SOURCE: Burke, Helen. “Law-suits, Love-suits, and the Family Property in Wycherley's The Plain Dealer.” In Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater, edited by J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne, pp. 89-113. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Burke examines the internal and external contexts of The Plain Dealer that determine the structure of its plot and subplot. Burke argues that the play's full subversiveness is noticeable only when its cultural context is recognized.

The realm of the proper … the general cultural heterosexual establishment in which a man's reign is held to be proper.

—Hélène Cixous

What is emphasized or downplayed in the history of commentary on a literary text, or what is perceived to be a “problem” or a “failure” in a text, is often as much an effect of the critical tradition in which this text has been received...