"The Country Wife" by William Wycherley

A Country Wife was written by William Wycherley, himself a noted Restoration rake, and perhaps based on a Roman play, the Eunuch by Terence.

I saw it at Southwark Playhouse Saturday (matinee) 14th April 2018 in a production that (slightly weirdly) transferred the costumes to the 1920s but left the dialogue in 1675 (good: don't mess with dialogue!!) The production brought out the bawdy farce elements and added some wonderful moments of physical humour: we all loved the character hiding behind the screen. There was a generally strong cast with some outstanding performances by Sparkish and Pinchbeck, Alithea and Margery.

Horner, a rake, spreads the rumour that he has caught an STD and been rendered impotent. As a result Sir Jaspar Fidget decides to trust Hormer with his wife and daughter and their friend. Meantime Pinchwife's new wife, just up from the country, has seen Horner at the theatre and wants to have an affair with him. Meanwhile Pinchwife's sister, Alithea, is engaged to marry Sparkish whose best friend Harcvourt has fallen in love with her. This is a farce of true love versus cuckoldry, reputation versus honour, and trust versus betrayal.

Lots of innuendoes and double entendres and a fair amount of farce.

Some great lines, although they are often uncomfortably un-politically correct:

• “Women of quality are so civil, you can hardly distinguish love from good breeding, and a man is often mistaken.”
• “Your old boys ... who like superannuated stallions are suffered to run, feed, and whinny with the mares as long as they live, though they can do nothing else.”
• “A mistress should be like a country retreat near the town; not to dwell in constantly, but only for a night and away.”
• “‘Tis as hard to be a good fellow, a good friend, and a lover of women, as ‘tis to be a good fellow, a good friend, and a lover of money.”
• “For my part I will have only those glorious, manly pleasures of being very drunk and there is slovenly.” 
• “He can no more think that men laugh at him than that women jilt him, his opinion of himself is so good.”
• “Most men are the contraries to that they would seem.”
• “The little, humbly fawning physician with his ebony cane is he that destroys men.”
• “A marriage vow is like a penitent gamester’s oath, and entering into bonds and penalties to stint himself to such a particular small sum at play for the future, which makes him but the more eager, and not being able to hold out, loses his money again, and his forfeit to boot.”
• “If a woman wants wit in a corner, she has it nowhere.”
• “A beauty masked, like the sun in eclipse, gathers together more gazers then if it shined out.”
• “Nothing makes a man hate a woman more, than her constant conversation.”
• “Loving alone is as dull as eating alone.” 
• “Marrying to increase love is like gaming to become rich; alas, you only lose what little stock you had before.”
• “A secret is better kept ... by a single person than a multitude”

Other plays reviewed in this blog may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Oroonoko" by Aphra Benn

Aphra Benn was a woman playwright and novelist during the restoration. When she was young she seems to have lived in Suriname (before it was ceded to the Dutch by the Treaty of Breda in 1667 following the Anglo Dutch War (the English got New Amsterdam which they renamed New York). This story is about an African slave who led a revolt there.

Oroonoko is a Prince in his own country and very good looking (in fact he resembles a fine young English gentleman except for the colour of his skin). He falls in love with a very beautiful woman, Imoinda but the King, his grandfather, summons her to join his harem. The old King is impotent so Imoinda's virginity is preserved until Oroonoko can sneak into her bedchamber and ravish her. All night. The King finds out and sells Imoinda into slavery. Shortly afterwards, English sailors seize Oroonoko by trickery and transport him to Suriname and sell him as a slave to a very nice overseer called Trefry who treats Oroonoko with all respect. Surpirse, surprise, Imoinda is there (and has resisted all advances). So Oroonoko is reunited with her. But the story doesn't end there. Oroonoko leads a slave rebellion which is put down with great ferocity, despite promises of peace made by yet more treacherous Englishmen. Oroonoko is whipped to within an inch of his life and swears revenge ...

It is really short, only 66 pages, but the prose is long-winded and there is a lot of description. It is remarkable as a history and as an example of the nascent flowering of prose fiction; it is a classic story but the characters are too stereotyped for modern tastes.

November 2015; 66 pages

"Blazing star" by Alexander Larman

This is the biography of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, who was a courtier at the court of Charles II during the restoration and famous for being a libertine, a rake, a wit, and the writer of some incredibly rude poetry. He died of tertiary syphilis at the age of 33.

