William Wycherley

He was born at Clive, near Shrewsbury, where his family was settled on a moderate estate of about £600 a year. Like Vanbrugh, Wycherley spent his early years in France, where he was sent, at fifteen, to be educated in the heart of the "precious" circle on the banks of the Charente. Wycherley's friend, Major Pack, says that he " improved, with the greatest refinements," the "extraordinary talents" for which he was "obliged to nature." Although the harmless affectations of the circle of Madame de Montausier, formerly Madame de Rambouillet, are not chargeable with the" refinements" of Wycherley's comedies--comedies which caused even his great admirer Voltaire to say afterwards of them, "Ii semble que les Anglais prennent trop de liberté et que les Françaises n'en prennent pas assez"--seem to have been much more potent in regard to the " refinements" of Wycherley's religion.

Under French influence, Wycherley turned from the Protestantism of his fathers to Roman Catholicism, but, on his return shortly before the accession of King Charles II, turned back to Protestantism while at The Queen's College, Oxford, under the influence of Bishop Barlow. Wycherley only lived (according to Wood) in the provost's lodgings, being entered in the public library under the title of "Philosophiae Studiosus" in July 1660. And he does not seem to have matriculated or taken a degree. Macaulay hints that Wycherley's turning back to Romanism once more had something to do with the patronage and unwonted liberality of the future James II. As a professional fine gentleman, at a period when, as the genial Major Pack says, "the amours of Britain would furnish as diverting memoirs, if well related, as those of France published by Rabutin[?], or those of Nero's court writ by Petronius," Wycherley was obliged to be a loose liver. However, his nickname of" Manly Wycherley" seems to have been earned by his straightforward attitude to life.

When, on leaving Oxford, he took up residence at the Inner Temple, where he had been entered in 1659, Wycherley gave little attention to the study of law. Pleasure and the stage were his only interests, his play, Love in a Wood[?], being produced early in 1671 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It was published the next year. Wycherley told Pope "over and over", till Pope believed him, that he wrote it the year before he went to Oxford. Wycherley's boast of having written such scenes as a nineteen-year-old is probably untrue. Macaulay points to the allusions in the play to gentlemen's periwigs[?], to guineas, to the vests which Charles ordered to be worn at court, to the Great Fire of London, etc, as showing that the comedy could not have been written the year before the author went to Oxford. However, even if the play had been written in that year, and delayed in its production till 1672, it is exactly this kind of allusion to recent events which any dramatist with an eye to freshness of colour would be certain to weave into his dialogue. However, if we were asked to indicate the finest touch in all Wycherley, we should very likely select a speech in the third scene of the third act of this very play, where the vain, foolish and boastful rake Dapperwit, having taken his friend to see his mistress for the express purpose of advertising his lordship over her, is coolly denied by her and insolently repulsed. "I think," says Dapperwit, "women. take inconstancy from me worse than from any man breathing."

That the writer of a play far more daring than Etheredge's She Would if She Could--and far more brilliant too--should at once become the talk of the court was inevitable; equally inevitable was it that the author of the song at the end of the first act, in praise of harlots and their offspring, should attract the attention of the king's mistress, Barbara Villiers[?], Duchess of Cleveland. Possibly Wycherley intended this famous song as a glorification of Her Grace and her profession, for he seems to have been more delighted than surprised when, as he passed in his coach through Pall Mall[?], he heard her address him from her coach window as a "rascal" and a "villain", and the son of a woman such as that mentioned in the song. His answer was perfect: "Madam, you have been pleased to bestow a title on me which belongs only to the fortunate." Seeing that she received the compliment in the spirit in which it was meant, he lost no time in calling upon her, and was from that moment the recipient of those "favours" to which he alludes with pride in the dedication of the play to her. Voltaire's story (in his Letters on the English Nation) that Her Grace used to go to Wycherley's chambers in the Temple disguised as a country wench, in a straw hat, with pattens on and a basket in her hand, may be apocryphal, for disguise was superfluous in her case, but it shows how general was the opinion that, under such patronage as this, Wycherley's fortune as poet and dramatist was now made. King Charles, who had determined to bring up his son, the Duke of Richmond, like a prince, sought as his tutor a man as qualified as Wycherley to impart a "princely education", and it seems clear that, if not for Wycherley's marriage, the education of the young man would actually have been entrusted to him as a reward for having written Love in a Wood.

Whether Wycherley's experiences as a naval officer, which he alludes to in his lines "On a Sea Fight which the Author was in betwixt the English and the Dutch," occurred before or after the production of Love in a Wood is a point upon which opinions differ, but probably took place not only after the production of Love in a Wood but after the production of The Gentleman Dancing Master, in 1673. Macaulay claims that he went to sea simply because it was the "polite" thing to do so--because, as he says in the epilogue to The Gentleman Dancing Master, "all gentlemen must pack to sea." This second comedy was published in 1673, but was probably acted late in 1671. In The Gentleman Dancing Master the mingling of discordant elements destroys a play that would never in any circumstances have been strong.

It is, however, on his two last comedies--The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer--that Wycherley's fame rests. The Country Wife, produced in 1672 or 1673 and published in 1675, is full of wit, ingenuity, high spirits and conventional humour.

