SOURCE: Markley, Robert. “‘A Way of Talk’: Etherege and the Ironies of Wit.” In Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve, pp. 100-37. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Markley discusses how Etherege experiments with dialogue and dramatic form in his plays to examine the ideological dislocation of aristocratic culture in Restoration England.

Shakespeare and Jonson did herein [in comic language] excel, And might in this be imitated well; Who refined Etherege copies not at all, But is himself a sheer original.(1) 

Rochester's praise of his friend (implicitly at Dryden's expense) might sum up three centuries of critical reaction to the dramatic stylist Dryden called the ‘best author of [prose] which our nation has produced’.² Etherege's comic style, particularly in The Man of Mode, has been praised since his own day, but often only in broad and effusive terms.³ As the...