Art & Creativity Quote by William Wycherley

Wycherley lands the punchline with the casual cruelty of Restoration comedy: women as leisure objects, literacy as a kind of sensual indulgence, and “company” as the real courtroom where a man’s value gets judged. The joke works because it pretends to offer gentlemanly self-help while smuggling in a harder ethic: pleasure is permitted only insofar as it polishes your social performance.

Calling mistresses “books” is more than a cheap metaphor. Books were newly abundant, privately consumed, faintly suspect; mistresses carried the same charge. “Pore upon them” tilts toward both studious reading and erotic fixation, suggesting that too much intensity - emotional or intellectual - is socially disabling. The fear isn’t sin; it’s absorption. To be “unfit for company” in Wycherley’s world is to fail the salon, the coffeehouse, the theater: arenas where reputations are minted in real time through wit.

Then comes the managerial doctrine: “used discreetly.” Discretion isn’t morality, it’s technique. Keep desire compartmentalized, keep attachments light, and the mistress becomes an accessory to male conversation, furnishing anecdotes, confidence, maybe even a sharpened appetite for banter. The subtext is transactional and frankly misogynistic: women are not interlocutors but material for talk.

Context matters. Wycherley wrote for a post-Puritan, courtly culture that prized polish, cynicism, and sexual knowingness. This line flatters the audience’s sophistication while warning them not to be caught caring too much. In Restoration terms, nothing is more embarrassing than sincerity that lasts longer than the laugh.