Wycherley and the shock of disillusionment

Abstract

This study attempts to examine the plays of William Wycherley in terms of the social and economic revolution in England which culminated in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It also attempts to remove Wycherley from the category of a writer of "manners" comedy in which critics have somewhat uneasily placed him and to place him amont that list of writers who have raised their voices in humanistic protest against an imperonal economic system which dehumanizes man and his institutions. Examination of Wycherley's plays reveals a morally and socially chaotic world in which a few baically decent individuals search for values and relationships based upon something other than self-service. It is a world of fraud, of deceit, and oubtful appearances, a world in which human beings and their non-ecomomic concerns hae been completely subordinated to economic considerations and rendered increasingly irrelevant. For the emergence of capitalism and the accompanying reorganization of human life meant that man was brought face to face with himself and forced to look at the naked reality of himself and his rationalizations. The brutal cynicism of Wycherley's Horner and the moral absolutism of his Manly represent the two poles around which Wycherley's plays revolve. Horner represents and defines the limitation of the self-seeking world of Wycherley's bourgeois dupes when stripped of its affectations and superficial moral gloss; and Manly, whose intolerant moral absolutism, like that of the Puritanism he is so suggestive of, stems from egoistic pique rather than from accepted social ideals, represents the perversion of man's capacity for idealism when the social base on which those ideals are founded is destroyed. Both are equally destructie of a humanistic endeavor to mantain a balance between the two sides of man's nature. Wycherley presents, in brief, a world which acknowledges no god but Mammon and has John Calvin for its prophet. Therefore, in this study Wycherley's plays are examined against their larger historical background, and the attempt is made to view the larger social, political, and religous conflicts of the day in terms of the reorganization of human life and thought under the rapidly evolving capitalism and to relate Wycherley's plays to this larger historical context.