Puritan age + Restoration age:

This blog is in response to the task given by our professor https://blog.dilipbarad.com/2021/02/puritan-and-restoration-age-english.html. Here is link you can go there for more detail.

William wycherley:

Born:1640, England.

Died:1715, London.

one of the greatest dramatists of the restoration period, British Author William Wycherley. Wycherley was born in England, 1640, into an established shrop-shrine family.less than wycherley's birth, the English civil war began. Oliver Cromwell led a union of puritan and supporters of parliamentary rule against the forces of king Charles 1.

France became a safe haven for "Royalist" families such as wycherley's who supported the king and his dynasty. Returning to England, there is little evidence of Wycherley's activities between the ages of 15 and 30. Wycherley's first play, love in a wood, premiered in london in 1671 and made him famous overnight. His second play, a comedy titled the gentleman ‘Dancing Master’ was performed later that year, but it was not as well received. Shortly after this, Wycherley probably served as a naval officer in Dutch war.

The country-wife, Wycherley's best known play, was first performed in 1672 or 1673. This play was a great success and is still performed today in 1697 wycherley succeeded to his father’s estate. In 1704 he published ‘miscellany’ poems, which caught the attention of young alexander pope, who later helped wycherley to revise and edit his poetry. His plays helped to establish the subjects and structures that would come to define ‘Restoration Comedies.’

Another common feature of restoration comedies was a plot involving a woman forced to disguise herself as a man, as seen in “The country wife”by wycherley. The restoration was the first time women were allowed to perform on stage. Wycherly greatly influenced other restoration dramatists as well as a number of British authors who followed him. 

By 1675, william wycherley had firmly established himself as a playwright and had come under the notice of the king himself. His stock was on the rise when “The country wife”, his best known comedy, was published and performed. In 1676, his fourth play, ‘the plain dealer’, was produced and became another huge success. In 1678, however, wycherley fell seriously ill. Money plus the good life in France cured whatever illness Wycherley may have had. His salary was fifteen-hundred pounds per year.

The following year, he married a wealthy widow, the countess of Drogheda. The king disapproved of this marriage, and wycherley was removed from royal favour ‘The plain dealer’ was james’s favourite comedy, and he once again restored wycherley to the comfort of the upper class. Late in his life, he took to writing poems and published a volume of poetry.

Wycherley wrote verses, and, when quite an old man, prepared them for the press by the aid of Alexander Pope, then not much more than a boy. But, notwithstanding all Pope's tinkering, they remain contemptible. Pope's published correspondence with the dramatist was probably edited by him with a view to giving an impression of his own precocity. The friendship between the two cooled, according to Pope's account, because Wycherley took offense at the numerous corrections on his verses. It seems more likely that Wycherley discovered that Pope, while still professing friendship and admiration, satirized his friend in the Essay on Criticism. Wycherley died on the 1st of January 1716, and was buried in the vault of the church in Covent Garden.

wycherley's work " The country wife":

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.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.

Illness, depression, and financial hardship beset Wycherley in his final years, and the capstone of these afflictions was a very sordid transaction that led to his remarriage in 1715 at age 74. A cousin of Wycherley’s, one Captain Thomas Shrimpton, suggested that Wycherley might discharge his debts by marrying a young woman named Elizabeth Jackson and, with her, a considerable dowry. Wycherley had no interest in this scheme, as his physical condition was deteriorating rapidly at the time; having recently reconverged to Catholicism, he was more interested in the sacrament of last rites than that of matrimony. Shrimpton, however, availed himself of everything from threats to physical compulsion, and in the end Wycherley submitted to ceremony, eleven days before his death on New Year’s Eve.

Inevitably, the litigation over Wycherley’s will favored the widowed Elizabeth over Wycherley’s nephew. Shrimpton and the new Mrs. Wycherley were lovers, of course, and they married three months later, leaving the late dramatist on the wrong end of just such a cynical plot as he might once have delighted to write into his comedies.

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