Aging & Wisdom Quote by William Wycherley

Desire, in Wycherley, isn’t a romantic thunderbolt; it’s an accounting trick. The line turns intimacy into inventory management: the “new mistress” is a fresh purchase, the “old one” a sunk cost you’re relieved to write off. That cold arithmetic is the point. Restoration comedy thrives on stripping love of its metaphysical excuses and showing it as status, appetite, and self-preservation dressed up in lace.

Wycherley’s intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s a punch line for the libertine set, a wink at a world where men treat affairs as a sport with clear winners (variety) and losses (obligation). Underneath, the sentence is a compact portrait of misogynistic convenience: women are interchangeable pleasures, and emotional continuity is framed as a burden. “Rid of” is the tell; it’s the language of pests, not people. The joke lands because it’s brutal and because the audience is invited to recognize, uncomfortably, how socially sanctioned that brutality was.

Context matters: late 17th-century London, post-Puritan backlash, courtly cynicism, and a theatrical culture that made vice speak elegantly. Wycherley’s plays (The Country Wife, The Plain Dealer) delight in exposing hypocrisy and weaponizing wit as a moral solvent. Here, the line doesn’t just celebrate infidelity; it mocks the sentimental scripts that pretend desire is noble. The comedy works by turning what polite society won’t confess into something quotable, neat, and nasty enough to feel true.