“Write as I bid you”: Eruptive Baroque Aesthetics in Wycherley’s The Country Wife

Abstract

This article argues that J. Douglas Canfield’s idea that baroque characteristics “persisted” in neoclassical literature can do more than just mark moments of exuberant rhetoric and imagery in Restoration texts. Rather, combining scholarship on the baroque by Peter Davidson and Walter Benjamin with Restoration studies reveals that the baroque is an underappreciated feature of Restoration drama that erupts from its neoclassicism and emblematizes aristocratic ideology about the constructed social, economic, and political order of the Restoration. Taking stock of specific historical issues negotiated by Charles II’s regime, therefore, provides the inventory of meanings a baroque eruption signals. Mr. Pinchwife’s surprising and violent threat to his wife Margery in The Country Wife is the article’s primary example. Allusions to Shakespeare’s Othello and the Whore of Babylon from the book of Revelation are revealed to be couched in Pinchwife’s outburst; they demand an allegorical reading in light of contemporary ideology about noblemen and anti-Catholicism.