William Wycherley, 1640–1715. Born, in London, 1640. Educated in France, 1655. Became a Roman Catholic. Abjured Church of Rome, and matriculated at Queen’s Coll., Oxford. Took no degree. Student of Inner Temple, 1659. Served in Army during war with Holland. Play, “Love in a Wood,” produced at Drury Lane, 1671; “The Gentleman Dancing Master,” Dorset Gardens Theatre, Jan. 1672; “The Country Wife,” Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, 1673[?]; “The Plain Dealer,” Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, 1674. Married (i.) Countess of Drogheda, 1678[?]. After her death was imprisoned for seven years in the Fleet for debt. Debts paid by James II., who gave him a pension of £200. Friendship with Pope begun, 1704. Married (ii.) Miss Jackson, Nov. 1715. Died, in London, Dec. 1715. Buried in St. Paul’s, Covent Garden. Works: “Love in a Wood,” 1672; “The Gentleman Dancing Master,” 1673; “The Country Wife,” 1675; “The Plain Dealer,” 1677; “Epistles to the King and Duke” (anon.), 1682; “Miscellany Poems,” 1704; “Works,” 1713. Posthumous: “Posthumous Works,” ed. by L. Theobald, 1728. Collected Works: “Plays, etc.” (2 vols.), 1720.

Personal

  My friend the Plain-Dealer.

  Wycherley died a Romanist, and has owned that religion in my hearing.—It was generally thought by this gentleman’s friends, that he lost his memory by old age; it was not by age, but by accident, as he himself told me often. He remembered as well at sixty years old, as he had done ever since forty, when a fever occasioned that loss to him…. Wycherley was a very handsome man. His acquaintance with the famous Duchess of Cleveland commenced oddly enough. One day, as he passed that duchess’s coach in the ring, she leaned out of the window, and cried out loud enough to be heard distinctly by him; “Sir, you’re a rascal: you’re a villain!” Wycherley from that instant entertained hopes. He did not fail waiting on her the next morning: and with a very melancholy tone begged to know, how it was possible for him to have so much disobliged her Grace? They were very good friends from that time; yet, after all, what did he get by her? He was to have travelled with the young Duke of Richmond; King Charles gave him, now and then, a hundred pounds, not often…. We were pretty well together to the last: only his memory was so totally bad, that he did not remember a kindness done to him, even from minute to minute. He was peevish too latterly; so that sometimes we were out a little, and sometimes in. He never did any unjust thing to me in his whole life; and I went to see him on his death-bed.

  Wycherley was in a bookseller’s shop at Bath, or Tunbridge, when Lady Drogheda came in and happened to inquire for the “Plain Dealer.” A friend of Wycherley’s, who stood by him, pushed him toward her, and said, “There’s the Plain Dealer, Madam, if you want him?” Wycherley made his excuses; and Lady Drogheda said, “that she loved plain-dealing best.” He afterwards visited that lady, and in some time after married her. This proved a great blow to his fortunes; just before the time of his courtship, he was designed for governor to the late Duke of Richmond; and was to have been allowed fifteen hundred pounds a year from the government. His absence from court in the progress of this amour, and his being yet more absent after his marriage, (for Lady Drogheda was very jealous of him), disgusted his friends there so much, that he lost all his interest with them. His lady died; he got but little by her: and his misfortunes were such, that he was thrown into the Fleet, and lay there seven years.

  A man who seems to have had among his contemporaries his full share of reputation, to have been esteemed without virtue, and caressed without good nature. Pope was proud of his notice. Wycherley wrote verses in his praise, which he was charged by Dennis with writing to himself, and they agreed for awhile to flatter one another. It is pleasant to remark how soon Pope learnt the cant of an author, and began to treat critics with contempt, though he had yet suffered nothing from them. But the fondness of Wycherley was too violent to last. His esteem of Pope was such that he submitted some poems to his revision; and when Pope, perhaps proud of such confidence, was sufficiently bold in his criticisms and liberal in his alterations, the old scribbler was angry to see his pages defaced, and felt more pain from the detection than content from the amendment of his faults. They parted; but Pope always considered him with kindness; and visited him a little before he died.

