About the Play:
William Wycherly's The Country Wife, first performed at Drury Lane in 1675, has proved to be one of the more lasting and popular plays of the Restoration period. Wycherly uses the the comic antics of a character named Horner, who pursues ladies who run very slowly, to portray the mores and the moral attitudes of a particular section of London society of 1675.

The main plot turns on the genial libertine Horner's stratagem by which he enjoys, among others, the country wife of Squire Pinchwife, who in his foolish jealousy tries to keep her in seclusion and ignorance. In the subplot, Pinchwife's jealousy is balanced by the idiotic complacency of Sparkish, whose sole desire is to pass for a man of wit and sense, and whose undervaluing of Alithea's affection opens the way for Harcourt, a true wit whose courtship of Alithea is honourable and has marriage as its object. These twin plots are brilliantly inter-related, while at the same time Horner pursues his scheme of indiscriminate seduction with the wife and relations of Sir Jasper Fidget. The theme of jealousy gives a deeper unity to the play.

--Leland Starnes

Program

Production Scenes

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