1. What do you make of the names in this play: Horner, Pinchwife, Sparkish, Fidget, Squeamish?

2. What is the relation of the Horner plot and the Alithea-Harcourt subplot?

3. "Repartee" was originally a fencing term. What does it mean and what does it have to do with this play?  See also the wit for a relevant use of the term "repartee."

4. If you were directing this play, would you treat it as a farce, a libertine comedy, or a satire? 

5.  There were numerous contemporary critiques of Restoration drama; one of the strongest was Jeremy Collier's  A Short View of the Immorallitly and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). On the basis of The Country Wife, would you agree with Collier's condemnation?  Or would you defend this play?

"Their liberties in the following particulars re intolerable, viz., their smuttiness of expression; their swearing, profaneness, and lewd application of Scripture; their abuse of the clergy, their making their topi characters libertines and giving them success in their debauchery."

"[W]hat can be the meaning of such a representation unless it be to tincture the audience, to extinguish shame, and make lewdness a diversion?  This is the natural consequence, and therefore one would think 'twas the intention too.  Such licentious discourse tends to no point but to stain the imagination, to awaken faolly, and to weaken the defenses of virtue.  it was upon the account of these disorders that Plato banished poets his Commonwealth. . . . "

 Qtd in Norton Critical Edition of Restoration Comedy, pp. 391, 393).

6.  Read the following comments together.  How do they contradict each other?  How do they seem to coincide?  Are any of them helpful to you in your reading?

Thomas Babbington Macaulay (19th c.) (qtd. Restoration Drama, ed. John Loftis, p. viii):   "And yet it is not easy to be too severe. For in truth this part of literature is a disgrace to our language and our national character.  it is clever, indeed, and very entertaining; but it is, in the most emphatic sense of the words, 'earthly, sensual, develish.'  Its indecency, though perpetually such as is condemned . . .  is not, in our opinion, so disgraceful a fault as its singularly inhuman spirit."

L.C. Knights (20th c.):  "It has no significant relation with the best thought of its time."  "The criticism that defenders of Restoration comedy need to answer is not that the comedies are 'immoral,' but that they are trivial, gross, and dull."

Christopher Hill (20th c.) (in Century of Revolution, p. 217):  "Too often the Restoration attitude is regarded merely as a reaction against Puritanism.  It was that; but Restoration comedy, a comedy of manners, also comments sceptically on a world in which aristocratic standards were adjusting themselves to a society dominated by money.  Hence the dramatists' obsession with the relation of the sexes . . . .   Restoration comedy discusses the relation of the sexes among those classes whose marriages are property transactions and therefore exclude love; and tilts against the potential hypocrisy in sentimental idealization of marriage."

7.  Can you make any connections between this play and Hobbes's Leviathan (this is a question for thinking about after the lecture)?

8. .  Alithea's name means "truth." How can wit and truth coincide? What room does this play make for truth?

9. Why is this play called The Country Wife?

10. What questions would you like to add? (You could put them on the Message board.)

 

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