Wycherley, WILLIAM, was the eldest son of Daniel Wycherley, a Shropshire gentleman of good family and some property, and was born in the village of Clive, near Shrewsbury, about the year 1640. In early youth he was sent to France, where he was admitted to the circle of the Précieuses of which the celebrated Duchess de Montausier, the beautiful daughter of Madame de Rambouillet, was queen. The duchess is said to have gained over young Wycherley to the Roman Catholic faith, but on returning to England and becoming a fellow-commoner of Queen's College, Oxford, he was reconverted to Protestantism by Dr (afterwards Bishop) Barlow. He left college without taking a degree and entered at the Middle Temple, where he acquired as much legal knowledge as sufficed for the happy portrayal of a litigious widow in his comedy of The Plain Dealer. For some years he lived gaily as a man about town and a courtier, and he began early to work as a dramatic author, but the dates at which his comedies were written are uncertain. 'The chronology of Wycherley's plays,' says Pope, 'I am well acquainted with, for he told it me over and over. Love in a Wood he wrote when he was but nineteen; The Gentleman Dancing-master at twenty-one; The Plain Dealer at twenty-five; and The Country Wife at one- or two-and-thirty.' If this statement be correct, the plays must have been written about the years 1659, 1661, 1665, and 1671. They abound, however, in allusions which could not possibly have been made in these years, and they must either have been in a great measure rewritten after the dates given by Pope, or more probably Pope was in error regarding them. The question, however, is one of no great moment. Love in a Wood, or St James's Park, a brisk comedy of hide-and-seek, founded on Sir Charles Sedley's Mulberry Garden, was acted with much applause in 1672, and its handsome witty author became for a time one of the most popular men in town. He rose into special favour with 'her graceless grace,' the Duchess of Cleveland, with the Duke of Buckingham, and with the king. The duchess, according to Voltaire, used to visit him in his chambers at the Temple, 'dressed like a country-maid, in a straw hat, with pattens on, and a box or basket in her hand;' Buckingham gave him a commission in a regiment; and Charles went to see him while he lay fever-stricken in Bow Street, made him a present of £500, and at one time wished to appoint him tutor to his son, the Duke of Richmond. Wycherley served for a short time in the fleet, like Dorset and many other young men of rank and fashion of that day, and was present at a sea-fight which may have been the battle gained by the Duke of York over Opdam in 1665, but was more probably one of the drawn battles fought between Rupert and De Ruyter in 1673. The Gentleman Dancing-master, a cleverly constructed farcical comedy of intrigue, was produced in 1673. The Country Wife, Wycherley's coarsest but strongest play, partly founded on Molière's École des Femmes, was brought out in 1675, and was followed in 1677 by The Plain Dealer, founded partly on Molière's Misanthrope. A little after 1679—the date is uncertain—Wycherley married the Countess of Drogheda, a young and handsome widow, with whom he lived unhappily, though his wife appears to have been sincerely attached to him. At her death she left him all her fortune, a bequest which involved him in a law-suit whereby he was reduced to poverty and then cast into the Fleet prison. There the ex-favourite of Charles remained for some years, while his comedies were being repeatedly performed to delighted audiences. At last James II. happened to witness a representation of The Plain Dealer, and was so impressed by the character of the hero, the surly sea-captain, Manly, that he set free the author by paying his debts, and awarded him a pension of £200 a year. At the age of sixty-four Wycherley made the acquaintance of Pope, then a youth of sixteen, who for a time paid court to him assiduously, and to whom he entrusted the revision of a number of his verses. Pope set about the task in a manner better calculated to improve the lines than gratify their author, the natural result being a quarrel, followed by expressions of esteem on both sides, but by no renewal of intimacy. Wycherley's money troubles continued to the end of his days, even his succession to his estate failing to set him completely free. At the age of seventy-five he married a young woman, in the hope that he could thereby make certain legal arrangements which would balk the hopes of his heir, a nephew whom he disliked. He died eleven days after his marriage, in December 1715, and was buried in the vault of Covent Garden church. According to Pope, he died in the Roman Catholic faith. Leigh Hunt was very probably right in saying that Wycherley was a better man than he seems in his printed works. In his lifetime he was highly spoken of for his sincerity and goodness of heart, and was known among his associates as 'Manly Wycherley'—a title of which he certainly showed himself worthy by his courageous adherence to the Duke of Buckingham when that noble had fallen into disgrace with the king.
Few writers have been at once so unsparingly condemned and so highly praised as Wycherley. Macaulay pronounced him worthless alike as a man and as a dramatist—Wycherley it must be remembered was a pensioner of James II.—while Sir Walter Scott praised his 'strong and forcible, painting,' set his Plain Dealer in some respects above Molière's Misanthrope, and declared that he stood aloof from the other dramatists of the Restoration in that he upheld the standard of the Jonsonian school. The Way of the World, says Mr Swinburne, is one of the glories, The Country Wife, one of the disgraces of English literature. The Country Wife, says Hazlitt, will do its author never-ceasing honour. The play, in truth, excites alternate admiration and disgust. The hero is an outrage at once on decency and probability, but the heroine is a triumph. In literary brilliance Congreve of course infinitely outshines Wycherley, but Wycherley is a far more dexterous playwright. He does not sacrifice action to epigram, he never confounds the closet with the stage. There are scenes in The Country Wife where it would be hard to overpraise the ingenious, startling turns of the plot, the natural evolution of the situations, the irresistible bustle and rattle of the action. Purged of the imbecile nastiness with which it is defiled, it has proved one of the best acting plays ever set on the stage. Wycherley's style is vigorous and pointed, though it lacks the raciness of Vanbrugh's and the ease and dash of Farquhar's, no less than the exquisite modish grace of Congreve's. There is a curious strain of inconsistency in his work which marks it off from the work of the other Restoration dramatists. If he sins more grossly alike against morality and art than Congreve or Vanbrugh or Farquhar, his work nevertheless betrays an earnestness of purpose, a sincere and even morose indignation against certain forms of vice, of which there is no sign in all their graceless, sparkling revel of raillery and intrigue. No one, said Hazlitt, could read his Plain Dealer without being the better for it through life. He is a writer whom it is very difficult to judge fairly; but to brush him aside as a mere worn-out example of the depraved dramatic taste of a day is to show either that one has no first-hand knowledge of his work, or that one is blind to admirable stage-craft and skilful characterisation, to the sparkle of genuine wit and the play of genuine humour, though the wit is often hard and deliberate and the humour often coarse and cold.
See The Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar (edited by Leigh Hunt, 1 vol.); Hazlitt's English Comic Writers; and Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature (Lond. 1875).