The Restoration comedy The Country Wife, by William Wycherley, published in 1675 demonstrates types of plays in the restoration period that were bawdy and sexual. It is in this play that certain characters are used to represent the genre of comedy of manners. Through the characters in the play such as Horner, Mrs. Pinch-wife and Lady Fidget and the constant reference to the comedy of manners, it is evident that there are many links between the playwright and restoration period. As the play originated after the restoration of England, its relation to society and the new addition to women being permitted to act on stage portrays the sexual nature of the play.
Prior to the restoration, Charles I was beheaded in January 1649. This lead to an Interregnum period between 1649-1668; Governed as a virtual dictator by Oliver Cromwell. Richard Cromwell was then put in charge after the death of his father from 1658-1660 which put England at an austere period in which theatres were closed due to no monarch ruling. By the end of the 1660's the Son of Charles I; Charles II was restored to the t...
Pinchwife’s adopts a relatively relaxed attitude being ‘cuckolded’ despite his jealousy; he employs exaggeration to ridicule women in London; he tells Margery ‘Ay, my Dear, you must love me only, and not be like the naughty town women, who only hate their husbands.’ (2.1.79-80) ‘Ay’ show the distress he is experiencing due to his tremendous jealosy, He attempts to control the fool Margery by criticising women of the ‘town’ He describes women of London as ‘naughty’ as they cuckold their husbands. They are not ‘good’ wives and they are not controlled by their husbands. This gives the reader an insight on the role of women in the male social power exchange.
The use of euphemism and crudeness in “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” is simultaneously unnerving and amusing, and begs the question of how a “wicked” woman like The Wife could ever actually progress in medieval society. Chaucer incorporates subtle allusions to female sexual organs and it is this bluntness (that would raise eyebrows even today) which establishes the Wife as such a powerfully outspoken character. Because courtship in Chaucer’s time was considered worthy of complete submission, the fact that the Wife places such emphasis on domination and even psychological power hints at her being an object of irony (and not a feminist figure “before her time”). It is for this reason that Chaucer’s delicate use of “queynte”- a term from which
Comedy and tragedy would not seem to mix well, as they have opposite conclusions of happiness or sadness. To have comic and tragic plots within one play, then, can be argued as being too distinct to be coherent. In The Insatiate Countess, however, it is the differences between the tragic plot of the countess, Isabella, and the comic plot of Abigail and Thais, that strengthen the play’s message supporting loyalty in friendship.
In I Henry IV and II Henry IV, William Shakespeare brings together drama and comedy to create two of the most compelling history plays ever written. Many of Shakespeare's other works are nearly absolute in their adherence to either the comic or tragic traditions, but in the two Henry IV plays Shakespeare combines comedy and drama in ways that seem to bring a certain realism to his characters, and thus the plays. The present essay is an examination of the various and significant effects that Shakespeare's comedic scenes have on I Henry IV and II Henry IV. The Diversity of Society
Wycherley’s The Country Wife opens on Horner, the lead, telling his physician about his plan to change his reputation from that of a rake (promiscuous man-about-town) to that of a eunuch in order to gain access to women without anyone knowing. He withholds this plan from everyone but the doctor, who becomes his accomplice by spreading the rumor of Horner’s impotence to the gossipiest women in London. Horner’s sex life constitutes two of the three main plots, in both of which he gains access to a married woman and cuckolds her husband. He comes close to being found out but narrowly escapes discovery when the women of the play and the doctor reaffirm his condition, thus persuading the cuckolded husbands that they have not been made cuckolds. The other plot involves Harcourt, Horner’s best friend, who falls in love with and immediately proposes to Alithea when Sparkish, the would-be wit whom she is arranged to marry, introduces them in an attempt to make Harcourt jealous and thus win his approval. Harcourt then spends the rest of the play making failed attempts to win Alithea away from Sparkish. In the end, Horner’s plots intersect with Harcourt’s, and Horner slanders Alithea to keep his affairs secret. Sparkish had kept Alithea’s loyalty because ostensibly he was not jealous and seemed to trust her, but he believes what Horner says about Alithea without waiting to hear her defense and shows that he is not really who she thought he was, nor did he ever really care about her. Harcourt, on the other hand, defends her honor and trusts her, despite the slander, and once again offers marriage. Alithea, who had fallen for Harcourt but had to keep her feelings secret, is now free t...
The title page offers an immediate insight into the patriarchal constraints placed on women in early modern England. Although The Tragedy of Mariam is the first known English play to be authored by a woman, the fact that Cary is unable to give her full name is indicative of the limitations on women writers of the period. This semi-anonymous authorship...
King Charles I left us with some of the most intriguing questions of his period. In January 1649 Charles I was put on trial and found guilty of being a tyrant, a traitor, a murderer and a public enemy of England. He was sentenced to death and was executed on the 9th of February 1649. It has subsequently been debated whether or not this harsh sentence was justifiable. This sentence was most likely an unfair decision as there was no rule that could be found in all of English history that dealt with the trial of a monarch. Only those loyal to Olivier Cromwell (The leader opposing Charles I) were allowed to participate in the trial of the king, and even then only 26 of the 46 men voted in favour of the execution. Charles was schooled from birth, in divine right of kings, believing he was chosen by God to be king, and handing power to the parliament would be betraying God. Debatably the most unjust part of his trial was the fact that he was never found guilty of any particular crimes, instead he was found guilty of the damage cause by the two civil wars.
