William+Wycherly



While in France, Wycherley converted toRoman Catholicism. He returned to England shortly before the restoration of KingCharles II, and lived atQueen's College, OxfordwhereThomas Barlowwas provost. Under Barlow's influence, Wycherley returned to theChurch of England. Wycherley only lived in the provost's lodgings; he does not seem to have matriculated or taken a degree.
 * William Wycherley** (c. 1640 – 31 December 1715) was an English dramatist of the Restoration period, best known for the plays The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer. He was born at Clive, Shropshire near Shrewsbury, where his family was settled on a moderate estate of about £600 a year. Like John Vanbrugh, Wycherley spent some years of his adolescence 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, said that he there "improved, with the greatest refinements", the "extraordinary talents" for which he was "obliged to nature".

Thomas Macaulayhints that Wycherley's turning back to Roman Catholicism once more had something to do with the patronage and unwonted liberality of the futureJames 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 ofNero's court writ byPetronius", 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.

Wycherley left Oxford and took up residence at theInner Temple, but gave little attention to the study of law. Pleasure and the stage were his only interests. His play,Love in a Wood, was produced early in 1671 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It was published the next year. Though Wycherley boasted of having written the play at the age of nineteen, before going to Oxford, this is probably untrue. Macaulay points to the allusions in the play to gentlemen'speriwigs, to guineas, to the vests which Charles ordered to be worn at court, to theGreat 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.

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.

William Wycherley may have coined the expression "nincompoop" (certainly, the word occurs inThe Plain Dealer). TheOxford English Dictionaryalso cites Wycherley as the first user of the phrase "happy-go-lucky", in 1672.


 * List of plays**:

The Country Wife The Plain Dealer


 * List of links/sources**:

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 * This page has been created by mlev20**