William Wycherley Research Articles

Libertinism during Restoration Era and the Liberation of a Restricted Sexuality

This paper deals basically with defining libertinism as a freedom movement giving attention to the rise of theatre activities during the of Restoration Era. In addition to this, the evolution of libertinism from pre-Enlightenment Era to how it was revived by the Court Wits during the regime of King Charles II of England is reviewed. It views that the sexuality was defined in consonance with someone’s vested interest of maximizing the pleasure of the self and of controlling others thereby giving rise to the guiding principles, norms, morality, law and policies on it. It reviews half a dozen of books on libertine sexuality with particular reference given to two selected Restoration libertine playwrights William Wycherley and Thomas Shadwell, and shows how bourgeoisie sexual morality came to blast caused by its complete disregard to one’s release of private pleasure. It finds that the libertine dramas have helped not only to expose people’s sexuality naturally in the public, but also to redefine sexuality in a quite open and unrestrained manner. If finally concludes that the established and seemingly rigid normative standards, which aim to demolish the real human sexuality, are also subject to change.

Commanding Eyes: Female Spectators and the Restoration Theatrical Repertoire

This article explores the impact of women on the theatrical repertoire of the later seventeenth century in England. Female theatregoers at this time were largely anonymous, defined by their venue rather than by their names, however comments by playwrights indicate that pleasing this female audience, especially the elite women in the audience, could have a powerful effect on whether plays succeeded or failed upon the stage. The ladies were avid theatregoers, and their presence in the theatre auditorium was remarked upon, both positively and negatively, and their response to what they watched was studied and judged by those around them. For this reason, women frequently wore masks to the theatre in the early decades of the Restoration, in part to avoid being surprised by a bawdy play, such as William Wycherley’s The Country Wife. The article examines mask wearing within the theatre as it relates to female response to performance. Couched in terms of hypocritical mask wearing, Wycherley’s irate response to the ladies in his final play The Plain Dealer suggests that these elite women had the potential to negatively impact a play’s success. Paratexts from the end of the century indicate that playwrights perceived the ladies’ presence at theatre could assure a play’s success. In this way, the female audience was able to shape the theatrical repertoire.

The Country Wife, Southall Style: Restoration Comedy and the Multicultural Gaze

Abstract First performed at Watford Palace Theatre in 2004, Tanika Gupta’s version of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) relocates the Restoration classic to twenty-first-century London, reframing its libertine plot as a witty satire on sexual and gender mores in contemporary Britain. In this new setting, Wycherley’s comic masterpiece is revisited from a multicultural perspective, and his merciless exposure of social hypocrisies becomes infused with the adaptor’s keen awareness of diversity and its complexities. This article draws attention to Gupta’s play as a culturally significant intervention in the reception history of Restoration theatre culture. By opening up Wycherley’s comedy to the representation of Britain’s “new ethnicities,” I suggest, Gupta’s work has paved the way for the more inclusive, multiculturally conscious approach to the Restoration canon that is observable in the new spate of revivals and adaptations produced during the last decade or so.

‘This was the better way’: The Restoration Afterlives of Ben Jonson’s Comic Designs

Abstract The dramatists of the Restoration stage reveal the guiding influence of Ben Jonson, giving his plays a strong comedic afterlife, particularly with respect to his construction of his plots and his sense of comedic design. This article explores that influence by first considering the influences on Jonson’s own concept of comic design, particularly as derived from Aristotle, and the late-antique grammarians Euanthius and Donatus. Jonson follows Aristotle’s distinction of comedy from tragedy on the basis of the ‘laughable’ moral quality of its characters. When paired with Jonson’s own didactic bent, this distinction shaped his ‘humours’-based approach to character, and his plots’ exposure and mockery of those characters. Daniël Heinsius’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics show clear consonance with Jonson’s tight integration of his humorous characters into densely unified plots by way of the trickster characters’ hoaxes. Jonson also finds in Scaliger’s unique concept of catastasis, the penultimate movement of comic plot, a definitive tactic for achieving that integration and exposure. In the light of these claims, we look at three of Jonson’s plays, Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), Volpone (1605) and Epicene, or the Silent Woman (1609), which depict his developing techniques of character, exposure hoaxes and catastasis. This leads to the later seventeenth century and John Dryden’s attentive analysis of Jonson’s comic plots, especially that of Epicene. We then show how the Jonsonian traits singled out by Dryden were used and adapted by William Wycherley in The Country Wife (1675) and William Congreve in The Way of the World (1700).

