George Etherege

Verbal brilliance, urbane sophistication and sexual conquest are the measures of success for the fashionable set who watched themselves being represented on the Restoration stage. Yet idealisation and satire, as this edition of Etherege's masterpiece shows, are flip sides of the same coin, and the...

Preface to tke First Edition The plays in this volume are comedies about men and women who live in London, care for sex and money, and make fools of one another if not of themselves. There is nothing strange about that combination of activities, as anyone who has lived in London or cared for sex...