In all literatures-- ancient and modern--an infinite wealth of material has been wasted upon subjects that are unworthy, or else incapable, of artistic realization; and yet Wycherley's case is, in our literature at least, without a parallel. Perhaps he felt that the colossal depravity of intrigue in which the English comedians indulged needs to be net only warmed by a superabundance of humour but softened by the playful mockery of farce before a dramatic circle such as that of the Restoration drama can be really brought within human sympathy. Plutarch's impeachment of Aristophanes, which affirms that the master of the old comedy wrote less for honest men than for men sunk in baseness and debauchery, was no doubt unjust to the Greek poet, one side of whose humour, and one alone, could thus be impeached. But does it not touch all sides of a comedy like Wycherley's--a comedy which strikes at the very root of the social compact upon which civilization is built? As to comparing such a comedy as that of the Restoration with the comedy of the Elizabethans, Jeremy Collier[?] did but a poor service to the cause he undertook to advocate when he set the occasional coarseness of Shakespeare alongside the wickedness of Congreve and Vanbrugh. And yet, ever since Macaulay's essay, it has been the fashion to speak of Collier's attack as being levelled against the immorality of the "Restoration dramatists." It is nothing of the kind. It is (as was pointed out so long ago as 1699 by Dr Drake in his little-known vigorous reply to Collier) an attack upon the English drama generally, with a special reference to the case of Shakespeare. While dwelling upon that noxious and highly immoral play Hamlet, Collier actually leaves unscathed the author of The Country Wife, but fastens on Congreve and Vanbrugh, whose plays--profligate enough in all conscience--seem almost decent beside a comedy whose incredible vis matrix is "the modish distemper."

Wycherley's efforts to bring to Buckingham's notice the case of Samuel Butler shows that the writer of even such heartless plays as The Country Wife may have generous impulses, while his defence of Buckingham, when the duke in his turn fell into trouble, show that the inventor of so shameless a fraud as that which forms the pivot of The Plain Dealer may in actual life possess that passion for fair play which is believed to be a specially English quality. But among the "ninety-nine" religions with which Voltaire accredited England there is one whose permanency has never been shaken--the worship of gentility. To this Wycherley remained as faithful to the day of his death as Congreve himself. And, if his relations to that "other world beyond this," which the Puritans had adopted, were liable to change with his environments, it was because that " other world " was really out of fashion altogether.

It was after the success of The Plain Dealer that the turning point came in Wycherley's career. The great dream of all the men about town in Charles's time, as Wycherley's plays all show, was to marry a widow, young and handsome, a peer's daughter if possible--but in any event rich, and spend her money upon wine and women. While talking to a friend in a bookseller's shop at Tunbridge, Wycherley heard The Plain Dealer asked for by a lady who, in the person of the countess of Drogheda, answered all the requirements. An introduction ensued, then love-making, then marriage--a secret marriage, probably in 1680, for, fearing to lose the king's patronage and the income therefrom, Wycherley still thought it politic to pass as a bachelor.

He had not seen enough of life to learn that in the long run nothing is politic but "straightforwardness." Whether because his countenance wore a pensive and subdued expression, suggestive of a poet who had married a dowager countess and awakened to the situation, or whether because treacherous confidants divulged his secret, does not appear, but the news of his marriage oozed out--it reached the royal ears, and deeply wounded the father anxious about the education of his son. Wycherley lost the appointment that was so nearly within his grasp--lost indeed the royal favour for ever. He never had an opportunity of regaining it, for the countess seems to have really loved him, and Love in a Wood had proclaimed the writer to be the kind of husband whose virtue prospers best when closely guarded at the domestic hearth. Wherever he went the countess followed trim, and when she did allow him to meet his boon companions it was in a tavern in Bow Street opposite to his own house, and even there under certain protective conditions. In summer or in winter he was obliged to sit with the window open and the blinds up, so that his wife might see that the party included no member of a sex for which her husband's plays had advertised his partiality.

She died, however, in the year after her marriage and left him the whole of her fortune. But the title to the property was disputed; the costs of the litigation were heavy--so heavy that his father was unable (or else he was unwilling) to come to his aid; and the result of his marrying the rich, beautiful and titled widow was that the poet was thrown into the Fleet prison. There he remained for seven years, being finally released by the liberality of James II--a liberality which, incredible as it seems, is too well authenticated to be challenged. James had been so much gratified by seeing The Plain Dealer acted that, finding a parallel between Manly's "manliness" and his own, such as no spectator had before discovered, he paid off Wycherley's execution creditor and settled on him a pension of £200 a year.

Other debts still troubled Wycherley, however, and he never was released from his embarrassments, not even after succeeding to a life estate in the family property. In coming to Wycherley's death, we come to the worst allegation that has ever been made against him as a man and as a gentleman. At the age of seventy-five he married a young girl, and is said to have done so in order to spite his nephew, the next in succession, knowing that he himself must shortly die and that the jointure would impoverish the estate.

Wycherley wrote verses, and, when quite an old man, prepared them for the press by the aid of Alexander Pope, then not much more than a boy. But, notwithstanding all Pope's tinkering, they remain contemptible. Pope's published correspondence with the dramatist was probably edited by him with a view to giving an impression of his own precocity. The friendship between the two cooled, according to Pope's account, because Wycherley took offence at the numerous corrections on his verses. It seems more likely that Wycherley discovered that Pope, while still professing friendship and admiration, satirized his friend in the Essay on Criticism. Wycherley died on the 1st of January 1716, and was buried in the vault of the church in Covent Garden.

This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.