Motivic complex of deception in the comedy “The Country Wife” by William Wycherley

The subject of this research is the motif-imagery analysis of the comedy “The Country Wife” by W. Wycherley. The method of motif analysis allowed revealing the core motifs and their implementation in the text, while the structural method allowed outlining the patterns and correlations between motifs. The article is dedicated to the analysis of the motivic complex, as well as the images of the characters. Special attention is given to the protagonist of the comedy Mr. Horner, whose image receives different interpretation of the researchers – from crafty libertine to playwright. W. Wycherley introduces an entire gallery of hypocrites, and each one of them seeks to fulfill their hidden motives. Comedy “The Country Wife” is considered the pinnacle of W. Wycherley’s work and multiple times has become the subject of scientific research. However, the novelty of this study lies in the analysis of the motivic complex of deception in the comedy. The study reveals the following motives associated with deception: motive of deception, motive of disguise, motive of writing / giving the note, motive of infidelity, motive of fear of infidelity (fear of becoming cuckold), motive of theater that is directly related to the image the hypocritical hero Harry Horner. All these motives create the general background of the work, and are the elements of the true or phantom motive. The character type is also important for realization of the motivic complex. The classification of W. Janz clearly indicates the prevalence of two types of hypocrisy in the comedy under review: moral (Lady Fidget, Mrs. Dainty Fidget and Mrs. Squeamish, Mr. Sparkish, Mr. Pinchwife) and intellectual (Mr. Horner).

Breast Cancer Care in a COVID-19 Pandemic Epicenter.

Most breast cancer patients are initially treated with surgery, with elective timing Moderate delays in timing do not impact surgical outcome, as they are not significantly associated with a change in tumor size nor significant disease progression 1 The oncology literature in fact supports sometimes delaying surgery with neoadjuvant endocrine therapy or chemotherapy William Wycherley wrote: “Necessity, mother of invention ” [ ]in response to social distancing, surgeons are learning how to delicately balance risk and benefit in new, meaningful ways

Questioning Conventional Gender Roles in William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer

This article argues that the notion of gender is not a fixed category and doesn’t have any given essence to it. The male and female characters in William Wycherley’s play The Plain Dealer perform roles that tend to challenge our traditional conception of gender roles. Gender identities are complex things and it is not possible to reduce them to simple and unproblematic essences. The Character Manly falls into the trap of a woman’s machinations and succumbs to her power. His lack of manliness and the Widow’s knowledge and alacrity prove that traditional gender roles are open to challenge and can be reversed by different characters in different situations. This article analyses the role of the characters in the light of Foucauldian discourse and Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performance.

Crazy Rich Asians

Crazy Rich Asians

A Socio-Pragmatic Study of Impoliteness in William Wycherley's Comedy : The Plain Dealer

Impoliteness is a linguistic aspect that has been seen as an opposite in orientation to politeness. It is unpleasant and rather minor in conversations. Nevertheless it is central and important in some discourses as in drama. The use of impoliteness in dramatic dialogue, especially in historical data, is important to know the social fabric of a society at that time. This study focuses on the investigation of impoliteness in historical data; a Restoration comedy entitled The Plain Dealer (1676) by William Wycherley. The current study also focuses on other functional types of impoliteness which are: affective impoliteness, coercive impoliteness and entertaining impoliteness.

