The Country Wife

A Virtuous Woman In William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, William Wycherley enlightens the audience to capture several different ironical statements and questionable behaviors. The play fits perfectly into Greenwald’s definition of a comedy of manners: “[Critics] assert that a comedy of manners and the people who inhabit it represent the ostentatiously idle upper-class” (“Social Heirarchy” web). Wycherley also distinguishes several oddities in his characters not typically used to describe the

Wycherley’s “The Country Wife” “A Restoration comedy is like an eighteenth-century sitcom; it’s entertaining” (MacKenzie, “Behn”). However, the similarities between the two genres are more far-reaching than their equal entertainment value. For example, the cast of William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy, “The Country Wife,” consists of some central characters that are strikingly similar to those in the cast of the modern situation comedy, Seinfeld. Harry Horner from “The Country Wife” and George

In The Country Wife, women are treated as mere objects and are viewed by the men of the play as being inferior. Sparkish views Alethea as an object that should be flaunted around and is only interested in marrying her for her wealth. Sparkish revels in the idea that he be envied for his wife because he believes that allowing more men to love her and envy him for owning her will increase her worth. In viewing her as something that gains value, Sparkish likens her to a treasure at an auction, whose

The Country Wife – written by William Wycherley in 1675 – is a Restoration comedy based upon the life of the aristocracy. Restoration comedy is a style of drama that was made popular in the late seventeenth century. It refers to the period in England when King Charles II was returned as the head of the English empire. Life under King Charles II was seen as hedonistic: people were motivated by pleasure. These moral virtues represented the degradation of society, rampant with sexual explicitness and

The dynamics of marriage can be seen throughout The Country Wife. Within the play most people marry for appearances alone. Women are treated as if they are property, which can be seen when Mr. Pinchwife continues to lock his wife in her room and forbids her to communicate with any man. Mrs. Pinchwife’s sister, Alithea believes that she should marry Sparkish because her society status expects her to marry him. The marriage between Lady Fidget and Sir Jasper is beneficial to his business, which is

The Country Wife is a restoration comedy, which means there is lots of sexual language in it. William Wycherley is the playwright. In the play, he expressed lots of Comedy of Manners. Nathan did a great job with expressing the sexual jokes. All the actors and actresses I didn’t get a lot of them, but I did for the most part it was okay put together. The costumes were a major factor in the entire production success. The costumes chosen for the performance were appropriate, but not well conveyed in

public thought of marriage in restoration times are different and in some ways, the same. Everyone’s ideas on marriage are different, no doubt. However, if you go back to restoration times there certainly is a general consensus on marriage. ‘The Country Wife’ by William Wycherley is a play in the Restoration period that certainly develops many themes. The theme at the forefront of this

Marlow with Miss Hardcastle and Hastings with Miss Neville. The pairs try very hard to get the approval of the parents, because of how important relationships were. Another neoclassical work that portrays the point is The Country Wife by William Wycherley. The Country Wife is about married women falling in love with single men, but the relationships they are in with their husbands bring conflict between love and society’s view on marriage during the time period. There is a confrontation between

showed the married women’s role would be The Country Wife which was written by William Wycherley and the Beggar’s Opera that was produced by John Gay. The roles of married women are describe in Jane Collier’s book, An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, there is a section of which a man is giving advice to his daughter about being a married woman. The father discusses the challenge of being a wife is how to live with a husband. Being a wife means she would have to observe his behavior

this short essay, I will first start off by touching on Tartuffe and how the writing was purposefully catering to the aristocratic. I will then shift to the analysis of The Country Wife. Finally, I will show the middle class society from The London Merchant breakdown. I will also be using specifics from Tartuffe, The Country Wife and The London Merchant, to show the shift from an aristocratic to middleclass society effected the drama. That being noted, I will begin with Tartuffe. The audience that