Theatre
The Country Wife
William Wycherley · 1675
Opening lines
Horner
A quack is as fit for a pimp, as a midwife for a bawd; they are still but in their way, both helpers of nature.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
London. Back from France, Horner has a charlatan spread the word that a surgeon has left him impotent: the husbands, reassured, entrust their wives to him, and the wives begin by fleeing him in disgust. Pinchwife, who has just married a naive young woman from the country, shuts her up and forbids her to return to the theatre. She wants to see the town; he dresses her as a boy so that Horner will not recognise her, and takes her out like that into the streets.
Context
The play was first staged in January 1675 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on a stage where women's roles had been played by actresses for only fifteen years, the theatre having been banned for eighteen years and reopened in 1660. It draws its material from several plays by Molière. Its last performance of the eighteenth century took place in 1753; it was not staged again for one hundred and seventy-one years, an expurgated version having replaced it, in which the character who carries the ruse has disappeared.
Who it is for
A comedy in five acts and in prose, in the English of the Restoration, translated into French in a bilingual edition.
Prizes and reception
Nearly one hundred and seventy years off the English stage, during which an expurgated version took its place and went through at least twenty editions.
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