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Introduction
In act 4, scene 2 of William Wycherleys The Country Wife (1675) Mr. Pinchwife intimidates his wife Margery with a brutal ultimatum: "Write as I bid you, or I will write whore with this penknife in your face" (ЮЗ04). After Pinchwife threatens also to "stab out those eyes that cause my mischief" (121-22), Margery responds with temporary compliance, only to disobey him as soon as he exits the scene. This surprising outburst is provocative not only because of its violence, but because it is loaded with a wide range of possible meanings, all of which play up the irony that Pinchwife has forced his wife to lie. Margery's deception enacts Pinchwifes own greatest fear: for, by calling her a whore, he has effectively made himself a cuckold. The scenes focus on violence and libertine anxieties including bodily mutilation and cuckolding make it an almost obligatory locus for criticism of the play.1 These aspects are crucial to J. Douglas Canfields categorization of the play as a "subversive comedy," a genre of drama that "reveals fissures under the smooth surface of official ideology" (Broadview xvii). John A. Vances analysis of fear in the play also focuses on characters' apprehensions. He maintains that "[f]or Wycherleys characters, the truths about human debility are too frightening and unbearable to be openly recognized or articulated" and that "[a]s a result, truth is avoided and spurned, forcefully and at times frantically by the women and men [in his plays]" (12). Both positions usefully reveal masculine insecurities manifested as libertine excess in the play, but this article offers a different mode of analysis. The avoidance of truth discussed by Vance boils up and issues forth in Pinchwifes threat as what I call an eruptive baroque moment. Though mainly focused on poetry, Canfield has argued elsewhere that the baroque persisted in "some of the later, neoclassical literatures most arresting moments" (Baroque 15). This article will add to this assertion by arguing that baroque elements in English neoclassical drama erupt allegorically out of their otherwise ordered, symmetrical aesthetic frames.
The stylistic divergences from Arnolphes threat to his ward Agnes in Molieres ?École des Femmes (1662) reveal Pinchwifes threat to be stylistically baroque. These characters are Wycherley's source for Pinchwife and Margery; however, while most...