By the end of Act 3, some of the characters emerge as worthy of the audience's sympathy while others do not. How does Wycherley achieve this effect?

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Ryan Hirst

By the end of Act 3, some of the characters emerge as worthy of the audience’s sympathy while others do not. How does Wycherley achieve this effect?

William Wycherley cleverly creates likeable and villainous characters in his restoration comedy “The Country Wife”. He manipulates the audience’s feelings towards certain characters through their dialogue, personalities and their action in the first three acts of the play. How the play is physically performed on the stage is also another important technique the author uses to show the audience what each character is really like. This in turn makes the audience believe that the likeable characters are worthy of their sympathy, whilst the villainous characters are not.

One of the first characters the audience meets is Horner, who is trying to deceive the male population in London into believing that he has caught the “pox”, therefore unable to have sex. Horner is an intelligent man and he this deception is all so he can try and sleep with all the men’s wives. Even though he is a lying, cunning, philandering character, people watching this being performed on a stage would still like Horner and he would therefore have their sympathy:

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“SIR JASPER: Won’t you be acquainted with her sir? So the report is true, I find, by his coldness or aversion to the sex. But I’ll play the wag with him. – Pray salute my wife, my lady, sir.

HORNER: I will kiss no man’s wife, sir, for him, sir. I have taken my eternal leave, sir, of the sex already, sir.”  

Horner is worthy of the audiences sympathy by the end of Act 3, even though he is trying to sleep with other men’s wives, as the men whose wives he is trying to get into ...

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