1. William Wycherley was an English Army officer and playwright best known for writing the plays The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer.
15 Facts About William Wycherley
1. 2.
William Wycherley was the son of Daniel Wycherley and his wife Bethia, daughter of William Shrimpton.
3.
William Wycherley lived during much of his childhood at Trench Farm, one of his paternal family's Shropshire properties, and probably in his earliest years at Whitchurch Farm, which his father leased until 1649, in Hampshire.
4.
William Wycherley returned to England shortly before the restoration of King Charles II and lived at The Queen's College, Oxford, where Thomas Barlow was provost.
5.
Under Barlow's influence, William Wycherley returned to the Church of England.
6.
William Wycherley served in Ireland in 1662 as a soldier with the Earl of Ancram's Regiment of Guards.
7.
William Wycherley claimed to have written the play at the age of nineteen before going to Oxford, but Thomas Macaulay points to the allusions in the play to gentlemen's periwigs, to guineas, to the vests that King Charles II ordered to be worn at court, to the Great Fire of London, etc.
8.
William Wycherley had no title or wealth, but by 1675 he had been admitted to the inner court circle, sharing the conversation and sometimes the mistresses of King Charles II, who "was extremely fond of him upon account of his wit".
9.
In 1679, Charles engaged William Wycherley as tutor for his bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, born in 1672.
10.
However, the title to her property was disputed and the costs of the litigation were so heavy that William Wycherley's father was either unable or unwilling to financially aid him.
11.
In 1689, Wycherley fled back to Shropshire after the accession of King William III displaced James II.
12.
William Wycherley still had other debts, and they were not paid off even after he succeeded to a life estate in the family property at Clive after his father's death in 1697.
13.
William Wycherley was said to have married in order to spite his nephew, the next in succession, knowing that he would shortly die and that the jointure would impoverish the estate.
14.
The language and content of William Wycherley's plays led to the restriction of their publication and performance for nearly two centuries, and over most of that time the original versions were replaced with bowdlerised versions, such as an adaptation of The Plain Dealer by Isaac Bickerstaffe and a version of The Country Girl by David Garrick.
15.
Voltaire was a great admirer of William Wycherley's plays and once said of them, "".