Anti-Préciosité in the Drama of Thomas Shadwell

England’s literature, as well as her society, was affected by preciosite which originated in France and made its appearance in England during the reign of Charles I. Prevalent during the first decade of Charles II’ reign was the comic theme of the love-game in which a gay hero and heroine in accordance to the inflexible code of the time would make a point of not being serious, carry on a witty courtship, but would never marry. This code called preciosite, in which the lady was accorded divine characteristics, appeared in many of the Restoration dramas including those of John Dryden, William Congreve, William Wycherley, and George Farquhar. Not all seventeenth-century dramatists, however, were in favor of preciosite as we can see in the comedies of Thomas Shadwell. It is the purpose of this paper to show evidence of anti-preciosite as it appears in the plays of Shadwell. Serving best to illustrate this point are the following comedies: The Sullen Lovers: or, the Impertinents (1693), The Virtuoso (1691), The Squire of Alsatia (1693), Bury Fair (1689), and The Scowrers (1691). For example, since the precieuse, the heroine, was the center of preciosite, much of Shadwell’s ridicule is of her. Most prominent of his comedies in this aspect is Bury Fair. Wildish says of Madam Fantast, “I must confess, God has given her one good Face; but by her most insupportable Affectation, she screws it into twenty bad ones.” As well as making jabs at the precieuse, Shadwell ridicules the lovers. This is perhaps best seen in The Sullen Lovers, and even narrowed down in the character of Sir Positive-At-All. Since preciosite was often seen in Restoration comedies, and, the precieuse was the center of Restoration comedy, and, moreover, when Restoration comedy deals with love, it is a conscious mixture of preciosite and anti-preciosite elements, and a knowledge of preciosite increases the appetite for the mock-precieuse and furnishes a target for manners wit, it seems that Shadwell’s attack on preciosite would be an important part of seventeenth-century drama.

Libertine Sexuality and Queer-Crip Embodiment in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This essay explores the vital role that disability plays in the history of sexuality and posits a pre-history of queercrip theory. It argues that Restoration and early eighteenth-century poems and letters from William Wycherley, from the Earl of Rochester, and from Colley Cibber depict people with physical disabilities as incapable of heterosexual sex. In these representations, libertine sexuality serves as the apotheosis of manhood. Ableist constructions of deformity, as these sources also suggest, shore up gender and sexual codes. In Deformity: An Essay (1753), William Hay, a self-proclaimed “deformed” writer, responds in a curious way to the mockery typical of his day by likening himself to various kinds of animals, including the lapdog. In so doing, he articulates a version of male sexuality that reconfigures the dominant libertine model of Restoration and early eighteenth-century England. Hay proposes a radical alternative to standard heterosexual practice of that time, in which robust male subject penetrates immobile female object, to a more expansive eroticism in which women play an active role. Hay’s peripheral post-postscript offers a glimpse into what this essay calls “hetero-deformity,” a significant re-imagining of the way that heterosexuality so often relies upon able-bodiedness for its coherence.

Shopping and Flirting: Staging the New Exchange in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Comedies

Abstract In the mid to late seventeenth century the New Exchange shopping mall on the Strand was one of London’s most important social and commercial spaces. Its significance is reflected by the number of references to it in various contemporary sources, including, prominently, Restoration comedies. There have been a number of modern studies of the building in relation to its architecture, commercial history, and cultural significance, but none examines how the building was represented theatrically. This essay corrects this omission by discussing all the plays that have scenes set in the New Exchange. Focusing on two of these—She Would If She Could (1668) by George Etherege and The Country Wife (1675) by William Wycherley—this essay considers dramaturgical approaches to the staging of real places in the period. In particular, it draws on period illustrations of the New Exchange and close theatrical readings of the plays to suggest correlations between the architectural structure of the building and its theatrical representation.

Containing Identity in The Plain Dealer and The Way of the World

This essay examines the correlation between property and identity in William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer and William Congreve’s The Way of the World. Both playwrights emphasize this connection between property and identity by using containers as stage properties. Often brought on stage during revelatory moments, the containers and their contents not only help resolve the action, but they also manifest the connection between what one owns and who one is. They reinforce the correlation between property and power. That women often owned property in these plays reveals the limited and contingent nature of female ownership. By following the movement of these containers, readers can trace the shifting power dynamics that property creates between people and, thereby, the influence that property has on constructing, expressing, and containing identities.

Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy: Women's Desire, Deception, and Agency by Peggy Thompson (review)

Reviewed by: Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy: Women's Desire, Deception, and Agency by Peggy Thompson Jennifer L. Airey Thompson, Peggy . Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy: Women's Desire, Deception, and Agency. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012. 189 pp. Peggy Thompson's Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy: Women's Desire, Deception, and Agency provides an original and compelling reading of women's erotic choices in Restoration comedy. Restricted on one side by cultural ideologies that forbid women to consent to sex and bounded on the other by the cultural belief in women's constant desirousness, the women of Restoration comedy, Thompson argues, find themselves "unable to say yes or mean no" (2). Trapped in this double bind, female characters behave coyly in some cases to resist sex, in others to attract lovers who will see through the façade. Onstage displays of false modesty, what Thompson calls "the trope of insincere resistance" (3), thus legitimize rape as a sanctioned way for women to express their forbidden desires and transform forced sex into a central requirement of Restoration masculinity. Meanwhile, women are compelled to prove their virtue through displays of coyness, even as they are mocked and punished for the results. Thompson's book offers both a trenchant examination of the limitations circumscribing female sexual behavior in Restoration comedy and a new way to interpret on-stage depictions of female nature, female socialization, and acts of sexual violence. Thompson frames her thesis in her first chapter by analyzing female sexual agency in seventeenth-century conduct literature as it informs the drama of the period. The pairing here is intelligent, as it allows Thompson to draw out the contradictory requirements [End Page 80] of ideal femininity that also underlie dramatic representations of women. Since women are expected to fend off male advances, coyness becomes, paradoxically, "one of the only ways for women to exercise romantic or sexual agency" (15). In contrast, men are both predators against whom women must be constantly on guard and "valiant combatants" who know when and how to seize a woman against her stated will (15). Thompson continues her analysis in chapter 2 with a look at William Wycherley's four plays. Throughout his career, Wycherley would treat the coy woman as "devious, threatening, and literally criminal" (21). He would also valorize sexual violence as a form of just punishment for the coy. Here Thompson constructs an illuminating parallel to Richardson's Clarissa. Although Lovelace models himself on a Wycherley-style hero in his attempt to expose Clarissa's artifice, he ultimately discovers that her resistance has been genuine. No such recognition occurs in Wycherley's plays. While Wycherley may momentarily offer sympathy for women trapped with loathsome husbands, he ultimately treats women as aggressors who must be punished for their desires. In chapter 3, Thompson turns her focus to John Dryden's infamous The Kind Keeper (1678), a play that ridicules female desirousness to comment on contemporary politics. For Dryden, female sexual agency allegorizes dissent against King and Church, an unacceptable undermining of patriarchal political structures. In Mrs. Saintly, Dryden "taps the fear and hostility provoked by sects' authorizing wives to disobey ungodly husbands" (46), while Tricksy embodies a political radicalism "resonating with guilt—in her case, the guilt not only of a political radical but... of a lustful Eve" (42). Dryden also satirizes Shaftesbury in Limberham, but his satire is predicated on the misogynist "condemnation of women as weak, carnal, devious, uncontrolled, contaminated, and, therefore, properly dominated" (57). Aphra Behn's comedies form the subject of Thompson's fourth chapter. Throughout her comedies, Behn exhibits a profound ambivalence towards the dynamics of female coyness. At times, she subverts the trope of insincere resistance; when her ridiculous cits misinterpret sincere resistance as false modesty, it acknowledges the existence of female erotic disinterest. In other plays, however, Behn reaffirms Royalist prerogative by emphasizing female falsity. Meanwhile, as is the case in The Rover, "modest resistance" serves as the only possible alternative to financially driven sexual transactions (81). Thomas Shadwell, like Behn, offers a complicated and measured response to female coyness: "Shadwell's apparently sympathetic acknowledgment of the way coyness regulates women is offset by...