  In reading this author’s best works, those which one reads most frequently over, and knows almost by heart, one cannot help thinking of the treatment he received from Pope about his verses. It was hardly excusable in a boy of sixteen to an old man of seventy.

  So high did Wycherley stand in the royal favour, that once, when he was confined by a fever to his lodgings in Bow-street, Charles, who, with all his faults, was certainly a man of a social and affable disposition, called on him, sat by his bed, advised him to try change of air, and gave him a handsome sum of money to defray the expense of the journey. Buckingham, then master of the horse, and one of that infamous ministry shown by the name of the Cabal, had been one of the duchess’s innumerable paramours. He at first showed some symptoms of jealousy, but soon, after his fashion, veered round from anger to fondness, and gave Wycherley a commission in his own regiment, and a place in the royal household.

  He ended as he had begun, by unskilfulness and misconduct, having succeeded neither in becoming happy nor honest, having used his vigorous intelligence and real talent only to his own injury and the injury of others.

Love in a Wood, 1672

  The comedy itself is poor and feeble, and does not contain a single passage from which the wit that Wycherley afterwards displayed in his writings could be reasonably predicated.

  Is worth little in style or plot; yet we think, upon the whole, it has been undervalued. It is not unamusing. It gives early evidence of that dislike of backbiting and false friendship, which honourably distinguished Wycherley through life.

  The comedy of “Love in a Wood” is, indeed, an extraordinary piece of invention, and of writing, too, for a youth of nineteen. His knowledge of the arcana of town life, with its interminable intrigues and love-treasons—if it be not profanation to use the term “love” in this description of social commerce—is certainly remarkable. The disguises and blunders and perplexities are conducted with all the display of a young ambition to build up a dramatic plot: they are spun out to wearisomeness, and mostly improbable in design. One must keep one’s mental eyes closed while reading it, and, like children, play at “make-believe.” Moreover, we feel little or no sympathy with even the better class of the characters; one cares nothing whether they “marry and live happy afterwards,” or not; for their whole course of conduct shows that their jealousy arises from sensual vanity, and not from a worthy pride of exclusiveness; and, moreover, we feel that if in the end they had all been jilted, they would have quickly righted themselves by some other toy object. Nevertheless, it must be confessed that, gross as many of the scenes are, the “mirror held up to nature” is not a distorted one.

  Is in the style of Etheredge and Sedley,—indeed “The Mulberry Garden” of the latter (1668) has been justly held to have suggested this play. Its satire on manners is, however, perhaps more incisive and contemptuous than theirs; and, in contrast to the fantastic figures of Sedley’s production, it already exhibits signs of a realistic vigour capable of taking us back from the Restoration writers to Elisabethans like Middleton.

The Gentleman Dancing-Master, 1672

  This play sparkles with wit; but, being founded for the most part in fugitive manners, and being deficient in the more durable elements of nature, its popularity ceased with the age in which its points and allusions were familiar to the audience.

  Preposterously improbable in plot; overcharged, and yet feeble in character; and the dialogue, not merely “flat, stale, and improbable;” but, what is the greatest of all defects in a play, there is frequent repetition in it.

  “The Gentleman Dancing-Master” resembles Molière in manner more than any other of Wycherley’s plays; indeed its intrigue has been compared to that of “L’École des Femmes,” but, in accordance with this author’s general method of working, the resemblance is by no means close. The English work may be described as a capital farce, written with genuine vigour and freshness of humour; and to my mind this is by far the most agreeable of Wycherley’s plays.

