Background
Sir George Etherege was born in Maidenhead, Berkshire, c. 1634. His parents were George Etherege and Mary Powney, and he was the eldest of six children.
(Even among the richly talented generation who wrote for t...)
Even among the richly talented generation who wrote for the stage during the Restoration, Etherege was, from the start, considered to be a very special kind of innovator. His first play, The Comical Revenge (1664), with its partisan portrait of the Cavalier gentry during the last years of the Revolution and its bravura interweaving of four separate plots, deftly caught an early Restoration mood and enjoyed great popularity. Its successor, She Would if She Could (1668), marks a deliberate change in direction. Audiences, expecting a sequel more akin to The Comical Revenge, were at first faltering in their response, but by 1671 Thomas Shadwell was confidently calling it the best comedy to have been written since the return of the king in 1660. Etherege's masterpiece, however, is his last play, The Man of Mode (1676), which in clarity of vision and freshness of detail surpasses both its predecessors and in the early years of the eighteenth century became a central text in the debate about the worth of Restoration comedy. This edition includes annotated texts of all three plays, prefaced by an account of Etherege's life and the reception of his plays on the stage and in criticism.
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Sir George Etherege was born in Maidenhead, Berkshire, c. 1634. His parents were George Etherege and Mary Powney, and he was the eldest of six children.
He was educated in Lord Williams's School. In his youth he is said to have studied at Cambridge. He also studied law at the Inns of Court. As a young man he probably traveled through France and Flanders, returning to London to live a fast, modish life in the circle of Buckingham, Sedley, Rochester, and Dorset.
He wrote In The Comical Revenge, or, Love in a Tub in 1664, where he presented a medley of local color, romance, gallantry, roguery, and wit, composed in a mixture of prose and heroic couplets. It had a great success, but his next play, She Would If She Could, was wrote only after 4 years, in 1668. It is done in a bright, easy prose, showed a great improvement in characterization and structure, but it was less successful than The Comical Revenge. He spent three years in Turkey as secretary to the English ambassador (1668 - 1671). Not until 1676 did Etherege write his last and most famous work, The Man of Mode, or, Sir Fopling Flutter, part of the fun of which lay in its presentation of recognizable portraits of Rochester in Dorimant, of Sedley in Medley, and perhaps Beau Hewitt in Sir Fopling. The comedy lovingly satirized the modish and amoral lives of the man and the woman about town. In the minor character of Flutter, however, Etherege, probably taking a hint from Moliere's Les Precieuses ridicules, inaugurated the long line of Frenchified, affected fops who were to delight English audiences for over a century. He wrote only three plays, and then retired from literature. Few years later he had lost much of his fortune to gambling. He was knighted c. 1679. From 1685 to 1689 he was English envoy at Ratisbon (Regensburg), Germany. After the Glorious Revolution, he joined James II in his exile in Paris. His death date is unknown; he probably died in Paris in 1691, as Narcissus Luttrell states in February 1692 that Sir George Etherege, the late King James's ambassador to Vienna, had died recently in Paris.
(Even among the richly talented generation who wrote for t...)
His contemporaries called him "gentle George" and "easy Etheredge. "
He was married to Mary Sheppard Arnold sometime around 1679.