Verbal brilliance, urbane sophistication and sexual conquest are themeasures of success for the fashionable set who watched themselvesbeing represented on the Restoration stage. Yet idealisation andsatire, as this edition of Etherege's masterpiece shows, are flip sidesof the same coin, and the play betrays deep anxieties about ridiculeand social failure. Any London beau would emulate Dorimant, theunconscionable rake who loves 'em and leaves 'em, but he would alsosecretly fear that he in fact resembled Sir Fopling Flutter, the modelof all Restoration fops, in his vanity and affectation. The women fareno better, being offered for identification Dorimant's discardedmistress Loveit, scheming for revenge, or the beautiful but hard-headedHarriet, who dares Dorimant to woo her in the country, for 'I know allbeyond Hyde Park is a desert to you and that no gallantry can draw youfarther'.
