William Wycherley
born 1641
died Jan. 1, 1716, London
English dramatist who attempted to reconcile in
his plays a personal conflict between
deep-seated puritanism and an ardent physical
nature. He perhaps succeeded best in The
Country-Wife (1675), in which satiric comment on
excessive jealousy and complacency was blended
with a richly comic presentation, the characters
unconsciously revealing themselves in
laughter-provoking colloquies. It was as
satirist that his own age most admired him:
William Congreve regarded Wycherley as one
appointed “to lash this crying age.”
Wycherley’s father was steward to the marquess
of Winchester. Wycherley was sent to be educated
in France at age 15. There he became a Roman
Catholic. After returning to England to study
law, in 1660 he entered Queen’s College, Oxford.
He soon left without a degree, though he had
converted back to Protestantism. Little is known
of his life in the 1660s; he may have traveled
to Spain as a diplomat, and he probably fought
in the naval war against the Dutch in 1665. In
this period he drafted his first play, Love in a
Wood; or, St. James’s Park, and in the autumn of
1671 it was presented in London, bringing its
author instant acclaim. Wycherley was taken up
by Barbara Villiers, duchess of Cleveland, whose
favours he shared with King Charles II, and he
was admitted to the circle of wits at court. His
next play, The Gentleman Dancing-Master, was
presented in 1672 but proved unsuccessful. These
early plays—both of which have some good
farcical moments—followed tradition in “curing
excess” by presenting a satiric portrait of
variously pretentious characters—fops, rakes,
would-be wits, and the solemn of every kind. The
Plain-Dealer, presented in 1676, satirizes
rapacious greed. The satire is crude and brutal,
but pointed and effective. In The Country-Wife,
acted a year earlier, the criticism of manners
and society remains severe, but there is no
longer a sense of the author despising his
characters.
Wycherley, who had led a fashionably
dissolute life during these years, fell ill in
1678. In 1680 he secretly married the countess
of Drogheda, a rigid puritan who kept him on
such a short rein that he lost his favour at
court. A year later the lady died, leaving her
husband a considerable fortune. But the will was
contested, and Wycherley ruined himself fighting
the case. Cast into a debtor’s prison, he was
rescued seven years later by King James II, who
paid off most of his debts and allowed him a
small pension. This was lost when James was
deposed in 1688. In the early 18th century,
Wycherley befriended the young Alexander Pope,
who helped revise his poems. On his deathbed,
Wycherley received the last rites of the Roman
Catholic church, to which he had apparently
reverted after being rescued from prison.
