[THE PLAIN DEALER.]
Ridiculum acri
Fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res.[86]—Horat.
According to Wycherley's own statement The Plain Dealer was written when the author was twenty-five years of age—i.e., in the year 1665-6.[87] Its first performance on the stage cannot have taken place later than the spring of 1674, as there is an interesting allusion to it in the preface to Dryden's State of Innocence, which was registered at Stationers' Hall, April 17, 1674. Dryden writes in terms of noble eulogy: "The author of The Plain Dealer, whom I am proud to call my friend, has obliged all honest and virtuous men by one of the most bold, most general, and most useful satires, which has ever been presented on the English theatre." The Plain Dealer was brought forward by the King's Company, probably, like The Country Wife, at the house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, as the new theatre, in Drury Lane, was not opened until March 26 of that year. It was published three years later, in 1677, the title-page bearing the imprimatur—"Licensed Jan. 9, 1676, Roger L'Estrange." The license, of course, was for printing, not for acting; the date, in new style, would be 1677.
We shall have, I think, little difficulty in accepting Wycherley's statement as to the year in which this play was written, if we suppose, as would almost certainly be the case, that it was revised and altered before its production on the stage. The critique on The Country Wife, in particular, cannot have been written earlier than 1672 or 1673, in one of which years that comedy was first acted.
Of our author's four comedies The Plain Dealer is, questionless, the most powerful. From the mock dedication to the epilogue "the satire, wit, and strength, of manly Wycherley"[88] are everywhere conspicuous and triumphant. The main purport of the plot, as well as the particular design of certain scenes, is borrowed from Le Misanthrope of Molière, but it is almost a truism that the most original writers are frequently the most extensive plagiarists, and Wycherley has so overlaid his appropriations with the colouring of his own brilliant individuality, that his play appears almost equally a masterpiece of originality as of ingenuity. It is scarcely too much to say that in The Plain Dealer we are conscious of a fertility of invention, a richness of wit and satire, which make even Le Misanthrope seem tame in comparison. Voltaire has justly contrasted the two plays. "All Wycherley's strokes," he writes, "are stronger and bolder than those of our Misanthrope, but then they are less delicate, and the Rules of Decorum are not so well observed in this Play."[89]
The scene in the second act, between Olivia, her cousin, and the two "pretty fellows," Novel and Plausible, was suggested by a dialogue between Célimène and her admirers, in the second act of Le Misanthrope, but the detail is almost entirely Wycherley's own, and is enlivened with such diverting antitheses and such brilliant fancy that, perhaps, few scenes more masterly are to be found in the entire range of English comedy from the time of the Restoration downwards. In this scene occurs the critique upon The Country Wife, of which the hint was taken from Molière's Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes. It is here introduced with great felicity, and the contrast between the affected prudery of the vicious Olivia and the simple candour of the truly modest Eliza is both just and edifying. Again, the discovery by Novel and Plausible of the duplicity of Olivia, by means of an exchange of letters, is borrowed from the dénouement of Le Misanthrope; but the scene in which it occurs owes little to Molière beyond the incident; and the humorous device of making each letter, mutato nomine, the exact counterpart of the other, belongs to Wycherley alone. One or two more particular coincidences between The Plain Dealer and Le Misanthrope will be pointed out in the notes.
The admirably conceived character of the Widow Blackacre has been described as a copy of that of the Countess in Racine's comedy, Les Plaideurs, surely, in the first instance, by one of those critics with whom "most authors steal their works, or buy." There is a litigious old woman in Les Plaideurs, there is a litigious old woman in The Plain Dealer; and here the likeness begins and ends.[90] Voltaire calls the Widow Blackacre "the most comical character that was ever brought upon the stage." Lastly, although Fidelia is imitated from Shakespeare's Viola, and although the imitation is immeasurably and at all points inferior to the original, it must be admitted, nevertheless, that she fills her place in the play with perfect propriety, and is even drawn with some not inconsiderable degree of sweetness and pathos.