The "Plyant" Discourse of Wycherley's The Country Wife

Abstract

In a spirited defense of excellences of Restoration culture, John Dryden praises King Charles II for having awakened the dull and heavy spirits of English, from their natural reserv'dness; loosen'd them, from their stiff forms of conversation; and made them and to each other in discourse. Thus, insensibly, our way of become free: and fire of English wit, which was before stifled under a constrain'd, melancholy way of breeding, began first to display its force: by mixing solidity of our Nation, with air and gayety of our neighbors.1I The king may indeed have set a tone in court that counteracted recent Puritanical curbs on speech, but it was Restoration stage that allowed and popularized art of ingenious conversation and encouraged habit of easy and plyant discourse. Clearly, Dryden links linguistic habits to behaviors and displays his political and cultural commitments to a Way of living both more free and closely resembling that of rest of Europe. Writing about discourse in novels rather than in conversation, Mikhail M. Bakhtin concurs with Dryden's assertion of a link between language and society and possibility of social change: these processes of shift and renewal of national language that are reflected by novel do not bear an abstract linguistic character in novel: they are inseparable from social and ideological struggle.2 He also insists that memory of past struggles persists in language.3 This slant on semantic and social history is particularly telling in consideration of relatively recent (if indeed yet complete in 1670s) consolidation of London's dialect as national language of England, which was so aggressively sought by Elizabethan policy. It follows that vocabulary of a text can be examined for congealed traces of social practices and attitudes across genera-