The Country Wife, 1673

  This evening the comedy called the Country Wife was acted in Drury-lane, for the benefit of Mrs. Bignell…. The poet, on many occasions, where the propriety of the character will admit of it, insinuates, that there is no defence against vice but the contempt of it; and has, in the natural ideas of an untainted innocent, shown the gradual steps to ruin and destruction which persons of condition run into, without the help of a good education to form their conduct. The torment of a jealous coxcomb, which arises from his own false maxims, and the aggravation of his pain by the very words in which he sees her innocence, makes a very pleasant and instructive satire. The character of Homer, and the design of it, is a good representation of the age in which that comedy was written; at which time love and wenching were the business of life, and the gallant manner of pursuing women was the best recommendation at Court. To this only it is to be imputed, that a gentleman of Mr. Wycherley’s character and sense condescends to represent the insults done to the honour of the bed, without just reproof; but to have drawn a man of probity with regard to such considerations had been a monster, and a poet had at that time discovered his want of knowing the manners of the Court he lived in, by a virtuous character in his fine gentleman, as he would shew his ignorance by drawing a vicious one to please the present audience.

  Wycherley was before Congreve; and his “Country Wife” will last longer than anything of Congreve’s as a popular acting play. It is only a pity that it is not entirely his own; but it is enough so to do him never-ceasing honour, for the best things are his own. His humour is, in general, broader, his characters more natural, and his incidents more striking than Congreve’s. It may be said of Congreve, that the workmanship overlays the materials: in Wycherley, the casting of the parts and the fable are alone sufficient to ensure success. We forget Congreve’s characters, and only remember what they say: we remember Wycherley’s characters, and the incidents they meet with, just as if they were real, and forget what they say, comparatively speaking.

  It was evidently suggested by L’Ecole des Femmes: the character of Arnolphe has been copied; but even here the whole conduct of the piece of Wycherley is his own. It is more artificial than that of Molière, wherein too much passes in description; the part of Agnes is rendered still more poignant; and, among the comedies of Charles’s reign, I am not sure that it is surpassed by any.

  In the “Country Wife” there are no such scenes and dialogue of continued excellence as those of Olivia and her visitors in the second act of the “Plain Dealer;” but the principal female character hits a point of more lasting nature, and is an exquisite meeting of the extremes of simplicity and cunning; so that with some alterations, especially of the impudent project of Horner, which would have been an affront in any other age to a decent audience, this comedy outlasted the performances of the graver one.

  Though one of the most profligate and heartless of human compositions, it is the elaborate production of a mind, not indeed rich, original, or imaginative, but ingenious, observant, quick to seize hints, and patient of the toil of polishing.

  The play itself, with all its extravagant coarseness, is not without its home-speaking moral: for the unrestricted woman of society, Alithea, vindicates her own self-respect by a steadiness and constancy towards the man to whom she had pledged her truth, till he himself, by wanton absurdity and self-seeking, forces her to marry the man she preferred, but had resolutely refused, because of her previous engagement; while the “cribbed and cabined” country wife, mewed up before marriage, and jealously watched, and mistrusted, and locked up afterwards, is ready to rush into any eccentricity of conduct from pure ignorance, with resentment at the injustice exercised towards her. Bad education, and want of confidence, from first to last, was the cause of all the evil; for her nature is frank and generous, and even lovable. She is a wild weed brought suddenly into the hothouse of artificial and licentious society. Another unfavourable feature in the play is the hollowness and utter absence of all confidence in the men towards each other: there is no resting-place for the heart—all are “dear friends,” and all would be traitors at the first glance of an inducement. They certainly are not hypocrites to each other, for no one is deceived in his estimate of his companion’s friendship.

  Of all comedies I have witnessed none appeared more amusing, more genuine, or more original.

  There can be no question that the men and women who sat through the acting of Wycherley’s “Country Wife” were past blushing.

