There has always been bawdy humour. The Miller’s Tale, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s late 14th century masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, is replete with sexual innuendo and crude behaviour. More recently, we can think about the classic saucy seaside postcards of the early to mid-20th century featuring heaving bosoms, henpecked husbands and double entendres aplenty. Think too of the Carry On films of the 60s and 70s and the Confessions of a Window Cleaner franchise (funnily enough, Robin Asquith, who played the lead role in the Confessions films, also appeared in a 1972 “erotic comedy” version of The Canterbury Tales, containing abundant nudity, sex and slapstick; he evidently knew his oeuvre).
Another age in history that was known for its explosion of bawdy humour was the Restoration period. The Restoration, of course, was the 1660 reinstatement of the Stuart monarchy, after ten years of Cromwell’s Commonwealth of England which was characterised by a Puritan culture that amongst other things banned Christmas and the theatre. Buzzkill, much. The Restoration triggered an outpouring of creativity in the arts and a Renaissance in English drama throughout the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Enter Restoration Comedy, and talk about a reaction to Puritanism: it went quite spectacularly the other way, with the new King Charles II actively encouraging sexually explicit language in plays.
The theatres were packed and there was no shortage of playwrights to keep them that way for a few years (the peak of Restoration comedy per se was really only the 1670s and again in the 1690s): prominent figures included John Dryden, George Etherege, William Davenant, Thomas Killigrew, and William Wycherley. Wycherley’s comedy The Country Wife (1675) is a case in point. Controversial for its sexual explicitness even in its own time, the title contains a lewd pun with regard to the first syllable of “country”. Even in our own times, this word rarely makes in on-screen.
The play turns on two indelicate plot devices: a seducer’s ploy of faking impotence 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, ooh-err missus. The scandalous deception and the frank language have for much of the play’s history kept it off the stage and out of print. It was only in 1924 that the play was staged once more; interestingly, itself a year and period that followed a period of deprivation, namely the Great War, which understandably led to a sense of devil-may-care enjoyment of freedoms. Although clearly a period piece, The Country Wife has been acclaimed for its linguistic energy and sharp social satire.
