The Country Wife
The bawdy elements of "The Country Wife" inspired multiple adaptations to bowdlerise it. The first was by John Lee, whose 1765 revision completely eliminated the Horner character and cut the play from five acts to two in an attempt to make it "inoffensively humourous". A more successful adaptation was made the following year by David Garrick. He retained the five-act structure, but renamed the characters and called it "The Country Girl". Peggy (the renamed Margery) is a virginal country girl who wants to marry against the wishes of her guardian, Jack Moody (the reimagining of Pinchwife). In this cleaned-up form, "The Country Wife" continued a shadowy existence into the twentieth century, as Garrick's version was very popular, going through at least twenty editions and reaching the New York stage in 1794. The few modern critics who have read Garrick's version typically dismiss it as "sentimental and boring, where "The Country Wife" is astringent and provocative".