  It is the most brilliant but the most indecent of Wycherley’s works. When it was revived in 1709, after an interval of six years, for Mrs. Bicknell’s benefit, Steele, in a criticism in the “Tatler” (16 April 1709), said that the character of the profligate Horner was a good representation of the age in which the comedy was written, when gallantry in the pursuit of women was the best recommendation at court. A man of probity in such manners would have been a monster. In 1766 Garrick brought out an adaptation of the play, under the title of “The Country Girl,” which is still acted occasionally; but, as Genest says (v. 116), in making it decent he made it insipid. Another adaptation, by John Lee, was published in 1765.

The Plain-Dealer, 1674

  There is a heaviness about it, indeed, an extravagance, an overdoing both in the style, the plot, and characters, but the truth of feeling and the force of interest prevail over every objection. The character of Manly, the Plain Dealer, is violent, repulsive, and uncouth, which is a fault, though one that seems to have been intended for the sake of contrast; for the portrait of consummate, artful hypocrisy in Olivia, is, perhaps, rendered more striking by it. The indignation excited against this odious and pernicious quality by the masterly exposure to which it is here subjected, is “a discipline of humanity.” No one can read this play attentively without being the better for it as long as he lives. It penetrates to the core; it shows the immorality and hateful effects of duplicity, by showing it fixing its harpy fangs in the heart of an honest and worthy man. It is worth ten volumes of sermons.

  The feelings of the public saw better than the court-wits, and instinctively revolted against this play in spite of the exquisite scenes of the scandal-mongering fine ladies and gentlemen.

  In “The Plain-Dealer” (1674) the cynicism of Wycherley has reached its acme…. As for the plot of this famous comedy, it is not less horrible than the chief character, Manly the “Plain-Dealer,” is revolting. The repulsiveness of the story, and of its dénouement, is such as to make description irksome; but the character of the hero may be judged by contrasting it with the original—if it can be so called—which suggested it, viz. the noble hero of Molière’s immortal “Misanthrope.”… Wycherley must in this play be allowed to have given proofs of genuine force and of essential originality, and to have produced what is indisputably one of the most powerful dramas of its age.

  One of the most brutally cynical, but none the less one of the best-constructed pieces which have ever held the stage. With his magnificent gaiety and buoyancy, Wycherley exaggerated and disfigured the qualities which should rule the comic stage, but they were there; he was a ruffian, but a ruffian of genius.

  The coarseness of Wycherley’s touch is nowhere more obvious than when we compare the picture of Fidelia, the girl who loves Manly and follows him to sea in man’s clothes, with Shakespeare’s Viola in “Twelfth Night.” Fidelia, with whom we are expected to be in sympathy, aids Manly in his revolting plot against Olivia. But much may be forgiven on account of the underplot of the litigious widow Blackacre, and her son Jerry, a raw squire. They are the forerunners of Goldsmith’s Mrs. Hardcastle and Tony Lumpkin, and of Steele’s Humphry Gubbin, and the scenes in which they appear enabled Wycherley to make use of such knowledge of the law as he had picked up at the Temple, and supply a much-needed lighter element to the play.

General

  A Gentleman, whom I may boldly reckon amongst the Poets of the First Rank: no Man that I know, except the Excellent Johnson, having outdone him in Comedy; in which alone he has imploy’d his Pen, but with that Success, that few have before, or will hereafter match him.

  Methinks Mr. de Muralt should have mention’d an excellent comic writer, (living when he was in England) I mean Mr. Wycherley, who was a long time known publickly to be happy in the good graces of the most celebrated mistress of King Charles the second. This gentleman, who pass’d his life among persons of the highest distinction, was perfectly well acquainted with their lives and their follies, and painted them with the strongest pencil, and in the truest colours. He has drawn a Misanthrope or man-hater, in imitation of that of Molière. All Wycherley’s strokes are stronger and bolder than those of our Misanthrope, but then they are less delicate, and the rules of decorum are not so well observ’d in this play. The English writer has corrected the only defect that is in Molière’s Comedy, the thinness of the plot, which also is so dispos’d, that the characters in it do not enough raise our concern. The English Comedy affects us, and the contrivance of the plot is very ingenious, but at the same time it is too bold for the French manners.

