BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mann, David D. Sir George Etherege: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1981, 135 p.

Comprehensive bibliography of Etherege's life and works, ranging from 1664 to 1980.

CRITICISM

Bell, Robert. “The Comedies of Etherege.” Fortnightly Review 3, no. 15 (15 December 1865): 298-316.

Acknowledges Etherege as the inventor of the comedy of manners and favorably surveys his dramatic works.

Berglund, Lisa. “The Language of Libertines: Subversive Morality in The Man of Mode.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1800 30, no. 3 (summer 1990): 369-86.

Explores how Dorimant and his retinue use a “libertine language” of extended metaphors and analogies to subvert conventional morality in The Man of Mode.

Birdsall, Virginia Ogden. “The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter.” In Wild Civility: The English Comic Spirit on the Restoration Stage, pp. 77-104. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970.

Examines the contrast of lifestyles between Sir Fopling Flutter's rule-bound world of social pretense and Dormant and Harriet's natural, honest, and self-deterministic world.

Boyette, Purvis E. “The Songs of George Etherege.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1800 6, no. 3 (summer 1966): 409-19.

Discusses the significance of the songs included in Etherege's plays.

Cibber, Theophilus. “Sir George Etherege.” In The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 3, pp. 33-9. London: R. Griffiths, 1753.

Appraises Etherege's life and works, maintaining that the playwright “possessed a sprightly genius,” but that “his works are so extremely loose and licentious, as to render them dangerous to young, unguarded minds.”

Davies, Thomas. Dramatic Miscellanies, p. 101. 1784. Reprint. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971.

Praises Dorimant as one of the best creations of the “fine gentleman” on the English stage.

Dobrée, Bonamy. “Etherege (?1635-91).” In Restoration Comedy, 1660-1720, pp. 58-77. 1924. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.

Characterizes Etherege's comedies as light-hearted, unsophisticated works intended mainly to delight and amuse Carolinian audiences.

Fujimura, Thomas H. “Sir George Etherege.” In The Restoration Comedy of Wit, pp. 75-116. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952.

Discusses how Etherege employs wit in his plays to reflect Restoration intellectual attitudes toward such topics as naturalism, skepticism, and libertinism.

Gosse, Edmund W. “Sir George Etherege: A Neglected Chapter of English Literature.” Cornhill Magazine 43, no. 255 (March 1881): 284-304.

Considers Etherege a principal founder of modern English comedy and provides an intimate glimpse of the author's later years through an examination of his personal and official correspondence in a recently discovered Letterbook.

Hazlitt, William. “Lecture III: On Cowley, Butler, Suckling, Etherege, Etc.” In Lectures on the English Comic Writers, with Miscellaneous Essays, pp. 49-69. 1819. Reprint. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1910.

Brief notice of Etherege, with a favorable description of The Man of Mode as a “more exquisite and airy picture of the manners of that age than any other extant.”

Henshaw, Wanadalie. “Sir Fopling Flutter, or The Key to The Man of Mode.” Essays in Theatre 3, no. 2 (May 1985): 98-107.

Contends that critics have underestimated Sir Fopling Flutter's significance to The Man of Mode, due to their emphasis on the characters of Dorimant and Harriet.

Holland, Norman N. “The Comical Revenge, She Wou'd If She Cou'd, and The Man of Mode; or, Sir Fopling Flutter.” In The First Modern Comedies: The Significance of Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve, pp. 20-7, 28-37, 86-95. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959.

Analyzes the plot, main characters, themes, and structure of each of Etherege's comedies in an effort to trace his artistic maturation.

Hume, Robert D. “The Nature of Comic Drama.” In The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, pp. 63-148. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.

Takes exception to the claim that The Man of Mode is an intellectual showpiece on the manners and mores of Etherege's cultural milieu, arguing that the dramatist simply meant to create “a delightfully satiric entertainment.”

Knights, L. C. “Restoration Comedy: The Reality & The Myth.” Scrutiny 6 (June 1937): 122-43.

Censures all Restoration comedy, including Etherege's, as inferior works of literature which depict social conventions artificially. The critic further argues that because these dramatists relied on “a miserably limited set of attitudes,” no one “has achieved a genuinely sensitive and individual mode of expression.”

Langbaine, Gerard. “Sir George Etherege.” In An Account of the English Dramatick Poets, pp. 186-88. 1691. Reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1973.

Provides a favorable account of Etherege and his plays.

Markley, Robert. “‘A Way of Talk’: Etherege and the Ironies of Wit.” In Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve, pp. 100-37. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

Discusses how Etherege experiments with dialogue and dramatic form in his plays to examine the ideological dislocation of aristocratic culture in Restoration England.

Martin, Leslie H. “Past and Parody in The Man of Mode.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 16, no. 3 (summer 1976): 363-76.

Posits that Etherege invented the character of Mrs. Loveit in The Man of Mode to parody heroic drama and other outmoded conventions.

Mignon, Elizabeth. “Etherege.” In Crabbed Age and Youth: The Old Men and Women in the Restoration Comedy of Manners, pp. 36-47. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1947.

Examines Etherege's attitudes toward youth and old age in his comedies.

Morrow, Laura. “The Right Snuff: Dorimant and the Will to Meaning.” Restoration 14, no. 1 (spring 1990): 15-21.

Psychological analysis of Dorimant and his relationships to women in The Man of Mode.

