Fops Vs Tops: Character and Attention in the Country Wife

Fops Vs TopsCharacter and Attention in the Country Wife Eve Houghton When Sparkish first appears on stage in William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675), everyone expects a bad performance. According to his friends, Horner, Harcourt, and Dorilant, he is "one of those nauseous offerers at wit" whose attempts to be funny can immediately ruin the mood: "No, the rogue will not let us enjoy one another, but ravishes our conversation, though he signifies no more to't than Sir Martin Mar-all's gaping and awkward thrumming upon the lute does to his man's voice and music."1 The other men do not appreciate his belabored and unfunny jokes; in response to their silence, even Sparkish admits that "it does not move you, methinks" (1.1.356-357). On the one hand, this chilly reception from the other characters on stage confirms Harcourt's initial claim—that Sparkish does not "signifie," that he is a minor and ultimately irrelevant presence in the world of gentlemanly conversation. On the other hand, the staging of Sparkish's first appearance could give precisely the opposite impression, building excitement about the entrance of a character who was crucial to audience pleasure. After all, when the other men compare Sparkish to Sir Martin Mar-All, a bumbling and socially awkward aristocrat from John Dryden's popular 1667 comedy, they are encouraging Restoration audiences to associate him with a comic performance that was both conspicuously embarrassing and famously enjoyable.2 In that light, Horner's announcement that Sparkish is "the greatest fop, dullest ass and worst company, as you shall see" is a warning and an enticement, cueing Wycherley's audience to an impending social disaster: "for here he comes" (1.1.316-317). The scene's conflicting signals point us to the peculiar status of the fop on the Restoration stage, as a figure who reliably failed in his bids for recognition by other characters while capturing the interest and affections of the audience.3On the page they may seem merely laughable, but in performance, fops like Sparkish could upend and reconfigure the distribution of attention between minor parts and leading roles—or, as one Restoration commentator put it, between [End Page 667] fop characters and "Top Characters."4 In their tortured, tortuous, and often time-consuming bids for regard, they remind us that, as Jonathan Crary has shown, attention is both etymologically and conceptually linked to ideas of tension, stretching, and waiting.5 Fops frequently arrest or stretch the focus of the audience—by arriving at unexpected times, by straining against the norms of conduct shared by other characters, or by otherwise capturing audience interest and turning it in unexpected directions—and the performers who embodied them onstage possessed a similarly unpredictable force.6 How much and in what ways does Sparkish signify to the conversation between these men? For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her influential queer reading of Wycherley's play, the answer is both a great deal and not at all: the clear loser in an economy of value that places a premium on wit as a form of sexual currency and homosocial bonding, Sparkish lays disastrously bare the priorities and efficiencies of that economy.7 An aspiring "wit" and man-about-town, he is a barely tolerated presence in the fashionable social circle that includes Horner, the rake who pretends to be impotent in order to evade the suspicion of jealous husbands, and Harcourt, who is in love with Sparkish's fiancée Alithea. Sparkish is so eager to achieve the validation conferred by approbation from other men—since "I love to be envied and would not marry a wife that I alone could love"—that he makes no attempt to interfere with Harcourt's increasingly blatant overtures to her and fails to prevent their eventual engagement (3.2.413–14). Sedgwick argues that this resolution stages the repudiation and necessary exile of certain types of failed hetero-masculinity, which is why Alithea is paired with Harcourt and not with Sparkish at the end of the play. She sees Sparkish as a cautionary exemplar of failed male bonding, naively transparent and hopelessly inept in his efforts to...