The Country Wife

Stage history

The play had a good initial run, although Horner's trick and the notorious china scene immediately raised offence. Wycherley laughed off such criticisms in his next play, The Plain Dealer (1676), where he has the hypocritical Olivia exclaim that the china scene in The Country Wife "has quite taken away the reputation of poor china itself, and sullied the most innocent and pretty furniture of a lady's chamber". Olivia's sensible cousin Eliza insists that she'll go see The Country Wife anyway: "All this will not put me out of conceit with china, nor the play, which is acted today, or another of the same beastly author's, as you call him, which I'll go see."[19] Writing himself into The Plain Dealer as the "beastly author" of the china scene, Wycherley seems more amused than repentant. The Country Wife did in fact survive the complaints to become a dependable repertory play from 1675 till the mid-1740s, but by then public taste had changed too much to put up with the sex jokes any longer. Its last eighteenth century performance was on 7 November 1753, followed by a hiatus of 171 years, until the successful Phoenix Society production in 1924 at the Regent Theatre in London. The first-ever American performance of Wycherley's original Country Wife took place in 1931. Wycherley's play is now again a stage classic, with countless professional and amateur performances, an actors' favourite because of the high number of good parts it offers.


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