberately left Alethea one step to take before she can be seen to epitomize good sense and true love”;
that step will involve her revaluation of both her suitors and of her own concept of marriage itself. Certainly,
Alethea would be less compelling as a static type of achieved perfection than she is as a dynamic character
with remediable flaws.

Analysis of Act IV, Scenes 1-2

Alethea is an essentially virtuous young lady who has, anomalously, resisted the corrupting instances of
London: as she insisted to her brother in Act II, she has only ever “take[n] the innocent liberty of the town.”
Her conversation with Lucy makes clear, however, that her virtue has not precluded her assimilating some
of London’s superficial priorities and expectations. To begin with, she has made the typical urban mistake of
confusing reality with appearance: Sparkish appears to be an unobjectionable mate, being as he is of her
social class and apparently of an equable disposition, so Alethea infers that he must be meritorious
through-and-through.
Even more dangerous, however, is her deference to popular opinion, which threatens to trap her in her
engagement even after she has recognized Sparkish’s inferiority: as she told Harcourt in Act II, “I must marry
[Sparkish]; my reputation would suffer in the world else.” Reputation is a worthy thing, as is its sister virtue,
true honor; Alethea, however, seems to construe these qualities too much in terms of other people’s
perceptions rather than in terms of personal conduct and conscience. (Lucy, by contrast, voices what seems
a morally superior conception of honor: “Can there be a greater cheat or wrong done to a man, than to give
him your person without your heart?”) B. A. Kachur assesses Alethea’s merits and weakness thusly: “That
Alethea holds noble sentiments is clear, but that she misplaces her ideals on a man whom she does not love
and who lacks her virtue and substance is patently foolish, and even more foolish is her tenacious hold onto
an ideal strictly for the sake of appearances.”

Nor is a faulty concept of honor the only suspect element in Alethea’s marital calculations. Her low regard
for Sparkish’s intellect recalls Pinchwife’s contempt for Margery, and it serves a similar function: both
brother and sister have settled for foolish spouses on the theory that a fool will be easy to control—though
Alethea fears not unfaithfulness, as Pinchwife does, but rather the same sort of domestic tyranny and
sequestering in the countryside that she has seen Pinchwife inflict on Margery. As long as she can retain her
independence, she thinks, love will be a trifling matter: as she suggests weakly to Lucy, “I’ll retrieve [my
heart] for him after I am married a while.” As the example of Sir Jasper and Lady Fidget makes clear,
however, Wycherley does not think highly of the notion that spouses can be indifferent to (or
contemptuous of) each other upon marriage and learn to love each other afterwards. Additionally, Alethea
must learn that the kind of trust and autonomy that she seeks from a husband will be truly valuable only
when they are bestowed by a man of sense and integrity, not when they are the result of the indifference of
a frivolous man who cannot bring himself to care about her.
Scene 2 demonstrates the kind of verbal and physical abuse that can be sanctioned by a system that grants
husbands sovereign power over their wives. Pinchwife is innately violent: Margery is not unreasonable to
fear that he will kill her pet squirrel by way of punishing her, and his natural hatred of women erupts here in
brutal ways as he threatens to write “whore” on her face with his penknife. This gesture is, as B. A. Kachur

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notes, “a shocking and violent image of his desire to brand and disfigure her.” Unlike Sir Jasper, then, who
veils his sexism with civility, Pinchwife embodies unabashed misogyny, exposing the malevolent basis of his
society’s prevalent chauvinism.

Notably, however, Margery does not seem particularly frightened by these signs of Pinchwife’s violent
tendencies: though she complies with his orders under threat of injury, she never cowers, and by the end of
the scene she has brought off a risky plan to subvert him. Doubtless we are to understand that her
unworldliness prevents her from appreciating how large a role conventional manliness plays in Pinchwife’s
ego and self-presentation; she will therefore hardly be alert to the dangers of upsetting his emotional
balance by undermining his masculinity. More than that, however, the contrast of Margery’s ebullience with
Pinchwife’s brutality and insecurity has the effect of aligning audience and reader more firmly with the
oppressed wife, who even under the pressure of tyranny shows more spirit than her “grum” old husband.
As David Cook and John Swannell point out, with this scene “we are now entirely on her side in her
impulsive endeavours to beguile her husband, and we experience a sense of comic release when she
succeeds at the end of the scene.”

