mbrace the man you lately called a dunce, / Telling him in a tone sincere and fervent / How proud you are to be his humble servant" (II.v). His view that to savage another's reputation is acceptable if it be done to the other's face turns back upon him, when he is summoned by the court to apologize formally for criticizing a rival's love sonnet to Celimene. In Mis., the aristocratic characters traffic in lighter calumnies and devilish wordplay for sport. Small wonder, then, that they break into laughter at Alceste's summons; the consequences of deadly serious honesty are far greater than those of playful backbiting. This line of action reflects a France in which social lines were rigidly drawn and where there was no questioning of one's place in the social scheme. One would have time, if one had leisure at all, to make verbal nuance one of the higher social aspirations. As Wells comments of the court of Louis XIV, "It subordinated substance to style" (Wells 2:691).
Stakes are higher in The Plain Dealer, where nuance and subtlety are not achievements but social operating equipment. Here gossip is not diversion but a symptom of deep societal malaise. Wycherley was writing for an audience that had undergone enormous political, religious, and social upheaval, from the civil war and regicide of the 1640s, through the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the 1688 Glorious Revolution. Wells's comment on seventeenth century English literature is that it "reflected the less stable and centralized quality of English affairs and had more vigour and less polish than the French" (Wells 1:692). Winston Churchill might be thinking of The Plain Dealer when citing the political situation William of Orange encountered when he arrived in England from Holland in 1688: "He accepted double dealing as a necessary element in a situation of unexampled perplexity" (Commager 228).
Taken together, these assessments of the social context of The Pla...