Muir, Kenneth. “Sir George Etherege.” In The Comedy of Manners, pp. 28-40. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1970.

Provides a broad survey of Etherege's comedies and their critical reception.

Palmer, John. “The Life and Letters of Sir George Etherege.” In The Comedy of Manners, pp. 30-91. 1913. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962.

Comprehensive biographical and critical account of Etherege.

Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vols. IV-VI, edited by Henry B. Wheatley, p. 304. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1926.

Briefly recounts seeing Etherege's The Comical Revenge in a journal entry dated January 4, 1665, describing it as “very merry, but only so by gesture, not wit at all.”

———. The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, Vol. 7, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, pp. 346-47. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1972.

Judges The Comical Revenge to be “a silly play” in a journal entry dated October 29, 1666.

———. The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, Vol. 9, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, pp. 53-4. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1976.

Reports, in a journal entry dated February 6, 1668, viewing She Would If She Could, noting that Etherege himself attended the production and afterwards was unhappy with how the actors portrayed the characters.

Phillips, Edward. “The Modern Poets.” In Theatrum Poetarum, Vol. 2, p. 53. London: Charles Smith, 1675.

Briefly identifies Etherege as a popular contemporary dramatist.

Pinto, Vivian de Sola. “Sir George Etherege.” In The Restoration Court Poets, pp. 33-40. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1965.

Examines Etherege's role in the influential group of court poets which included John Wilmont, Earl of Rochester, Charles Sackville, and Sir Charles Sedley.

Powell, Jocelyn. “George Etherege and the Form of Comedy.” Restoration Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, no. 6, pp. 43-69. London: Edward Arnold, 1965.

Argues that Etherege's comedies display a central problem of subjectivity in that they condone ridicule and vice rather than satirizing antisocial behavior.

Southey, Robert, and Coleridge, S. T. In Omniana; or Horae Otiosiores, edited by Robert Gittings, pp. 185-88. 1812. Reprint. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.

Discusses the immoral nature of Etherege's works, censuring the playwright for “lampoon[ing] the noblest passions of humanity in order to pander for its lowest appetites.”

Staves, Susan. “The Secrets of Genteel Identity in The Man of Mode: Comedy of Manners vs. the Courtesy Book.” In Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 19, edited by Leslie Ellen Brown and Patricia Craddock, pp. 117-28. East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1989.

Discusses the relationship between The Man of Mode and contemporary courtesy books, asserting that Etherege represents courtesy literature as “a threat to his ideology of gentility.”

Steele, Richard. “No. 65, Tuesday, May 15, 1711.” In The Spectator, Vol. 1, edited by Donald F. Bond, pp. 278-80. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.

Deems Etherege's wit immoral in The Man of Mode, concluding that the “whole celebrated piece is a perfect contradiction to good manners, good sense, and common honesty.”

Street, G. S. “Etherege.” In Miniatures and Moods, pp. 34-9. London: David Nutt, 1893.

Praises Etherege's display of comedic talent in The Comical Revenge, She Would If She Could, and The Man of Mode.

Thorndike, Ashley H. “The Restoration, 1660-1680.” In English Comedy, pp. 269-303. New York: Macmillan, 1929.

Maintains that Etherege's comedies reflect a combination of cynicism and wit which springs from an intellectual mind.

Traugott, John. “The Rake's Progress from Court to Comedy: A Study in Comic Form.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1800 6, no. 3 (summer 1966): 381-407.

Explores the role of the rake in Restoration comedy, noting that Dorimant in Etherege's The Man of Mode nearly succeeds in making “a nasty character the vessel of value for the society and the aesthetic center of a proper comedy.”

Underwood, Dale. “The Comic Form—She Would if She Could.” In Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of Manners, pp. 59-71. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957.

Identifies opposition as a key structural concern in Etherege's She Would If She Could, maintaining that “the comic movement of the play suggests innumerable ways in which these apparently absolute polarities may in reality be reversed or resolved in coalescence.”

Walpole, Horace. “Thoughts on Comedy.” In The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Oxford, Vol. 2, pp. 315-22. London: G. G. and J. Robinson and J. Edwards, 1798.

Ranks Etherege's The Man of Mode among the best English comedies.

Weber, Harold. “Charles II, George Pines, and Mr. Dorimant: The Politics of Sexual Power in Restoration England.” Criticism 32, no. 2 (spring 1990): 193-219.

Examines the sexual dynamics in Etherege's The Man of Mode, arguing that the comedy affirms a patriarchal anxiety in the Restoration period about the power of female sexuality.

Wilkinson, D. R. M. “Etherege and a Restoration Pattern of Wit.” English Studies 68, no. 6 (December 1987): 497-510.

Asserts that Etherege played a critical role in the development of the witty dialogue which became the hallmark of Restoration comedy.

Young, Douglas M. “The Play-World of Sir George Etherege.” In The Feminist Voices in Restoration Comedy: The Virtuous Women in the Play-Worlds of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve, pp. 25-83. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997.

Discusses how Etherege innovated on Restoration attitudes toward women in his comedies, arguing that in each of the plays the virtuous heroine culminates the action in equal standing to her libertine male suitor.

Additional coverage of Etherege's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: British Writers, Vol. 2; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 80; Discovering Authors Modules: Dramatists; Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, Vol. 78; Literature Resource Center; Poets: American and British; and Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2.