OK. I am not very good at appreciating poetry. Rochester wrote mostly in couplets and I find it hard to get beyond that poetic form into true emotion. As a result, although I can often appreciate the wit in his verse I can rarely understand what Larman claims, which is that some special quality puts Rochester above anyone else writing usually bawdy ballads. Certainly his work doesn't touch Donne (whose brilliant biography by John Stubbs I reviewed here). The only two bits of poetry I remembered after closing the book are the witty ones:

• firstly the one in which he coins the phrase 'Merry Monarch' to refers to Charles II. But in the original it is rather less complimentary than it sounds: "Restless, he rolls about from whore to whore/ A merry Monarch, scandalous and poor."
• secondly (and this is ascribed to him) the spontaneous couplet "We have a pretty witty king/ Whose  word no man relies on./ He never said a foolish thing/ Nor never did a wise one."

As for his supposedly far-sighted libertarian (as opposed to libertine) views; there was not much instance of these in the book. He mostly toadied to King Charles except when he got drunk and then vandalised royal property or got a soldier killed. In any case, the politics were not carefully explained. It mentions the CABAL of five ministers without saying who they were. And I never really understood how there could be such flipping to and fro between the Roman Catholicism of court, the Test Act and the possible Exclusion Act and the 'Popish plot' witch hunts of Titus Oates.

He was a wit. He was a scandalous rake. He was probably bisexual (he seems to have pimped out his footman who was nicknamed Beautiful Buttocks). But thirty three years is not a long time for a full length biography and there are times, especially towards the end where he spent a long time dying, where the momentum of the story gets a little lost.

Larman dissects the court of Charles II, pointing out both the good (the reintroduction of theatre) and the bad (the extravagance and waste and the lack of care for the common weal). This is the job of the historian; on the one hand, on the other hand; letting the reader make up his own mind; faithfully chronicling the complexities of a world where no one is all good or all bad. Given how well Larman does this it is a little disappointing that he does not also apply this to the previous regime, the Cromwellian. Cromwell is 'the old hypocrite',  his thought is 'straightforwardly brutish', sympathisers are 'toadying' and his court is 'pompous and grandiose'. This is the use of rhetoric rather than argument and (because I am an awkward bugger) it makes me presume that Cromwell must have been better than perhaps he was.

I suppose I am an old Puritan who disapproves of Rochester and his antics. Perhaps he was a remarkable man but if he had such gifts it is a shame he didn't use them for more than his ultimately self-destructive pursuit of pleasure. Perhaps it is this that makes him so fascinating a figure to biographers.

It is difficult to leave such a compelling central character to one side and write a fair comment on the book. It was clearly well researched and, apart from the little niggles I have mentioned above, the story was well told. I saw the film about Rochester starring Johnny Depp and I was glad I had read the book.

February 2015; 363 pages

"Restoration" by Rose Tremain

I read the sequel, Merivel, to this book first.

Robert Merivel is an orphaned medical student who successfully treats an ill spaniel belonging to Charles II; this leads to his preferment at court and eventually to his being installed as the master of a Norfolk country estate as the nominal but cuckolded husband of Charles' latest mistress. But he falls in love with the woman and incurs the king's wrath.

The story rambles from Fenland madhouse to Cheapside lodgings. There seems no coherence or purpose to the tale. As with the sequel, it is a picaresque. It works because it explores the character of a remarkable man, a frail mortal who can laugh at himself, an Everyman in whose flaws and sufferings we can recognise ourselves.

This book was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1989.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Rose Tremain novels:

• Sadler's Birthday (1976)
• Letter to Sister Benedicta (1978)
• The Cupboard (1981)
• Journey to the Volcano (1985)
• The Swimming Pool Season (1985)
• Restoration (1989)
• 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year
• Shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize
• Sacred Country (1992)
• Winner of the 1992 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
• Winner of the 1994 Prix Femina Etranger
• The Way I Found Her (1997)
• Music and Silence (1999)
• Winner of the 1999 Whitbread Award
• The Colour (2003)
• The Road Home (2008)
• Trespass (2010)
• Merivel: A Man of His Time (2012)
• Shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Book Prize
• Shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott prize
• The Gustav Sonata (2016)
• Winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award
• Shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Book Awards
• Longlisted for the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction
• Winner of the 2017 Ribalow Prize
• Islands of Mercy (2020)
• Lily: A Tale of Revenge (2021)
• Absolutely & Forever (2023)
• Shortlisted for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize