Wit & Attitude Quote by William Wycherley

Marriage here is treated less like a sacrament than a rigged game, and Wycherley writes like the dealer. The line performs Restoration comedy’s favorite trick: turning polite social ideals into cynical arithmetic. Yes, marrying is foolish - you’re volunteering for expense, obligation, and reputation-management. But refusing marriage is “greater” folly because it implies you still want the benefits (sex, heirs, status) without paying the entry fee. The joke’s engine is that both options are stupid; the only question is which stupidity you can better narrate as prudence.

Then comes the sharper blade: “wit in a wife.” In Wycherley’s world, female intelligence isn’t celebrated; it’s framed as a threat to male control. Wit means verbal agility, social perception, the ability to read rooms and manipulate them - exactly the skills that make a husband vulnerable in a culture where masculine honor hangs on sexual exclusivity. The punchline isn’t merely misogyny (though it is that); it’s an exposure of how fragile the era’s masculinity is. A “cuckold” is less a man who’s been wronged than a man who’s been publicly outplayed.

Context matters: Restoration London was newly reopened to theaters after Puritan rule, and the stage became a playground for libertine manners, sexual bargaining, and the anxiety of appearances. Wycherley’s intent is provocation with a purpose: to entertain an audience fluent in gossip and status, while smuggling in a bleak thesis that marriage is a social contract haunted by surveillance, and that “wit” - especially in women - is treated as counterfeit virtue because it makes hypocrisy harder to sustain.