Historicizing the Gaze

Historicizing the Gaze Melissa Mowry (bio) Jean I. Marsden’s Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality, and the English Stage, 1660–1720 (Cornell, 2006) will seem like a breath of fresh air to scholars working on the intersection of gender and eighteenth-century culture. In this study, Marsden constructs a shrewd, nuanced, and much-needed history of the “gaze”—long a staple of feminist, theatrical, and cinematic theory. Fatal Desire “explores the impact of the theatrical spectacle of female sexuality on the world of Restoration and eighteenth-century theater” and “focuses on the impact of women on the stage and in the theater, examining the ways in which their material presence altered the representation of women in drama and even reshaped dramatic form at a time when theater was the most public and most debated literary venue” (3). What makes Marsden’s study so exciting is that rather than hewing to the traditional argument that public representations affected private lives, she presses her investigation fully into the realm of public argument and reveals the often nuanced ways in which acting not only rendered the actress’s body public but also made her body available as a heuristic tool that educated women and men alike in the proper methods for both viewing and interpreting women as such. Marsden moves her argument through six chapters that begin with the roots of “she-tragedy” in the 1680s and the intimate relationship between anti-theatrical diatribes and drama of the period. Chapter 1, “Female Spectatorship, Jeremy Collier and the Antitheatrical Debate,” frames Marsden’s project and carefully defines the cultural problematic she intends to explore. It is a particularly important feature of Marsden’s study that she foregrounds the scant evidence of women’s self-perceptions, a problem endemic to research and study on women of the period, particularly non-elite women and a recognition too seldom admitted by many scholars working in the period, yet one that fundamentally alters the kinds of projects we can realistically undertake and the kinds of materials we can research. Marsden’s candid acknowledgement that “no woman published her views, leaving us without a firsthand account of theatergoing in the Restoration and early eighteenth century” [End Page 229] (19), however, frees her to emphasize both the formal constructedness of the “gaze” and, most importantly, the historicity of those forms. As Marsden points out, Fatal Desire explores the ways late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century culture imagined the female spectator—a “phantom woman,” a “figure whose shadowy existence and dangerous gaze, it was argued, could lead to moral corruption and social catastrophe” (19). The second chapter, “Women Watching: The Female Spectator in Late Seventeenth-Century Comedy,” moves on from the anti-theatrical diatribes of the 1680s and 1690s to argue that the “problem” of female spectatorship was differentially engaged through different genres. Here, Marsden focuses on two plays, William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (1676/77) and Sir John Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife (1697), which define the spectrum of comedic discussions of the female gaze and provide the ideological underpinnings for the eighteenth-century she-tragedies that dominated the stage in the ensuing decades. Among the most fascinating claims that Marsden makes in this chapter is the observation that The Provok’d Wife constituted something like the primal scene of the transformation of female spectators into female spectacles. Vanbrugh, Marsden argues, “presents a picture of women who are endlessly objectified, on the stage and within the theater itself. Female spectatorship, in other words, is simply another occasion for the commodification of women, this time staged by the woman herself” (56). It has, of course, long been a staple of feminist criticism that patriarchy relies on the objectification of women to sustain an elitist distribution of social and political power. The force of that assumption, however, has often been weakened by the difficulties of answering the question of what happens to women’s social and political status when they too are spectators? Marsden’s careful reading of the plays in her second chapter not only adds crucial historical subtlety to feminism’s conventional claims about patriarchy, but also supplies feminist critics with much-needed historical evidence to plot specifically the...

