The "Plyant" Discourse of Wycherley's The Country Wife

In a spirited defense of the excellences of Restoration culture, John Dryden praises King Charles II for having awakened "the dull and heavy spirits of the English, from their natural reserv'dness; loosen'd them, from their stiff forms of conversation; and made them easy and plyant to each other in discourse. Thus, insensibly, our way of living become more free: and the fire of the English wit, which was before stifled under a constrain'd, melancholy way of breeding, began first to display its force: by mixing the solidity of our Nation, with the air and gayety of our neighbors." ¹ The king may indeed have set a tone in court that counteracted recent Puritanical curbs on speech, but it was the Restoration stage that allowed and popularized the art of ingenious conversation and encouraged the habit of "easy and plyant" discourse. Clearly, Dryden links linguistic habits to behaviors and displays his political and cultural commitments to a "way of living" both "more free" and more closely resembling that of the rest of Europe.

Writing about discourse in novels rather than in conversation, Mikhail M. Bakhtin concurs with Dryden's assertion of a link between language and society and the possibility of social change: "these processes of shift and renewal of the national language that are reflected by the novel do not bear an abstract linguistic character in the novel: they are inseparable from social and ideological struggle." ² He also insists that the memory of past struggles persists "as congealed traces in language." ³ This slant on semantic and social history is particularly telling in consideration of the relatively recent (if indeed yet complete in the 1670s) consolidation of London's dialect as the national language of England, which was so aggressively sought by Elizabethan policy. It follows that the vocabulary of a text can be examined for "congealed traces" of social practices and attitudes across generations , and I would like to subject William Wycherley's The Country Wife to just such scrutiny.

I want to make use of Dryden's term "plyant" in a couple of different ways. It was no doubt intended to register approval of liveliness or resiliency, and I will rely on this usage later. But I also want to take advantage of a sense of pliant unintended by Dryden. Some of the words in Wycherley's play are pliant in that they belong to two or more ethical and social systems. One result of this fact is that the play was understood differently by various groups in its own time, and another is that critical commentary on The Country Wife has reached little consensus about certain interpretative issues even now; Helen Burke refers to its "notorious resistance to interpretation." ⁴ Its textual features have seemed so pliant to interpretation over the years that the genre of the play has seemed to oscillate between satire and romantic comedy, and its central character, Mr. Horner, between brilliant spokesman for the satiric mode and sinister predator, himself the object of dismissive critique. ⁵ Laura Brown counts this interpretative impasse as an intended effect of the play: "Wycherley maintains a complete disjunction between social and moral judgment." ⁶ This essay does not dispute that openness to interpretation, but it will, I hope, highlight the serious and contentious social consciousness on which that openness is based and which the play can still, though under different circumstances, suggest.

It would not be difficult to see the textual pliancy of The Country Wife in the guise of postmodernity, especially in its generic instability, equivocation about moral norms, and linguistic slippage. One of my students responded to it just that way, remarking, "This play is so modern," and likening it to certain recent dramatic fare. Her comment impressed me because I had had the same reaction to the production I saw at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario in...