Although men got the quest plot while women were relegated to the marriage plot in the 18th century, a number of women writers found imaginative ways to circumvent it. Among these were Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
In Wycherley’s “Country Wife,” the entire society grasps at an implausible story to sustain its self deception. Sounds like the GOP and supply side economics.
Sex without love, the subject of several sex comedies this past summer, was also an issue explored by poets and playwrights in the British Restoration.
William Wycherley As I’ve been writing recently about Restoration and 18th Century couples comedies, allow me one last post on a brilliant but cold play, William Wycherley’s Country Wife (1675). I gained new insight into it when my student Stephanie Gonzalez noted that the jealousy theme in the play is one that she is very […]
