William Wycherley | Biography

Biography Essay

Satyre lashes Vice into Reformation, and humour represents folly so as to render it ridiculous. Many of our present Writers are eminent in both these kinds; and particularly the Author of the Plain Dealer, whom I am proud to call my Friend, has oblig'd all honest and vertuous Men, by one of the most bold, most general, and most useful Satyres which has ever been presented on the English Theatre.

—so John Dryden wrote in his preface to The State of Innocence (1677). Nevertheless, Wycherley's reputation as a playwright and his place in the literary tradition have always been problematic because the history of Wycherley studies hinges upon a bitter paradox. In his own day Wycherley was considered to be a moral satirist of the seriousness and stature of Juvenal; yet from the nineteenth century to the present he has been thought successively to be: a monster of moral depravity; a writer of artificial comedies of manners that are "holidays from the sublime . . . and the real"; a closet Savonarola, who restrained his neurotic rage while he was writing his first three plays only to have it burst forth in his "truly disturbing" last play; and, most recently, a writer of sex farces.

There was no doubt in the minds of his contemporaries that Wycherley was one of...
(read more)