Life & Mortality Quote by William Wycherley

Wycherley lands the line like a dagger wrapped in lace: the everyday appetites that bully us - hunger, revenge, even sleep - are “petty foes,” nuisances you can bargain with or outlast. Jealousy, though, is a different species. It doesn’t negotiate. It surveils. The “jealous eyes” aren’t just watching; they’re policing reality, inventing evidence, converting ordinary life into a courtroom where the verdict is always guilt.

The brilliance is in the escalation and the misdirection. “To sleep” sits beside hunger and revenge as if it’s merely another craving, but it also hints at the one thing jealousy can’t grant: rest. A jealous mind can’t power down because it treats uncertainty as threat. So the line’s final pivot - “But only death the jealous eyes can close” - isn’t romantic melodrama; it’s a bleak diagnosis. Jealousy is framed as a kind of living insomnia, a refusal of closure so total that only literal closure of the eyelids will do.

Context matters: Wycherley’s Restoration stage is obsessed with sexual politics, reputation, and the farce of control, especially the jealous husband trying (and failing) to manage women as property. In that world, jealousy isn’t proof of love; it’s proof of entitlement. The subtext is almost surgical: desire and vengeance can be satisfied, hunger can be fed, sleep eventually takes you. Jealousy feeds on its own appetite. If you need death to end the watching, the real target isn’t a rival - it’s the self that can’t stop looking.