‘We murder poets for you on our stage’. Lee’s and Garrick’s adaptations of The Country Wife for eighteenth-century audiences

Abstract

This article deals with seventeenth and eighteenth-century reception of Wycherley’s The Country Wife, always bearing in mind its double nature as a play for the stage and a play for the closet. A number of different editions of Wycherley’s play (1733, 1736, 1751) have been closely read, as well as different editions of the theatrical adaptations of the Country Wife attributed to John Lee (1765, 1786) or to David Garrick (1766, 1777, 1808, 1819). Attention has also been paid to playbills, that have helped understand the theatrical conditions that favoured these adaptations as well as the circumstances under which they were staged. A careful analysis has also been made of the stage history of these plays, and reasons have been offered for the changes that the different versions have undergone, as well as for the varying degree of acceptance they have enjoyed at different periods.