\'He\'s a fool that marries, but he\'s a greater fool that does not marry a fool.\' This bawdy, hilarious, subversive and wickedly satirical drama pokes fun at the humourless, the jealous, and the adulterous alike.
This student edition contains a lengthy, entirely new introduction, with a background on the author, structure, characters, genre, themes, original staging and performance history, as well as an updated bibliography and a fully annotated version of the playtext..
Sexually frank, and as ready to criticise marriage as infidelity, the virtuosity, linguistic energy, brilliant wit, naughtiness and complexity of this ribald play have made it a staple of the modern stage.
Twentieth century productions heralded it a Restoration masterpiece.
The seventeenth century libertine king Charles II saw it twice, and is said to have joined the \'dance of the cuckolds\' at the end of one performance; the eighteenth century actor-playwright David Garrick declared it \'the most licentious play in the English language\'; the Victorian Macaulay compared it to a skunk, because it was \'too filthy to handle and too noisome even to approach\'.
The Country Wife has provoked powerfully mixed reactions over the years.
A number of licentious and hypocritical women request Horner\'s services - the Country Wife among them.
It features a Country wife, Margery, whose husband believes she is too naive to cuckold him; and an anti-hero, Horner, who pretends to be impotent in order to have unrestrained access to the women keen on \'the sport\'. \'He\'s a fool that marries, but he\'s a greater fool that does not marry a fool.\' This bawdy, hilarious, subversive and wickedly satirical drama pokes fun at the humourless, the jealous, and the adulterous alike
