The Country Wife: Love, Marriage and Sovereignty

Abstract

No Carolean comedy has garnered such a range of critical opinion, some of which borders on moral indignation, for its prurient content as Wycherley’s acknowledged masterpiece, The Country Wife. Premièring at Drury Lane in January 1675, just one year prior to Etherege’s The Man of Mode and during the height of Carolean drama’s heavy proliferation of ‘sex comedies’ in the 1670s, Wycherley’s mordant play, which features not only a salacious libertine hero, aptly named Horner, who has deliberately spread the false rumour that he has suffered irreversible impotence after a botched operation for the pox so that he can seduce the willing wives of gullible and unwitting husbands, but also a host of equally libidinous and compliant women whose raw appetites for physical passion far exceed the boundaries of acceptable female propriety, has been labelled everything from ‘the most bestial play in all literature’,¹ an Ibsenite portrait of contemporary society, an exposé of male homosocial bonding, an attack on Hobbesian self-interest, a romping and innocuous comedy, an indictment against the age’s moral turpitude, a dramatised exegesis of masculinity, to anything else that falls in between the polarities of harmless farce and biting satire.²