William Wyncherly Flashcards
Country Wife: Wyncherly born
1641
Country Wife: Wyncherly dies
1716
Country Wife: Country Wife written
1675
Country Wife: Centers
being negotiated, mocked, revalued
Country Wife: performance
Putting on airs; acting, affectation
Country Wife: genre
Farce: crude characterization; ludicrously improbable situations; Horner getting out of many scrapes by luck and aplomb
Country Wife: tone, tendency
Anti-Puritan, aristocratic
Country Wife: George Eliot
Sparkish - Mr. Brooke
Country Wife: draws on several plays by
Moliere
Country Wife: Horner’s trick adapted loosely from
Terence’s Eunuchus
Country Wife: an influence on
Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw
Country Wife: David Garrick
The Country Girl, purged of indecency, awful
Country Wife: quote about the age/times
“Is it not a frank age? And I am a frank person” (Sparkish)
Country Wife: quote about love, liberality, jealousy
For love is better known by liberality than by jealousy” (Squeamish)
Country Wife: talking point: Sparkish, “Is it not a frank age? And I am a frank person.”
Meanings: French (Moliere, loose); Unrestrained or unchecked; unburdened with anxiety; liberal/bounteous; morally loose; ingenuous, candid, undisguised; lusty and vigorous
Country Wife: “frank” as unrestrained or unchecked
In some characters’ cases, unrestrained by morals; in others’, unrestrained by knowledge of the truth; finally, unrestrained by a wife or husband
Country Wife: “frank” as unburdened with anxiety
Some characters seem so, like Horner; but compare Pinchwife. The Restoration is not just a jovial or luxuriant moment, it is also a time of score-settling and anxiety and bitterness.
Country Wife: “frank” as liberal/bounteous
has the added effect, especially in Sparkish’s case, of being liberal with his own wife (i.e. sharing her)
Country Wife: “frank” as morally loose
the grand double meaning of the word in the play
Country Wife: “frank” as ingenuous, candid, or undisguised
Seen perfectly in the discussion of china: they are remarkably candid and undisguised, in one sense. But in another sense the duplicity is at its highest pitch
Country Wife: what is the irony in the play’s use of “frankness.”
Literally, the play evokes every sense of frankness, but in ways that show how much irony has been built into the concept. Almost every definition of frankness extant when Wyncherly is writing can be turned on itself, as W. does in this play.
