Wycherley’s The Gentleman Dancing Master: Aristocratic Order and Its Imitation

Abstract

Wycherley’s The Gentleman Dancing Master was his least successful play, a failure usually ascribed to a lack of complexity or sophistication. But more ideological reasons may have played a part in its failure. Wycherley, a member of the gentry, wrote a satire that ruthlessly attacked his “cit” audience and what he perceived as its materialist values. Using the image of the dance as a dual symbol, he mocked that audience’s senseless aping of their social betters as a betrayal of the divine harmony that underwrote the aristocratic social order. The dance is by turns the cits’ false masquerade of meaning, then the symbol for the aristocratic order, which “dances” harmoniously within the divine will.