Life's Pleasures Quote by William Wycherley

What sounds like a toast to slobbery excess is really Wycherley doing what Restoration comedy does best: turning vice into a performance and daring the audience to enjoy it while judging it. “Glorious” and “manly” are the bait words. They dress up being “very drunk” and “very slovenly” in the language of honor, as if debauchery were a civic virtue. That mismatch is the joke, and the barb. Wycherley knows that masculinity, especially among the fashionable men his plays skewer, is often less an inner quality than an excuse system: a set of poses that can sanctify any appetite.

The line’s force comes from its shameless selectivity: “for my part I will have only…” It’s the rhetoric of principle applied to the least principled habits. That faux-ethical framing exposes a culture where “choice” and “taste” become moral camouflage. Restoration London, newly reopened to theater after the Puritan interregnum, was hungry for wit that could both celebrate freedom and puncture it. Wycherley’s characters often weaponize candor; they confess not to repent, but to preempt criticism with swagger.

The subtext is social competition. To be “very” drunk is to prove you can afford leisure, withstand excess, and treat propriety as optional. “Slovenly” signals contempt for refinement even while relying on the privileges that make slovenliness safe. Wycherley isn’t just laughing at a rake; he’s diagnosing a status game where degradation can be recoded as dominance, provided you say it with enough style.