Etherege, SIR GEORGE

Etherege, SIR GEORGE, a Restoration dramatist, was born most probably in London about 1636. Almost nothing is known of his personal history save that he must have lived much in his early life at Paris, that he studied law, was 'gentle George' and 'easy Etheredge' in the circle of Sedley and Rochester, the most brilliant young reprobates of their time, that he had an intrigue with the famous actress, Mrs Barry, afterwards settling £6000 on her daughter, was knighted and married, not with his entire good-will, to a wealthy widow, and in 1686 was sent to be Resident at the Imperial court at Ratisbon. This banishment he found intolerably tedious, but he contrived to vary its monotony with coursing, moderate drinking, sometimes immoderate play, and flirtation with passing actresses, as well as with correspondence with Middleton, Dryden, Betterton, and others. Fortunately, drafts of some hundred of his letters (many of these official), along with poems and other papers, have been preserved in a letter-book acquired by the British Museum in 1837, and help to reveal to us a man of whom our knowledge otherwise would have been singularly scanty. It is not true that Etheredge broke his neck at Ratisbon in 1689, by falling down-stairs after a banquet; he seems to have died in Paris, most likely about the close of 1690. In English literature Etheredge holds a place securely as the founder of the comedy of intrigue, which reached its perfection in the masterpieces of Congreve and Wycherley. He himself had found his inspiration in Molière, and out of him grew that great master of comedy's English counterpart, the legitimate comedy of manners, and the dramatic triumphs of Sheridan and Goldsmith. Etheredge was more important in the impulse he gave the drama than in the magnitude of his own performance. His habitual indolence hindered him from producing more than three plays, The Comical Revenge; or Love in a Tub, the earliest play of which any large part was written in rhymed heroics (1664); She Would if She Could (1668); and The Man of Mode; or Sir Fopling Flutter (1676). These were all highly popular in their day, and it may be said that we have no better helps to an understanding of the time. The figures we meet are real creations, instinct with life, and some, as Dorimant and Sir Fopling Flutter, possess the supreme merit of having gone into literature as concrete types of the qualities they were meant to represent. See the fine essay on Etheredge in Edmund Gosse's Seventeenth-century Studies (1883), and the admirable complete edition of his works, with Introduction, by A. Wilson Verity (1888).