Author Description

Verbal brilliance, urbane sophistication and sexual conquest are the<br>measures of success for the fashionable set who watched themselves<br>being represented on the Restoration stage. Yet idealisation and<br>satire, as this edition of Etherege's masterpiece shows, are flip sides<br>of the same coin, and the play betrays deep anxieties about ridicule<br>and social failure. Any London beau would emulate Dorimant, the<br>unconscionable rake who loves 'em and leaves 'em, but he would also<br>secretly fear that he in fact resembled Sir Fopling Flutter, the model<br>of all Restoration fops, in his vanity and affectation. The women fare<br>no better, being offered for identification Dorimant's discarded<br>mistress Loveit, scheming for revenge, or the beautiful but hard-headed<br>Harriet, who dares Dorimant to woo her in the country, for 'I know all<br>beyond Hyde Park is a desert to you and that no gallantry can draw you<br>farther'.