Analysis of Act IV, Scenes 3-4

One of Wycherley’s most effective comic devices is the use of a speech which a fool interprets in its obvious
sense but which the wittier characters and the audience interpret in its covert, real significance. Sparkish is
frequently on the wrong side of these exchanges, and his tendency toward bespeaks some of his moral and
psychological inadequacy. For example, when he overhears Horner speaking of someone who “is to be
bubbled of his mistress,” he relishes the prospect because it never occurs to him that he himself is the
target of the intended bubbling. As Katharine M. Rogers observes, “Sparkish keeps misinterpreting speeches
which are perfectly evident to everybody else because he is too self-absorbed to be aware of anyone’s
feelings but his own.”
A related form of myopia afflicts Sir Jasper, who in Scene 3 takes “china” to mean “china,” which it assuredly
does not, and who even supplies his own unwitting double entendre (“Wife, my Lady Fidget, wife, he is
coming in to you the back way”). Sir Jasper has been eager to believe in Horner’s impotence because it is
convenient to him, presenting a means of disposing of his wife’s social energies, and because it affords him
amusement; this investment in the theory of Horner’s deficiency then allows him to construe his wife’s
interactions with Horner as mere sexual shadow-boxing. In the china scene, moreover, the self-duping of Sir
Jasper is compounded by an even baser form of self-interest, namely monetary greed: fine china is a
valuable commodity, and Sir Jasper the upwardly mobile businessman is ardently supportive of his wife’s
attempts to procure a specimen from Horner. As in the case of Sparkish, then, the failure of Sir Jasper to see
(or hear) properly is as much a moral failure, deriving from his selfishness, as an epistemological one, and
the sight of him cooperating in his own cuckolding is thereby poetically just.
As for Horner, the china scene makes clear that he now has more lovers than he is physically capable of
satisfying. It also suggests that his sexual compulsions have turned him into something of an automaton:
the relentless innuendo hints that he is to these ladies no less an object than is the piece of china that Lady
Fidget fondles after their encounter offstage. B. A. Kachur puts the issue in strong terms: “The greatest
irony, of course, is that in his disguise as a eunuch, Horner has unwittingly feminised himself in more ways
than one: not only is he suitable only for such female pastimes as theatregoing, card playing and gossiping
…, he has also become a mechanical phallus, reducing himself to what is typically the feminine role of
sexual object only, an anatomical part that is the sum of his entire worth.” Horner’s pose of being impotent,
then, does two things: it emphasizes, of course, the purely physical nature of his desire for women; but also,
as Katharine M. Rogers observes, it “symbolically suggests that—for all his virility—he is something less than
a man.”

Act IV concludes with a brief but important scene in which Margery, writing to Horner, gives voice to her
feelings about their relationship and her marriage with Pinchwife. It appears that the unworldly Margery did
not previously apprehend the severity of her emotional deprivation with Pinchwife—only with the advent
of Horner has she begun to recognize that others have trapped her in a wretched existence. Thus, in Act II
she avowed to Pinchwife that “You are mine own dear bud, and I know you; I hate a stranger.” Her previous

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rustic existence had never brought her among strangers, and consequently she had grown to take comfort
in the familiar.

By Act IV, however, she has undergone an awakening, which she renders now in physical terms: “when I
think of my husband, I tremble and am in a cold sweat and have inclinations to vomit but when I think of my
gallant, dear Mr. Horner, my hot fit comes and I am all in a fever.” Thus, the young woman who began the
play professing her loyalty to her husband now speaks explicitly of “this unfortunate match, which was
never, I assure you, of my choice.” She has been put in touch with her own longing for romance and a vital
human connection, and the result is that she is impulsively ready to commit herself to the first capable
partner who presents himself.

