Kevin Casey

ENG 579

Dr. Morillo

Paper 1

Sept. 19, 2008

What to Do About Lucy?

The Writer-in-Waiting in Wycherly’s The Country Wife

When Lucy turns aside to claim responsibility for the maelstrom of misdirection that spins the The Country Wife to its close, her lines sound odd: “Now could I speak, if I durst, and solve the riddle, / who am the author of it” (V.iv.272-3). How could this lady-in-waiting, who does not even first enter until almost halfway through the play and appears in only four scenes altogether, be the architect of such a plot? Much like the presence of the theater itself, the writer has an unbilled role in the play that manifests in Lucy, serving both as a dramatic device and also an authorial voice. While the character would seem an afterthought in the Dramatis Personae (in fact, appearing last in the list of Women), Lucy has an indelible impact on two crucial scenes—Act III, scene ii and Act IV, scene i—that requires her return in the final scene to bring the play to a satisfactory conclusion. Simultaneously, Wycherly—perhaps self-interested in pursuit of a living by his pen—comments via Lucy’s actions on the nascent Restoration theater and the importance of the playwright, creating a dual position for Alithea’s maid as his writer-in-waiting.

Preceding Lucy’s entrance in The Country Wife is a fascinating bit of dramatic criticism from Sparkish, the bumbling fool who wants in on every joke, even when he is the punchline. Horner and Harcourt have their fun with him, prompting a discourse on theater and Sparkish’s assertion about all who attend plays that “we speak more wit and so become the poet’s rivals in his audience” (III.ii.103-4). Indeed, he does “scorn writing” (III.ii.112) but acknowledges it a necessary evil in the game of love. Yet his own idea of poetry seems quite different than that of the Restoration stage. A question from Dorilant gets an angry response from Sparkish on the writers’ renewed reign:

Damn the poets! They turned ‘em into a burlesque, as / they call it; that burlesque is a hocus-pocus trick they / have got, which by virtue of the ‘hictius doctius, / topsy turvey,’ they make a wise and witty man in / the world a fool upon the stage, you know not how, / and ‘tis therefore, I hate ‘em too, for I know not but / it may be my own case, for they’ll put a man into a / play for looking asquint (III.ii.121-8).

Sparkish lambastes the current playwrights and longs for “their predecessors…contented to make serving men only their stage fools” (III.ii.128-31). He even declares knighthood is his for the asking, but that he declines the honor for fear of being parodied onstage. Harcourt reasonably asks: “But why shouldst thou be afraid of being in a play, / who expose yourself everyday in the playhouses / and as public places?” (III.ii.137-9).

It seems that the Restoration stage’s subject matter hits too close to home for Sparkish. If the goal of a play, in part, is to instruct, Sparkish wants no part of the lesson. He is, in his words, the writer’s rival. He speaks for the Interregnum, or at least a tamer brand of drama than the Restoration comedy. In his view, the theater is much like the woman of the title: best kept tucked away in the country, devoid of ideas or vitality, for fear that she fully realize herself and—heaven forbid—cuckold her husband. For Sparkish to find his likeness on the stage would be its own brand of dramatic cuckoldry. Asked if his appearance in a play would be any different than sitting for a portrait, and not good publicity with the ladies to boot, Sparkish responds with uncharacteristic conviction: “A pox! Painters don’t draw the small pox or / pimples in one’s face. Come, damn all your silly / authors whatever, all books and booksellers, by the / world, and all readers, courteous or uncourteous” (III.ii.145-8).

Lucy’s entrance ends the discussion, but not the meta-drama, for Margery insists on purchasing some reading material—including Covent Garden Drollery, which featured Wycherly’s work—no doubt of the same ilk as Sparkish’s damned songs. Sparkish, meanwhile, does all he can to push his bride-to-be into Harcourt’s arms and thinks quite well of himself for it. Lucy’s first lines—noted in the stage direction as spoken behind the principle actors, as though she is narrating—set her immediately against Sparkish:

Well, to see what easy husbands these women / of quality can meet with! A poor chambermaid can / never have such ladylike luck. Besides, he’s thrown / away upon her; she’ll make no use of her fortune, / her blessing. None to a gentleman for a pure / cuckold, for it requires breeding to be a cuckold (III.ii.272-8).

