Background
He was born in London, or perhaps in Oxfordshire or Bermuda, on an unknown date, and died in Paris, also on an unknown date.
Before marrying a rich widow and buying his knighthood, he spent three years in Turkey as secretary to the English ambassador (1668-1671); from 1685 to 1689 he was English envoy at Ratisbon (Regensburg), Germany.
Education
In his youth he may have studied at Cambridge and 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.
Career
To impress the fashionable world with his literary abilities, Etherege dashed off at intervals the three comedies that have given him his sometimes disputed claim as the father of the Restoration comedy of manners. In The Comical Revenge, or, Love in a Tub (1664) he presented a medley of local color, romance, gallantry, roguery, and wit, composed in a mixture of prose and heroic couplets. She Would If She Could (1668), done in a bright, easy prose, showed a great improvement in characterization and structure, but it was less successful than The Comical Revenge. 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 Molière'sMoliere's Les PrécieusesPrecieuses ridicules, inaugurated the long line of Frenchified, affected fops who were to delight English audiences for over a century.