Analysis of Act V, Scenes 1-3

Margery has made remarkable progress in trickery and is now almost out-Hornering Horner with her
outlandish ruses. Lucy, of course, is the real mastermind, but it is significant for Margery’s characterization
that the girl who began the play so innocent that she needed a definition of the word “jealousy” now
wonders to herself “what lie I shall tell next.” This “silly innocent,” as Horner calls her, has evidently
assimilated some of the guile of the town. Importantly, however, her motive in dissembling is always the
straightforward one of desire, and in her case desire is naturally attended by affection. She is unlike Horner
in that she is never mercenary or exploitative; she is equally unlike Lady Fidget in that her duplicity is never
of that particularly odious sort known as hypocrisy.
In addition to Lucy, Margery’s own husband deserves some of the (dubious) credit for her new aptitude in
deceit. In the episode of Pinchwife’s conveying Margery to Horner’s lodging, Wycherley supplies a brilliant
dramatic symbol: having taught Margery how to write deceitful letters (how to “shift” in the town), the
jealous husband now literally leads his wife to an assignation with her lover. The deceitfulness of the
women in the play is a natural result of the neglect and cruelty of the men; as P. F. Vernon says, Margery’s
progress in duplicity “demonstrates exactly how craft grows in response to tyranny,” and Pinchwife
facilitates the connection precisely through the measures he takes to prevent it.

However deserved Pinchwife’s cuckolding may be, nevertheless Margery’s eagerness to fly to Horner must
inspire ambivalent feelings in the alert reader. As David Cook and John Swannell observe, “We are willing to
feel that Margery deserves an interlude with the rakish Horner, but there is a touch of pathos in her
mistaking him for the prince of her girlish dreams.” Although Horner does show some insight and
appreciation when he remarks to The Quack upon the “original[ity]” of Margery’s first letter to him, he
certainly does not reciprocate her apparent readiness to form a strong emotional attachment; indeed, he
resembles Pinchwife in this respect, that sexual bonds, rather than emotional ones, are all he seeks from
women.

As Margery and Horner come together, Alethea and Sparkish fall apart. Lucy, the all-wise, gets to declare
victory in Scene 3, having previously cast doubt on Alethea’s sense of Sparkish’s virtues. Lucy has indeed
been largely right about Sparkish, of course, but she is actually wrong to attribute his anger to jealousy: it
consists instead of rage over the injury to his vanity and indignation at Alethea’s supposedly betraying, and
thereby humiliating, “a gentleman of wit and pleasure about the town.” Sparkish has now assumed the role
he has so long feared, that of the foolish gentleman whom the poet caricatures in plays.

The readiness with which he accepts the notion of his fiancée’s guilt is startling—he does not even pause to
inquire into the accusation against her. Logically, however, he has no reason not to believe the accusation
(despite the fact that Pinchwife’s evidence is purely circumstantial), for the simple reason that he has never
paid enough attention to Alethea to notice her integrity and her devotion to honor. He repudiates her
savagely, belying his earlier claim that, “as we [wits] have no affections, so we have no malice”: on the
contrary, though Sparkish is indeed devoid of affection, he is potent in malice when his precious ego is on
the line. Hence his indignation: “But who would have thought a woman”—any woman; Alethea in her
particularity is irrelevant here— “could have been false to me?” Everything, then, is about “me”; even as a
spurned lover, Sparkish manages to be entirely self-centered. As Cook and Swannell point out, Sparkish is

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deeply invested in a libertine code of display and self-assertion that, taken to an extreme, precludes all
meaningful human contact.

Analysis of Act V, Scene 4 and Epilogue.