Here set in motion are Lucy’s twin aims: She will conspire to prevent Alithea’s planned marriage to Sparkish, and in doing so condemn the fool and his criticism of the theater, specifically his skewering of the modern playwright. For the drama to reach an acceptable end, Sparkish must fail. Lucy is author of both plot and commentary, but subtly so. She lurks in the shadows and often speaks in asides, similar to her opening lines behind the action on stage. Lucy is quietly a key player in the onstage, off-stage action with Horner and Margery-in-drag, and attempts to pacify Pinchwife as his terror of cuckcoldry escalates. In the confusion, it seems only Lucy is able to fully apprehend the scene.

Act IV opens and, lest there be any ambiguity about Lucy’s opinion of her lady’s husband-to-be and writer’s rival, she proclaims Alithea’s dress and decoration “for / no other purpose but as people adorn and perfume / a corpse for a stinking second-hand grave, such or / as bad as I think Mr. Sparkish’s bed” (IV.i.4-6). Lucy makes her case for Harcourt—a moderate counterpart to Sparkish in the dramatic discourse of the previous act—and the synergy of plot and subtext continues with Lucy attempting to reweave the web of relationships as she sees fit. She also develops the primary commentary on marriage and love. She would prefer a coffin to Sparkish’s bed, and excoriates the commodification of marriage—the bribery of the heart (IV.i.32)—common of the time. Sparkish embodies this idea. He is the eternal fool who would suck the life out of anything worthwhile, his wife and the theater included. Even Alithea, with her misguided sense of loyalty and propriety, acknowledges Sparkish’s lack of that sought-after trait—wit—relative to Harcourt, but excuses it for his lack of jealousy. In Lucy’s view, though, that “husbandly virtue” (IV.i.52) is lost on an honest woman like Alithea.

Freedom—of life, love, expression—is very much at stake for Lucy. “Liberty is a great pleasure, madam” (IV.i.65). The current customs of marriage—as with the planned nuptials of Sparkish and Alithea—destroy freedom, particularly for the woman, suppressing her like Sparkish would have the theater stifled. Lucy says in an aside: “The country is as terrible / I find to our young English ladies as a monastery to those abroad” (IV.i.72-4). Derailing Alithea’s marriage is imperative for the preservation of freedom. Lucy therefore plays coy to the parson-in-disguise and enlists the trick for her own end, knowing the ceremony will be a sham. She coaxes Alithea into the deception (IV.i.181-3) and excuses her lady’s reluctance in a sly bit of deference to her rival Sparkish, convincing him nothing is amiss: “Yes, an’t please your worship, married women show all their modesty the first day, because / married men show all their love the first day” (IV.i.194-6). The scene concludes and Lucy remains out of sight (and presumably out of the audience’s mind) until she returns in Act V, scene iii, where she begins to reap the fruits of her conspiratorial labor. The sham parson has been revealed to Sparkish, and he believes he now sees the ruse—though he still mistakes Horner as Alithea’s true love. Lucy sees the misdirection will work (V.iii.34) and delights with the audience in Sparkish’s idiocy: “He has been a great bubble by his similes, as they say” (V.iii.41). She is vindicated in her arguments on marriage with Alithea—“You believe, then, a fool may be made jealous / now?” (V.iii.85-6)—and presses forward with her designs to pair her lady with Harcourt.

In the following scene, she claims authorship of the chaos of matchmaking and love at hand. From a dramatic plot standpoint, Lucy is crucial to the conclusion. Her admission and plea to Pinchwife allows for his satisfaction that Margery has not cuckolded him, and from there the pieces fall into place: Horner escapes unscathed, Alithea and Harcourt will marry, and Sparkish remains the unmarried fool. Given the convention of plays ending with couples pairing off, either in bed or in marriage (for even Horner is surely off to another rakish conquest), Sparkish’s solitude speaks loudly—that he is so self-assured in his lack of a woman (V.iv.433-4) is his final, foolish dismissal.

Lucy’s authorship claim is also an aside from the real writer, Wycherly, who takes the opportunity to remind his audience who is really in control of the drama. Sparkish’s fate at Lucy’s hands catalyzes the plot and serves as an admonishment. In the writer-in-waiting’s penultimate words: “And any wild thing grows but the more fierce and / hungry for being kept up and more dangerous to / the keeper” (V.iv.426-8). A “doctrine for all husbands” (V.iv.429) and also for the theater. Bottled up in silence for more than a decade, it has returned with a vengeance.

Works Cited

Wycherly, William. “The Country Wife.” The Broadview Anthology of Restoration &

Eighteenth-Century Drama. Ed. J. Douglas Canfield. Ontario, Canada: Broadview

Press, 2001. 1038.