The comical revenge, or, love in a tub. Acted at His Highness the Duke of York's Theatre in Lincolns-Inn-fields. Licensed, July 8. 1664. Roger L'Estrange

London: Printed for Henry Herringman, and are to be sold at his shop at the Blew-Anchor in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange,1669, 1669. This is a good copy,Bound in modern boards. This is a rare edition Listing only 4 copies in ESTC. Wing E-3370; W & M 546; Hazlitt, page 45.. A-I4, K4.(In this edition, there is a comma after title word "revenge" and leaf A2r has catchword "hope". Another edition has a semi-colon after "revenge" and leaf A2r has catchword "the".). The first work of Etherege was The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub. It was published in 1664 and may have been produced for the first time late in the previous year. This comedy was an immediate success and Etherege found himself, in a night, famous. Thus introduced to the wits and the fops of the town, Etherege took his place in the select and dissolute circle of Rochester, Dorset and Sedley. On one occasion, at Epsom, after tossing in a blanket certain fiddlers who refused to play, Rochester, Etherege and other boon companions so "skirmished the watch" that they left one of their number thrust through with a pike and were fain to abscond. Etherege married a fortune, it is not certain when, and, apparently for no better reason, was knighted. On the death of Rochester, he was, for some time, the "protector" of the beautiful and talented actress, Mrs. Barry. 63  Ever indolent and procrastinating, Etherege allowed four years to elapse before his next venture into comedy. She Would if She Could, 1668.

"The reputation of Sir George Etherege has risen considerably in the present century, and although there is now some danger of his being given an importance that he would have been the first to disown, he undoubtedly stamped his own unemphatic image on the Restoration theater. The comic world of his first two plays, although it is almost as unreal to the modern playgoer as the world of Edwardian musical comedy, is still young and fresh; it has the cool fragrance of those early mornings in the sixteen-sixties that Etherege knew so well as he went rollicking home after a night of pleasure. [...] His gentlemen never do anything that he and his friends would have been ashamed to do themselves. Whatever his moral standards may be, we have at least the satisfaction of feeling (as we do not with Dryden) that he is not consciously lowering them to make an English comedy. [...] (Sutherland).