  Wycherley was really angry with me for correcting his verses so much. I was extremely plagued, up and down, for almost two years with them. However, it went off pretty well at last; and it appears, by the edition of Wycherley’s Posthumous Works, that he had followed the advice I so often gave him; and that he had gone so far as to make some hundreds of prose maxims out of his verses.—Those verses that are published, are a mixture of Wycherley’s own original lines, with a great many of mine inserted here and there, (but not difficult to be distinguished), and some of Wycherley’s softened a little in the running, probably by Theobald, who had the chief care of that edition.

  Wycherley was ambitious of the reputation of wit and libertinism; and he attained it: he was probably capable of reaching the fame of true comedy and instructive ridicule.

  If he had composed nothing but his poems, he would have been one of the most neglected writers in the English language.

  Wycherley was formed for his times, and the times for him; indeed his works were too voluptuous for any but the gay “Charles’ golden days;” besides they are wanting in most requisites of fine writing; yet he laboured much to form the manners of the times, which procured him the appellation of slow Wycherley, from Rochester.

  Translated into real life, the characters of … Wycherley’s dramas, are profligates and strumpets,—the business of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognized; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. No such effects are produced in their world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings,—for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated,—for no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage bed is stained,—for none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections are disquieted,—no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder,—for affection’s depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is neither right or wrong,—gratitude or its opposite,—claim or duty,—paternity or sonship. Of what consequence is it to virtue, or how is she at all concerned about it, whether Sir Simon, or Dapperwit, steal away Miss Martha; or who is the father of Lord Froth’s, or Sir Paul Pliant’s children?

  Wycherley has justly been considered as the earliest of our comic prose dramatists, who forsook the fleeting shapes of custom and manners that were brought to their gayest head in Etherege, for the more lasting wit and humour natural to the prevailing qualities of mankind. Etherege was the “dandy” of the prose drama, and Wycherley the first man…. He is somewhat heavy as well as “brawny” in his step; and when he moves faster, it is seldom from gayety. He has “wit at will” also, but then the will to be witty is frequently too obvious. It has too artificial an air of thought and antithesis. His best scenes are those of cross purposes, mutual exposure, or the contrast of natural with acquired cunning; those, in short, in which reflection and design have much more to do than animal spirits. His style is pure and unaffected, and clearness and force are his characteristics, in preference to what is either engaging or laughable. We can easily believe him to have been a “slow” writer; not from dullness, but from care and consideration.

  Wycherley’s plays are said to have been the produce of long and patient labour. The epithet of “slow” was early given to him by Rochester, and was frequently repeated. In truth, his mind, unless we are greatly mistaken, was naturally a very meager soil, and was forced only by great labour and outlay to bear fruit, which, after all, was not of the highest flavour. He has scarcely more claim to originality than Terence. It is not too much to say, that there is hardly anything of the least value in his plays, of which the hint is not to be found elsewhere. The best scenes in the “Gentleman Dancing-Master,” were suggested by Calderon’s Maestro de Danzar, not by any means one of the happiest comedies of the great Castilian poet. The “Country Wife” is borrowed from the Ecole des Maris and the Ecole des Femmes. The groundwork of the “Plain Dealer” is taken from the Misanthrope of Molière. One whole scene is almost translated from the Critique de l’Ecole des Femmes; Fidelia is Shakspeare’s Viola stolen, and marred in the stealing; and the Widow Blackacre, beyond comparison Wycherley’s best comic character, is the Countess in Racine’s Plaideurs, talking the jargon of English instead of that of French chicane.