Jane Austen's novels at first glance tell a story of romance set primarily within the landowning society amidst country estates, and their cultivation of tea parties, social outings, and extravagant balls; ladies sashaying in flowing gowns through precisely decorated rooms, and men deliberating over their game of whist. The storybook romance usually unfolds in these familiar settings, and inevitably involves the conflict of two lovers separated by differences in social class, and the resulting influence of the diverse societies they revolve in. Although these superficial aspects of Austen's stories are protruding at the seams, underneath the skin of these well-clothed dramas lie serious moral issues afflicting the culture of England during Austen's life.
Kemp, Theresa D. Women in the Age of Shakespeare. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2009. Print.
The Wife of Bath, with the energy of her vernacular and the voraciousness of her sexual appetite, is one of the most vividly developed characters of 'The Canterbury Tales'. At 856 lines her prologue, or 'preambulacioun' as the Summoner calls it, is the longest of any of the pilgrims, and matches the General Prologue but for a few lines. Evidently Chaucer is infatuated with Alisoun, as he plays satirically with both gender and class issues through the Wife's robust rhetoric. Scholars and students alike have continued this obsession with her, and as a consequence Chaucer's larger than life widow has been subject to centuries of scrutiny. Indeed, she is in the vast minority amongst the Canterbury bound pilgrims; apart from the in-vogue Prioress she is the only female - though she appears in no way daunted by the apparent inequality in numbers. It seems almost a crime to examine masculinity in her prologue and tale, but as I hope to show, there is much to learn both about the Wife and about Chaucer from this male presence.
With the restoration of Charles II to the throne following the fall of the Commonwealth and Puritanism came a surge of sexual and artistic freedom in England. This new libertine ideology brought with it not only the reemergence of the theatre, but and a society that embraced freedom of sexuality and thought in a way that was unprecedented. It is this new libertine society that provided a context for the writings of Aphra Behn. While Behn observed men like rakish Charles II and the effeminate Earl of Rochester enjoying England’s newfound open mindedness, she was forced to navigate, or rather circumnavigate, the limitations that remained in place for women. In a time when actresses were first appearing on stage and Charles II’s mistresses were regarded practically as pop culture icons, women were finally breaking out of the private sphere and being thrust into the public eye.1 While women, and even their sexualities were at last being celebrated outside of the domestic sphere, it was far from on their own terms, and entirely relative to the roles they filled for men. While the society so often characterized by the court of Charles II was on the whole highly performative, women were expected to perform in a much more specific way than their male counterparts. On and off stage women were expected to conform to a limited selection of character types that started with wife and ended with whore, and the spectrum between was narrow if not nonexistent.
During Marvell's lifetime, many historical eents took place. King Charles was over thrown and beheaded all before Marvell was four. In 1660, Charles the Second was made king and under his reign, Oliver Cromwell was dug up and decapatated. The had his severed had placed on a pole and mounted over West Minister hall as caution to all the upcomming rebels("Andrew Marvell" 281).
In Tennessee William’s pays, the Southern Gothic style of literature is primarily used to portray the interactions between a character that is fixated in the past overcoming this fixation and moving on. William’s plays generally tend to feature a familial unit at their center, be it a conflict between husbands and their wives, the children and parents, conflict between siblings, or even between in-laws (Davis 1). Popkin takes this basic conflict and expands further on the specific style of William’s plays. He states that in most of William’s plays, there is commonly a conflict between a male and female, and one of them, generally the male, will play the role of a strong and confident “Adonis”, while the other will be the “Gargoyle” characterized by a fading beauty, desperation, scheming and cunning, or a disability to let go of the past (Popkin 45-47).
Throughout the historical literary periods, many writers underrepresented and undervalued the role of women in society, even more, they did not choose to yield the benefits of the numerous uses of the female character concerning the roles which women could accomplish as plot devices and literary tools. William Shakespeare was one playwright who found several uses for female characters in his works. Despite the fact that in Shakespeare's history play, Richard II, he did not use women in order to implement the facts regarding the historical events. Instead, he focused the use of women roles by making it clear that female characters significantly enriched the literary and theatrical facets of his work. Furthermore in Shakespeare’s history play, King Richard II, many critics have debated the role that women play, especially the queen. One of the arguments is that Shakespeare uses the queen’s role as every women’s role to show domestic life and emotion. Jo McMurtry explains the role of all women in his book, Understanding Shakespeare’s England A Companion for the American Reader, he states, “Women were seen, legally and socially, as wives. Marriage was a permanent state” (5). McMurtry argues that every woman’s role in the Elizabethan society is understood to be a legal permanent state that is socially correct as wives and mothers. Other critics believe that the role of the queen was to soften King Richard II’s personality for the nobles and commoners opinion of him. Shakespeare gives the queen only a few speaking scenes with limited lines in Acts two, four, and five through-out the play. Also, she is mentioned only a few times by several other of the characters of the play and is in multiple scenes wit...
Evaluate and respond to the presentations of women in the Romantic period. Feel free to discuss presentations of women, by women (such as Austen’s Persuasion) as well as presentations of women by men (such as the “she” in Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty”). Consider the following questions: are these presentations problematic? What do they tell us about the values and briefs of the Romantic Period? Do any of these presentations subvert (complicate, or call into questions) the time’s notions of femininity?