SOURCE: Walsh, Paul. “Performance, Space, and Seduction in George Etherege's The Man of Mode (Dorset Garden Theatre, 1676).” Essays in Theatre/Études Théâtrales 11, no. 2 (May 1993): 123-31.

In the essay below, Walsh proposes a possible seventeenth-century staging of The Man of Mode, exploring how “performance space”—the physical environment of the theater and the audience interaction with the actors—perhaps influenced the “dynamics of seduction and revelation” in the play.

George Etherege's The Man of Mode is widely considered an early example of what has come to be called the Comedy of Manners, a genre of English comedy that took particular form in the 1670s in imitation of Molière. Like the plays of such contemporaries as William Wycherley, Thomas Shadwell and Aphra Behn, however, Etherege's witty portrayal of the artificialities of social discourse turns quickly to an ironic, equivocal and generally ambiguous exposition of the dynamics of sexual...