'Still on the Criminal's Side, against the Innocent': Etherege, Wycherley and the Ironies of Wit

Over the course of the last three centuries, the plays of Sir George Etherege and William Wycherley have both benefited and suffered from being treated as though they exemplify and yet somehow transcend the concerns of wit comedy in the 1660s and 1670s. The attention that Etherege and Wycherley have received since their own day suggests that their comedies play significant ideological roles in late seventeenth-century literary culture. Their plays display the ironies that they themselves seem to have experienced in Restoration London. It is revealing that both playwrights, having taken the conventions of wit comedy to their limits, drifted away from the theatre while they were still in their thirties. Etherege and Wycherley leave the stage still on the criminal's side, even as they seek the patronage and estates that, they hope, will secure their futures as men of 'idleness'.