SOURCE: Wheatley, Christopher. “Thomas Durfey's A Fond Husband, Sex Comedies of the Late 1670s and Early 1680s, and the Comic Sublime.” Studies in Philology 90 (fall 1993): 371-90.

In the following excerpt, Wheatley discusses English sex comedies from the 1670s and 1680s, of which Durfey's A Fond Husband and The Virtuous Wife were among the most popular and influential.

In Thomas Shadwell's A True Widow (1678) the poetaster Young Maggot describes a new play that he admires to the male leads Bellamour and Carlos: “I saw it Scene by Scene, and helped him in the writing, it breaks well, the Protasis good, the Catastasis excellent, there's no Episode, but the Catastrophe is admirable, I lent him that and the love parts, and the Songs. There are a great many sublimes that are very poetical.”¹ In act 4, all the main characters actually watch a play about a cuckolding that Young Maggot praises...