SOURCE: Barnard, John. “Point of View in The Man of Mode.” Essays in Criticism 34, no. 4 (October 1984): 285-308.

In the following essay, Barnard investigates the relationship between the text of The Man of Mode and how Restoration cultural milieu likely influenced the way it was staged in Etherege's time.

Each performance of a play is a fresh collaborative creation between actors and audience. Even though an audience is worked upon by the combined skills of actors, designer, and director, its response is not passive but dynamic. The reader of a published play has a quite different relationship to the play-text, which, once in book form, has a fixity neither possible nor desirable on the stage—as Philip Gaskell's record of the first performed text and first printed text of Stoppard's Travesties demonstrates.¹ Dramatic criticism has, traditionally, read drama more as literature than as performance but, despite Dr. Johnson, ‘a...