In and Out of the Bed-chamber: Staging Libertine Desire in Restoration Comedy

Considering frequency with which libertines appear onstage in comedies written in four decades following Restoration of Charles II to throne of England in 1660, it may be reasonable to assume that beds would appear as primary pieces of furniture associated with these plays' sexually voracious protagonists. In fact, beds and bed-chambers appear onstage relatively infrequently during this period; it is far more common to set a scene in a house, lodging, garden, park, tavern, coffeehouse, or dressing room than in a bed-chamber.1 This essay argues that one reason for this infrequency is that bed-chambers in Restoration comedies signify differently from other scenic locations listed above. Peter Holland notes that the peculiarities of staging comedy on Restoration stage allowed audience to 'read' scenery, just absorb it. He therefore proposes that scholars could read scenery, sets, and stage directions as part of a larger series of signs, a system that helps comprehension of structure of whole play text (19). Rather than attempting an analysis of bed-chambers in all Restoration drama, my focus in this essay is very particular: examination of bed and its adjacent locales as sites in which Sir George Etherege and William Wycherley stage their rejection of same baroque aestheticism that scholars now commonly associate with Restoration libertinism.I explore what happens when these playwrights, known for their libertine activities in and around court of Charles II, write a comedy and then stage a scene in bed-chamber. Because these playwrights enjoyed cultural capital as libertines, their use of bed-chambers in these plays has a different resonance than those featured by their contemporaries, particularly Aphra Behn. A number of activities do indeed occur in beds and bed-chambers of these playwrights' libertine characters, but these activities only infrequently involve sex. Whereas it must be conceded that period's notions of decency and taste would prevent explicit depictions of sex onstage in any case, I maintain that libertine playwrights use signification of bed-chamber to explore these scenes as potentially problematic sites filled with dramatic tension, anxiety, and even pain for men and women. On one hand, bed-chambers are locations in which libertine desires may compete with one another: libertine often must choose between his sexual desire for women and his social bonding with men. On other hand, libertine playwrights' bed-chamber scenes suggest that bed-chamber can easily signify as male violence against women, male violence against other men, and even female violence against men.In The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature, J. Douglas Canfield analyzes baroque-which he defines as art that stresses disorder, excrescence, exuberance, irrational, cryptic (15)-in Restoration literature. For most scholars, Canfield writes, the early seventeenth century is traditionally considered heyday of baroque, its vertiginous apex but this aesthetic mode eventually yields to neoclassic in both England and France as that century progresses (15). He maintains, however, that baroque elements such as extravagant display, the monstrous, the grotesque, the macabre, the morbid, and the outrageous persisted into late-seventeenthcentury English literature not in some weak residue but in some of later, neoclassical literature's most arresting moments (15). In this vein, Canfield suggests that it is fruitful to think of baroque as style suited to centralizing and of late feudal aristocracy, with its attendant, heterodox libertinism, burning brightest and most extravagantly as it is about to expire (16).Although Canfield sees baroque as something bold, exciting, [and] delicious (17), self-glorifying impulses of aristocratic libertine sexual desire have generally led scholars to associate late baroque with libertinism's potential gender and class violence against women. …

A Free Man of Color (review)

