This article is about the Restoration comedy by Wycherley. For the TV episode, see The Country Wife (The Green Green Grass).
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The Country Wife
The first edition of The Country Wife
Written by
William Wycherley
Characters
Mr. Horner
Mr. Harcourt
Mr. Pinchwife
Mrs. Margery Pinchwife
Mrs. Alithea
more...
Date premiered
January 1675
Place premiered
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
Original language
English
Genre
Restoration comedy
Setting
London
The Country Wife is a Restoration comedy written by William Wycherley and first performed in 1675. A product of the tolerant early Restoration period, the play reflects an aristocratic and anti-Puritan ideology, and was controversial for its sexual explicitness even in its own time. The title contains a lewd pun with regard to the first syllable of "country". It is based on several plays by Molière, with added features that 1670s London audiences demanded: colloquial prose dialogue in place of Molière's verse, a complicated, fast-paced plot tangle, and many sex jokes. It turns on two indelicate plot devices: a rake's trick of pretending impotence to safely have clandestine affairs with married women, and the arrival in London of an inexperienced young "country wife", with her discovery of the joys of town life, especially the fascinating London men.
The implied condition the Rake, Horner, claimed to suffer from was, he said, contracted in France whilst "dealing with common women". The only cure was to have a surgeon drastically reduce the extent of his manly stature; therefore, he could be no threat to any man's wife.
The scandalous trick and the frank language have for much of the play's history kept it off the stage and out of print. Between 1753 and 1924, The Country Wife was considered too outrageous to be performed at all and was replaced on the stage by David Garrick's cleaned-up and bland version The Country Girl, now a forgotten curiosity.[1] The original play is again a stage favourite today, and is also acclaimed by academic critics, who praise its linguistic energy, sharp social satire, and openness to different interpretations.
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debut in TheCountryWife (1965–1966) at age 13. Irving subsequently studied theater at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater and at the London...
and now at Restoration comedy is probably Wycherley's TheCountryWife (1675). TheCountryWife has three interlinked but distinct plots, which each project...
at the Royal Court Theatre and was cast as Margery Pinchwife in TheCountryWife. She appeared with George Devine in the Eugène Ionesco play, The Chairs...
included Dorian Gray in The Picture of Dorian Gray with Rupert Everett, Hamlet in The Marovitz Hamlet, and Horner in TheCountryWife. His 1994 performances...
1675 Restoration comedy TheCountryWife also features such word play, even in its title. By the 17th century, a softer form of the word, "cunny", came into...
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Theatre, West End), in the original production of Whipping It Up at the Bush Theatre, and as Margery Pinchwife in TheCountryWife (Haymarket, West End)...
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comedy Donkeys' Years at the Comedy Theatre. Having appeared in the role of Pinchwife in the comedy TheCountryWife at the Royal Haymarket Theatre in...
Horner in TheCountryWife, Orlando in As You Like It, Warbeck in The Witch of Edmonton and Laertes to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet. His hit of the season was...
2006 (part of the Old Vic's '24 Hour Plays') Boeing Boeing, 2007 TheCountryWife, 2007–08 The Clean House, 2008 Calendar Girls, 2008–09 The Breath of Life...
January 1716) was an English dramatist of the Restoration period, best known for the plays TheCountryWife and The Plain Dealer. Wycherley was born at Clive...
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provincial theatre, she has appeared in: TheCountryWife (Manchester Royal Exchange) as Margery Pinchwife; The Constant Wife (Theatr Clwyd) as Constance; A Streetcar...
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