William Wycherley’s The Country Wife was a great box office success when it first premiered in London in 1675. Thereafter, the play was praised by important Restoration critics, particularly John Dryden, who was also the literary giant of his day. However, toward the end of the century—in 1696—a clergyman named Jeremy Collier published a scathing criticism of Restoration comedies, declaring them to be obscene, lewd, and morally offensive. He was especially perturbed by Restoration comedy’s cavalier and callous attitude toward marriage. The Country Wife was singled out as a prime example.

Collier’s attack was decisive. It changed English comedies from being robust and witty, if often salacious and lewd, to morally sentimental. All through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Collierian attitude dominated, though during the Victorian era (the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century), there was some recognition of Wycherley’s brilliant wit.

Criticism of Restoration comedy began to turn favorable again from about the 1920s when literary figures like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound began to take a fresh interest in Restoration poetry and prose style. Concurrently, with the hold of religion slackening in public life, Restoration comedy once again began to be appreciated by American and British academia. Professors such as Mark Van Doren and James L. Clifford wrote tirelessly praising Restoration and early-eighteenth-century literature. Wycherley was among the primary beneficiaries.

From the 1950s onward, Wycherley and the rest of the Restoration playwrights were definitely “in” with English and American audiences and critics. The Country Wife, banished from the stage since the nineteenth century, enjoyed critical approval and revivals in both countries. Scholars like Norman Holland wrote about the middle road in morality taken by The Country Wife:between the lascivious Horner and the hypocritical housewives like Lady Fidget, there was the “golden mean” example of Harcourt and Alithea. Rose Zimbardo praised the play as a fierce, social satire.

Thomas H. Fujimura, whose 1969 critical edition of The Country Wife is still considered to be the definitive single edition by many scholars, spends much of his “introduction” to the play explaining away Horner’s sexually predatory behavior, stating (as a typical male) that “Horner’s activities transcend mere libertinism; he is motivated by the desire to expose hypocritical women and to punish jealous fools.” It does not seem to occur to Fujimura that taking the sexual route is not necessarily the only way to expose the pretensions of foolish people. Fortunately, such male-order positive criticism of The Country Wife has also gone out of vogue. Anglo-American society has been witnessing major changes in cultural theory and criticism. Linguistics has influenced not only literary but also social theory. The Fujimura type of criticism of The Country Wife is now seen as a classic case of how academicians line up on the side of authority and language.

Into this milieu came J. Douglas Canfield, a professor at the University of Arizona, who wrote knowledgeably and critically of the way Restoration male aristocracy (e.g., men like William Wycherley) ganged up against the new gentlemen of London, those who became rich through business rather than inheritance, criticizing their sexual interest in the very women that the aristocrats would go after. Horner was of the landed aristocracy, while Mr. Sparkish belonged to the nouveau rich. Eve Cosofsky Sedgwick argued in her book Between Men that The Country Wife is ultimately not about predatory men trying to have sex with hypocritical and immoral women. Rather, it is about men challenging other men for sexual conquest. Referring to this as a “homosocial” phenomenon, Sedgwick argues that Horner fights on several battlefronts, cuckolding almost simultaneously Mr. Pinchwife and Sir Jasper Fidget. His excuse was moral; his technique was deceit; and he had the unconditional backing of the others in his class—Harcourt and Dorilant—who stood to gain from his success, ideologically if not materially.