Reviewed by: A Free Man of Color William W. Demastes A Free Man of Color. By John Guare. Directed by George C. Wolfe. Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center, New York City. 9 January 2011. John Guare's A Free Man of Color celebrates human potential. Set in a small part of the world struggling against the civilizing forces of "order" and "control" Guare's play is nonetheless sufficiently expansive to fill the Vivian Beaumont stage, where the production reminded me of both the carnivalesque explosiveness of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and the high metatheatricality of plays like Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good. A Free Man of Color not only celebrates self-invention and sensual indulgence as the characters embrace mutability, chance, and materiality, but also undermines the life-limiting constrictions of order, civilization, and law. Imbued with life-embracing vitality, this brilliant production created a sort of three-ring circus of continuous action. The play is set in New Orleans during the early nineteenth century, a time when Spanish, African, French, British, and US influences were all vying for the soul of what one character called "the free-est city in the world." This production's colorful open set, scattered with representative portable props, propelled the play from one imaginative locale to another: from marketplace to bedchamber; from a planter's home to a riverfront haunt; and even to Napoleon's bathroom. With an ornate proscenium arch erected as backdrop, the set befitted the theatrical [End Page 451] nature of the play and the rococo extravagance of colonial New Orleans. Against this background, director George C. Wolfe created a colorful New Orleans antithetical to the Yankee restraint of cities like Boston during the same period. The result was a feeling of openness and endless possibility, a world of opportunity for independent men of adventure and spirit, and a place of personal invention where "you can be whatever you declare yourself to be." The play's central character, Jacques Cornet, is just such a man, a free man of color who declares to the audience his intention to create his own character and write his own play. In essence, the main character writes the play (Cornet initially titles it The Happy Life of a Man in Power), and this city of multivalent influences is his fertile site of self-invention. Click for larger view View full resolution Jeffrey Wright (Jacques Cornet) in A Free Man of Color. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson.) In this world-premiere production, Jeffrey Wright played Cornet with the larger-than-life expansiveness that the role demands, assuming the mantel of Lord of Misrule and using his wit, sexual magnetism, and full-bodied appetite to mesmerize those characters around him. As master of self-invention and author of the play in front of us, Wright's Cornet mastered the stage like a circus ringmaster, trumpeting orders and directing attention to various corners of the spotlighted stage, where the many vignettes added up to the story of Cornet in New Orleans. Wright mastered the surface arts of appearance and seduction in a manner reminiscent of the Restoration rake, after which his character is clearly modeled. In fact, Cornet knew the stratagems used by Horner in William Wycherley's The Country Wife and literally assumed the disguise and masterful deception of his English namesake. This—Guare's most obvious reference to the libertine excesses of the Restoration world—admirably captured its comic legacy, and Wright masterfully translated eighteenth-century theatricality to the modern stage. Director Wolfe set the pace, moving the play along expeditiously in the best tradition of the comedy of manners. Seduction plots interwove political intrigue, unbridled buffoonery (Napoleon appeared several times in a bathtub scrubbing himself like a child while ranting about world domination), a chorus of prostitutes, a comically caricatured Spanish king and infanta, a wily manservant, and several insanely impotent captains of industry tricked like Keystone cops at every turn. It wasn't all fun and games, however. Wolfe's comic devices generated more than laughter; incorporated within them were instances of cruel injustice and hypocrisy among the ruling classes. Guare depicted these dissipated masters of their domain as purely...

The Ravishing Restoration: Aphra Behn, Violence, and Comedy (review)

Reviewed by: The Ravishing Restoration: Aphra Behn, Violence, and Comedy Misty Krueger Stewart, Anne Marie . The Ravishing Restoration: Aphra Behn, Violence, and Comedy. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2010. 134 pp. As the title of Ann Marie Stewart's The Ravishing Restoration: Aphra Behn, Violence, and Comedy suggests, Stewart examines the presence of sexual violence—rape and attempted rape—in Aphra Behn's comedies. In her introduction, Stewart claims to "deconstruct" Behn's plays in order to isolate how "cultural assumptions" shaped dramatic scenes of violence against women (16). Stewart explains that the purpose of her study is to question "how and why Behn utilizes sexual violence in her plays" and to examine the relationship between such scenes of violence and the genre of comedy of intrigue (21). Ultimately, Stewart concludes that Behn's "creations" are both "unique" and "complex" (21). For the most part, The Ravishing Restoration is concerned with isolating tokens of rape or attempted rape scenes in Restoration drama, complicating genre distinctions, and providing close readings of Behn's and other playwrights' plays. Readers who desire a lengthy discussion of how sexual violence functions in a specific Behn play will be delighted, for Stewart studies nine of Behn's plays that include rape or attempted rape scenes. Further, Stewart includes an overview of other Restoration dramatists' renderings of sexual violence in order to offer a context for studying Behn's plays. After an introduction that sets up Stewart's argument and provides some (albeit not enough) context for critical scholarship on sexual violence against women in the Restoration, Stewart focuses an entire chapter on Restoration dramatists other than Behn. With an argument that spans approximately one hundred pages, Stewart gives [End Page 10] other dramatists a large amount of textual space in The Ravishing Restoration. After quickly introducing comedy of intrigue as a genre in the first chapter, Stewart discusses approximately sixty plays, some comedies and many tragedies. In a book about Aphra Behn's comedies, a reader might wonder why half of the chapter examines tragedies. However, Stewart contends that some of Behn's "comedies" might better be understood as "tragicomedies" because of their blending of "life-threatening attacks" and "serious action" with playfulness and happy endings (25). After reading the first chapter, it is apparent that Stewart's close readings of fourteen plays by playwrights other than Behn serve as a springboard for her discussion of the author's work in the second half of the book. Playwrights studied in the first chapter include John Dryden, John Crowne, Susanna Centlivre, John Vanbrugh, William Congreve, William Wycherley, the Earl of Rochester, Thomas Otway, and Mary Pix. Ultimately, Stewart describes these authors' works in order to show how Behn's examples of rape or attempted rape compare to other playwrights' treatment of sexual violence. The Ravishing Restoration shows that Behn created different kinds of heroines subjected to assault; as an early example in the book, Stewart argues that Behn's characters are "typically virtuous, unmarried, and vulnerable" whereas playwrights such as Crowne's are "loose, worldly women" (26). Stewart also portends that Behn's comedies include more scenes of rape than her contemporaries' work; and Stewart astutely points out that threats of sexual assault in Restoration comedies are part and parcel of the battle of the sexes, in addition to observing the ways in which Behn's rape scenes bear rhetorical similarity to late seventeenth-century she-tragedies and heroic tragedies. Stewart's second chapter, interestingly titled "Seducing Behn: Staging Power and Persuasion," exclusively analyzes nine of Behn's plays and all of her rape or attempted rape scenes. The Ravishing Restoration seldom discusses performance history, but it does consider how Behn's plays reflect cultural values and attitudes about women in late seventeenth-century England. Further, the book's close readings provide a helpful evaluation of Behn's characters and plot development as Stewart demonstrates why plots "suddenly [turn] violent" and the tones of scenes change "from seduction to attempted rape"—oftentimes due to a breakdown in communication between characters (61). Stewart does a fine job of tackling the frequently studied The Rover, and the book particularly shines in its analysis of Behn's tragicomedies such as...

