SOURCE: Fisher, Judith W. “The Power of Performance: Sir George Etherege's The Man of Mode.” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 10, no. 1 (summer 1995): 15-28.

In the following essay, Fisher examines the text of The Man of Mode in an effort to reconstruct how the play might have been staged for Etherege's audience.

For years plays have been subjected to literary analyses which overlook a fundamental aspect of drama—the performance. Many of the critics who have written on the subject of Restoration drama have acknowledged that the comedy of manners was so named because it reflected the manners of the society, that is, the audience for whom it was performed, but they pursued the matter of performance no further.¹ In recent years several scholars have attempted to rectify this omission.² A good play, of course, has no single interpretation of the kind a literary analysis seeks. In order to...