  Wycherley, the coarsest writer who has polluted the stage…. His style is laboured, and troublesome to read. His tone is virulent and bitter. He frequently forces his comedy in order to get at spiteful satire. Effort and animosity mark all that he says or puts into the mouths of others…. We find in him no poetry of expression, no glimpse of the ideal, no system of morality which could console, raise, or purify men…. If Wycherley borrows a character anywhere, it is only to do it violence, or degrade it to the level of his own characters. If he imitates the Agnes of Molière, as he does in the “Country Wife,” he marries her in order to profane marriage, deprives her of honour, still more of shame, still more of grace, and changes her artless tenderness into shameless instincts and scandalous confessions. If he takes Shakspeare’s Viola, as in the “Plain Dealer,” it is to drag her through the vileness of infamy, amidst brutalities and surprises. If he translates the part of Célimène, he wipes out at one stroke the manners of a great lady, the woman’s delicacy, the tact of the lady of the house, the politeness, the refined air, the superiority of wit and knowledge of the world, in order to substitute the impudence and cheats of a foul-mouthed courtesan. If he invents an almost innocent girl, Hippolita, he begins by putting into her mouth words that will not bear transcribing. Whatever he does or says, whether be copies or originates, blames or praises, his stage is a defamation of mankind, which repels even when it attracts, and which sickens one while it corrupts. A certain gift hovers over all—namely, vigour—which is never absent in England, and gives a peculiar character to their virtues as to their vices.

  Wycherley, the first dramatist of the time, remains the most brutal among all writers for the stage; and nothing gives so damning an expression of his day as the fact that he found actors to repeat his words and audiences to applaud him. In men such as Wycherley Milton found types for the Belial of his great poem, “than whom a spirit more lewd fell not from Heaven, or more gross to love vice for itself.” He piques himself on the frankness and “plain dealing” which painted the world as he saw it, a world of brawls and assignations, of orgies at Vauxhall and fights with the watch, of lies and double entendres, of knaves and dupes, of men who sold their daughters and women who cheated their husbands. But the cynicism of Wycherley was no greater than that of the men about him; and in more love of what was vile, in contempt of virtue and disbelief in purity and honesty, the King himself stood ahead of any of his subjects.

  His merits lie in the vigour with which his characters are drawn, the clearness with which they stand out from one another, and the naturalness with which he both constructs his plots and chooses his language. As for his plots, they are rarely original, and in the main based upon Molière; but Wycherley neither borrows without reflexion, nor combines without care. The wit of his dialogue is less sparkling and spontaneous than that of Congreve’s or of Vanbrugh’s; he is, as Leigh Hunt says, somewhat heavy as well as brawny in his step, and he lacks in general the gaiety of spirit which is the most charming phase of comic humour. On the other hand, he excels in satire of an intenser kind; his sarcasms are as keen as they are cruel; and the cynicism of his wit cannot prevent us from acknowledging its power. But while he ruthlessly uncloaks the vices of his age, his own moral tone is affected by their influence to as deplorable a degree as is that of the most light-hearted and unthinking of the dramatists contemporary with him.

  Wycherley has this merit, that he was first in the field of our best school of comedy-writers. He virtually began the school of the Restoration comic dramatists, the so-called comedy of manners. True it is that had Molière not written comedies Wycherley would not have written as he did, and it must be admitted that Sir George Etheredge wrote plays as unconventionally natural so far as dialogue is concerned as Wycherley’s; but Etheredge’s comedies are altogether beneath notice as literature, while Wycherley is, and ever will be, a true English classic. If he transferred to our stage whole scenes from Molière, he did them into strong, nervous English, racy with mother wit.

  Whatever the cause, he was lost to the stage at thirty, and his occasional poetical productions, the most important of which have been already noticed, were far from qualifying him to sit in the seat of Dryden. He enjoyed, nevertheless, supremacy of another kind. Regarded as an extinct volcano, he gave umbrage to no rivals; his urbane and undemonstrative temper kept him out of literary feuds; all agreed to adore so benign and inoffensive a deity, and the general respect of the lettered world fitly culminated in Pope’s dedication of his “Homer” to him, the most splendid literary tribute the age could bestow.

  In Wycherley’s plays the immorality is more realistic, and therefore more harmful, than in other Restoration dramas; but his vigour and clearness of delineation are his greatest merits.