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The Country Wife is a Restoration comedy written in 1675 by William Wycherley. A product of the tolerant early Restoration period, the play reflects an aristocratic and anti-Puritan ideology, and was controversial for its sexual explicitness even in its own time. Even its title contains a lewd pun. It is based on several plays by Molière, with added features that 1670s London audiences demanded: colloquial prose dialogue in place of Molière's verse, a complicated, fast-paced plot tangle, and many sex jokes. It turns on two indelicate plot devices: a rake's trick of pretending impotence in order to safely have clandestine affairs with married women, and the arrival in London of an inexperienced young "country wife", with her discovery of the joys of town life, especially the fascinating London men.
The scandalous trick and the frank language have for much of the play's history kept it off the stage and out of print. Between 1753 and 1924, The Country Wife was considered too outrageous to be performed at all and was replaced on the stage by David Garrick's cleaned-up and bland version The Country Girl, now a forgotten curiosity. The original play is again a stage favourite today, and is also acclaimed by academic critics, who praise its linguistic energy, sharp social satire, and openness to different interpretations.
Tristan und Isolde, by Joseph Albert.
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...that the image of Benjamin Franklin on the U.S. hundred dollar bill (pictured) is based on a painting by the French artist Joseph Duplessis?
...that 1971's Out of the Darkness was the first Thai science fiction film?
...that Blackadder II, the second series of the BBC sitcom Blackadder, contains many tongue-in-cheek references to the plays of William Shakespeare?
...that Ken Richmond, the last gongman of the Rank Organisation, was a 1952 Summer Olympics wrestling medalist and actor in Jules Dassin's Night and the City?
...that in 1661, Lisle's Tennis Court in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London became the first public theatre in England to feature moveable scenery on sliding wings?
...that voice artists who made Gavrilov translations of foreign movies in Russia were once thought to have used a noseclip to conceal their identity?
...that the artist Sigrid Hjertén, a crucial figure in Swedish modernism, tragically died following an awkwardly performed lobotomy?
“ | "'There has to be something there of your own. You have to struggle to find your own way to give it expression. If it's a fresh thought then it's likely the form will be fresh too. It all comes down to what the artist has to say. It's no good spending your whole life splashing around with paint if you have nothing to splash around about.". | ” |
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