SOURCE: Brown, Laura. “Dramatic Social Satire.” In English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760: An Essay in Generic History, pp. 28-65. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981.

In the essay below, Brown explores the evolution of social satire in Etherege's plays, finding little criticism of social standards in his two early comedies and a more outspoken approach in The Man of Mode.

George Etherege's drama … falls into two main periods, a single work, The Man of Mode, constituting the second. And again, those two periods exemplify the course of generic evolution that we have been tracing in this chapter. Etherege's first plays (The Comical Revenge, 1664, and She Would If She Could, 1668) contain the same intriguelike or “all in fun” qualities as Dryden's early comedies: a tendency to emphasize a clever resolution of the plot at the expense of serious content, and, as a corollary, a consistent attempt to defuse conflict and...