In what has become known as the “banquet scene,” the “virtuous gang” reveal to Horner their true moral
condition: the ladies engage in some crude (and stereotypically masculine) behavior, singing drinking songs
that denigrate the other sex and boasting of their sexual escapades. This episode has been faulted for
heavy-handedness: for example, Katharine M. Rogers argues that the women “confess more than is realistic;
and the naked ugliness of the resulting picture is inconsistent with the gay tone of the play as a whole. It is
too fantastic for a woman like Lady Fidget to admit openly, even in drink, that her public modesty is an
unmistakable sign of her public lust.” In defense of Wycherley, however, one might reply that what happens
in the banquet scene is merely an extreme version of the affect Horner has on people throughout the play.
Horner has tended to bring out the real, base natures of those with whom he interacts: the women are
cynical and licentious, the men are stupid and selfish, and Sparkish is a pretender. Only Margery, Alethea,
and Harcourt are no more genuine around Horner than away from him, and that is because they are largely
without guile.
In Restoration plays, adulterous wives usually suffer some humiliation at the end of the play in a grand
meting-out of punishment that restores the moral balance of justice and harmony. By contrast, Wycherley
never discredits the adulterous Margery but instead allows her to remain sympathetic (if hardly triumphant)
at the end. Nor do even Lady Fidget and her “virtuous gang” receive their just deserts: their exposure blows
over, and they will doubtless continue to avail themselves of Horner’s services under the protection of the
rumor in which all the company have just declared their belief. This exemption of the immoral women from
punishment perhaps indicates Wycherley’s cynicism, a feeling that there is no sense apportioning blame in a
society in which nearly everyone is hopelessly corrupt. Alternatively, it may indicate Wycherley’s more
generous conviction that the infidelity of the women is simply a reaction to the tyranny of the men: not
being ultimately responsible for their own behavior, the women do not merit punishment at the end of the
play. Still, the unfaithful women do not merit the reward of happiness, either: only Harcourt and Alethea
seem likely to have love and happiness after the close of the curtain, for “Love proceeds from esteem,” as
Alethea observes, and deeply duplicitous people cannot merit esteem.

The false accusation against Alethea, i.e. that she has betrayed Sparkish and taken up with Horner, gives
Harcourt an opportunity to demonstrate that quality of honor which he must possess if he is to merit her
respect and affection. His declaration, that he “will not only believe your innocence myself, but will make
the world believe it,” may seem a bit comically grandiose; nevertheless, it bespeaks a degree of loyalty that
no other character in the play, save perhaps Alethea herself, ever matches. With this gesture of faith,
Harcourt completes his shift away from the cynicism of Horner and the other rakes, taking his stand instead
with Alethea’s conviction of the value of honor and marital fidelity. For her part, Alethea shows that she has
learned a lesson as well: no longer placing supreme value on her reputation in the eyes of the world, she
declares to Harcourt that she values no one’s opinion but his.

On the other end of the spectrum from Alethea and Harcourt’s exchange of elevated sentiments, Margery
provides some of the funniest moments of the scene, with her untutored enthusiasm for her new lover
(“You shall be my husband now”) and her very impolitic honesty on the subject of his virility (“You shall not
disparage poor Mr. Horner; for to my certain knowledge—”). She is absurd as ever in this final scene, but
the comedy is tempered by our sense of the bleakness of her prospects: Horner will not be her new
husband, she will soon be returning to the country, and the hypocrites shout down her advocacy of
Horner’s prowess. She is absurd, however, in a magnificent way: she is the lone voice of truth-telling in a
society predicated on deception of others and ultimately, as this scene makes clear, deception of self—for
as Pinchwife says in a revealing moment, “For my own sake fain I would all believe.”

As for Horner himself, he is ultimately a lonely figure: when he has exposed the pretension and
licentiousness endemic to London, his only (onstage) audience has been The Quack, whom he holds in
contempt. As B. A. Kachur says, “Horner represents the darker side of the hardcore libertine: isolated and

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without close friends or confidants, sexually competitive and aggressive, undesirous of emotional
attachment, and selfishly motivated.” He has committed himself to a life of lying to everyone, even Harcourt
and Dorilant, with the only exceptions being his upper-class mistresses; these women are mere objects to
him, the interchangeable instruments of his pleasure, and yet his relationships with them are the only
honest relationships he allows himself. If Horner is not physically sterile, then he is spiritually and
emotionally so, and he is telling the truth, in a way, when he says that he can never be a husband, for he is
incapable of the emotions that constitute spousal love.

