ABSTRACT
Sir George Etherege was very much of an amateur. Not having to write for a living, and being indolent by nature, he wrote only three plays: but by means of these he obtained an extraordinary reputation. ‘There is none’, Rochester wrote, ‘with more fancy, sense, judgment and wit’; Dryden said he would ‘never enter the lists in prose with the undoubted best author of it which our nation has produced’; and Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew, remarked more soberly that ‘for pleasant wit, and no bad economy’, Etherege’s plays were ‘judged not unworthy the applause they have met with’.
