SOURCE: Hawkins, Barrie. “The Country Wife: Metaphor Manifest.” Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research 11, no. 1 (summer 1996): 40-63.

In the essay below, Hawkins discusses Wycherley's use of language and imagery in The Country Wife.

L. C. Knights has famously charged that metaphoric density is precisely what Restoration Comedy lacks. Its language, he claims, is impoverished, its “idiomatic vigour and evocative power” is lost, and the plays are not so much immoral as “trivial, gross and dull.”¹ James Thompson's book-length analysis of Wycherley's “densely packed imagery”² has answered this Olympian judgement and P. F. Vernon claims that The Country Wife is “more metaphoric than any other comedy in English.”³ Others have claimed that Restoration Comedy is uniformly refined, restrained and static. David Vieth suggests:

the Elizabethan and Jacobean idea of a play as essentially a series of dynamic, developing actions would be misleading if applied to The Country Wife. Most...