The Country Wife Restoration Patent Theaters.

During the Restoration, theater companies needed royal patents in order to stage spoken plays. (Opera,
pantomime, dance, masque, and other less verbal genres of performance could be staged without license.)
Accordingly, King Charles II, who turned out to be a great patron of contemporary English theater, granted
two theatrical monopolies in 1660, shortly after gaining the throne; the fortunate recipients were the King’s
Company, managed by Thomas Killigrew, and the Duke’s Company, managed by William Davenant. The
King’s Company soon settled in at the Theatre Royal in Bridges Street, later (in 1674) rebuilding and
renaming the structure The Theatre Royal in Drury Lane; meanwhile, the Duke’s Company established itself
at Lisle’s Tennis Court in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, later (in 1671) relocating to Dorset Garden. The great architect
Sir Christopher Wren designed the new Theatre Royal in Drury Lane; the Dorset Garden Theatre, too, is
often ascribed to Wren, though this attribution is in doubt.
Unlike the open-air theaters of the Renaissance, the playhouses of the Restoration had enclosed roofs and
artificial lighting (probably very dim by today’s standards, as it was provided entirely by tallow candles).
Seating was in two sections, namely the pit and the galleries. Unlike Renaissance theaters, in which the
lowest-paying patrons (the famous “groundlings”) stood for the entire performance on the floor before the
stage, Restoration theaters had benches on this level. At half-a-crown for admission, the pit, as it was called,
was the second-most expensive part of the house; it was also the most miscellaneous part of the house,
attracting various members of the gentry class plus the urban litterateurs and the “wits” with whom
Wycherley’s Mr. Sparkish is so eager to class himself. Beyond the pit were three tiers of galleries. The lowest
tier was subdivided into boxes, which were occupied by the nobility and wealthy gentry at four shillings per
seat; in the center of this tier was the royal box. The second and third galleries were less grand, with the
second subdivided into boxes and the third not; these seats were the cheapest in the house, costing
eighteenpence and a shilling. The stage itself had two sections, the forestage (or proscenium) and the inner
stage. The forestage, where the main action was performed, extended into the auditorium, while the inner
stage was the setting for scenic effects. Separating the two areas of the stage was the proscenium arch,
which provided a visual frame for the dramatic action; this architectural distinction of dramatic space from
audience space was new to the English theater.
Three of Wycherley’s four plays debuted at the Theatre Royal. (The one exception, The Gentleman Dancing-
Master, which played at the Dorset Garden Theatre in 1672, was his least successful effort, both artistically
and commercially.) The original Theatre Royal in Bridges Street was a three-tiered wooden building with an
audience capacity of 700; the new Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, at which The Country Wife opened in 1675,
was also three-tiered but larger, with a capacity of 2,000. The construction of this elaborate and expensive
building represented a major financial investment for the King’s Company, but Killigrew felt that he needed
to upgrade his troupe’s facilities in response to the success of the Duke’s Company in employing crowd-
pleasing technical advances. The new stage equipment included sound-effects apparatus and the
continental innovation of moveable scenery made possible by sliding shutters.
The two rival companies offered two distinctly different styles of theater. Davenant’s Duke’s Company
attracted crowds by emphasizing spectacle, going heavy on visual and sound effects and elaborate stage
and costume design. This approach represented a continuation of the previous century’s masque or
pageant tradition, in which professional actors and musicians, in tandem with amateur participants (usually
courtiers or other aristocrats) would perform lavish allegories before a royal or noble patron. On this model,
the quality of acting and scriptwriting was less important than the extravagance of the production values.
By contrast, Killigrew at the Theatre Royal sought strong scripts for his fine actors. (Tellingly, his resident

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dramatist was the great poet John Dryden.) Accordingly, it was the King’s Company at the Theatre Royal that
developed Restoration Comedy’s distinctive traits of actor-driven banter and clever innuendo, of which
Wycherley’s works are major exempla; by comparison, the scripts put on by Davenant’s company have, by
and large, not endured.

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