A Severed Head: As Freudian Drama and as Restoration Comedy

A Severed Head, published in 1961, by the Anglo-Irish author Iris Murdoch, has proved one of her most commercially successful works. One of its primary attractions is that it is about sex. With its themes of marriage, incest and adultery within a group of educated and civilised people dwelling in well-to-do areas of 1950s London, it has been said that A Severed Head anticipates the sexual revolution of a period subsequently dubbed the “Swinging Sixties”. But its roots lie even deeper. It is also possible to see Murdoch's novel as a modern reworking of the licentious Restoration sex comedies penned in the late seventeenth century by such writers as William Wycherley, Sir George Etherege and William Congreve. Murdoch is indebted, too, to Freud. While Freud and Schnitzler believe that man engages in sex because of his fear of death, for Murdoch, love can enlighten and elevate the individual, allowing him to transcend the selfish limitations of self. This possibility is also hinted at in such a Restoration comedy as Congreve's The Way of the World, in the union of Mirabell and Millament. Although A Severed Head is one of the most popular of Murdoch's twenty-five novels because of its emphasis on sex, the author depicts the physical act to explore a wide range of philosophic topics, including the dangers of solipsism and egotism and the life-affirming nature of unselfish love.

Fatal desire: women, sexuality, and the English stage, 1660-1720

Informed by film theory and a broad historical approach, Fatal Desire examines the theatrical representation of women in England, from the Restoration to the early eighteenth century-a period when for the first time female actors could perform in public. Jean I. Marsden maintains that the feminization of serious drama during this period is tied to the cultural function of theater. Women served as symbols of both domestic and imperial propriety, and so Marsden links the representation of women on the stage to the social context in which the plays appeared and to the moral and often political lessons they offered the audience. The witty heroines of comedies were usually absorbed into the social fabric by marrying similarly lighthearted gentlemen, but the heroines of tragedy suffered for their sins, real or perceived. That suffering served the dual purpose of titillating and educating the theater audience. Marsden discusses such plays as William Wycherley's Plain Dealer (1676), John Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife (1697), Thomas Otway's Orphan (1680), Thomas Southerne's Fatal Marriage (1694), and William Congreve's Mourning Bride (1697). The author also addresses tragedies written by three female playwrights, Mary Pix, Catharine Trotter, and Delarivier Manley, and sketches developments in tragedy during the period.