William Wyncherly

Question 1

Country Wife: Wyncherly born

Answer 1

1641

Question 2

Country Wife: Wyncherly dies

Answer 2

1716

Question 3

Country Wife: Country Wife written

Answer 3

1675

Question 4

Country Wife: Centers

Answer 4

being negotiated, mocked, revalued

Question 5

Country Wife: performance

Answer 5

Putting on airs; acting, affectation

Question 6

Country Wife: genre

Answer 6

Farce: crude characterization; ludicrously improbable situations; Horner getting out of many scrapes by luck and aplomb

Question 7

Country Wife: tone, tendency

Answer 7

Anti-Puritan, aristocratic

Question 8

Country Wife: George Eliot

Answer 8

Sparkish - Mr. Brooke

Question 9

Country Wife: draws on several plays by

Answer 9

Moliere

Question 10

Country Wife: Horner’s trick adapted loosely from

Answer 10

Terence’s Eunuchus

Question 11

Country Wife: an influence on

Answer 11

Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw

Question 12

Country Wife: David Garrick

Answer 12

The Country Girl, purged of indecency, awful

Question 13

Country Wife: quote about the age/times

Answer 13

“Is it not a frank age? And I am a frank person” (Sparkish)

Question 14

Country Wife: quote about love, liberality, jealousy

Answer 14

For love is better known by liberality than by jealousy” (Squeamish)

Question 15

Country Wife: talking point: Sparkish, “Is it not a frank age? And I am a frank person.”

Answer 15

Meanings: French (Moliere, loose); Unrestrained or unchecked; unburdened with anxiety; liberal/bounteous; morally loose; ingenuous, candid, undisguised; lusty and vigorous

Question 16

Country Wife: “frank” as unrestrained or unchecked

Answer 16

In some characters’ cases, unrestrained by morals; in others’, unrestrained by knowledge of the truth; finally, unrestrained by a wife or husband

Question 17

Country Wife: “frank” as unburdened with anxiety

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

Country Wife: “frank” as liberal/bounteous

Answer 18

has the added effect, especially in Sparkish’s case, of being liberal with his own wife (i.e. sharing her)

Question 19

Country Wife: “frank” as morally loose

Answer 19

the grand double meaning of the word in the play

Question 20

Country Wife: “frank” as ingenuous, candid, or undisguised

Answer 20

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

Question 21

Country Wife: what is the irony in the play’s use of “frankness.”

Answer 21

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.