Reviews189 notion of validity, but it is one that is frequently applied throughout the book. Moreover, "the plain verbal sense of the text" can sometimes yield surprising results, as when we read that there is "nothing in the text" of TAe Country-Wife to prevent us from casting Horner as fortyish, overweight , and inclined to leer (p. 85). Yet both Sir Jaspar and Lady Fidget explicitly regard Horner as good-looking, and the most natural reading of the Quack's syntax confirms Horner's youth: "I have been hired by young Gallants to bely'em t'other way; but you are the first wou'd be thought a Man unfit for Women." Many similar oddities could be cited. They by no means outweigh the many merits of an impressive and instructive book, but the book would have been still better if the authors had consistently identified multiple potentialities that were genuinely permitted by the texts, and if they had conceded that the director's response to multiple potentialities need not be to exclude all but one of them. The authors continue the regrettably frequent scholarly practice of misspelling ecstasy (p. 120). DEREK HUGHES University of Warwick David D. Mann. A Concordance to the Plays and Poems of Sir George Etherege. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985. Pp. xix + 445. $95.00. A concordance serves many purposes. It helps in locating passages; it provides material for studying the vocabulary, syntax, and other aspects of the language of a writer, a genre, or a period; it simplifies tracing a theme or idea through an author's works (by key words, such as Nature, Natural) ; and it enables the user to work out possible meanings for words in a historical period with an enormously larger collection of examples than are provided by TAe Oxford English Dictionary. For most of these purposes concordances of other writers of the same era supplement and are supplemented by each new one that is published; thus, a list of Etherege's words in contexts makes similar lists for John Dryden and William Congreve more useful. In addition, a concordance for plays that lists the character who speaks each example provides material for studying the language, images, and ideas of each character. An old-spelling concordance permits the detailed study of various forms and possible pronunciations of a word. David Mann has given us such a multi-purpose tool in his old-spelling Concordance to the Plays and Poems of Sir George Etherege. An important molder of the Restoration comedy of manners, Etherege (1636?-1691?) is best known for his Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter (1676), but he was also the author of two earlier comedies, TAe Comical Revenge; or Love in a Tub (1664) and 5Ae Wou'd if She Cou'd (1668), as well as about forty short poems (ed. James Thorpe, 1963) and a number of letters (ed. Sybil Rosenfeld, 1927, and Frederick Bracher, 1974). Mann includes the three plays from the text of H. F. B. Brett-Smith's edition of TAe Dramatic Works (1927) and the poems from Thorpe's 190Comparative Drama edition; he does not include the letters. The listings are full and helpful: a word is given in its original spelling, followed by the number of times it is used, the speaker (for lines from the plays), the context, the page number in Brett-Smith or Thorpe, the short title of the work, and the act, scene, line reference. For instance, the seven examples of Lov'd begin as follows: Lov'd (7) Graciana: This gallant Man my brother ever lov'd; 19 LOVE TUB II.2.77. The other six examples follow. Mann also supplies a Preface, and the book concludes with a list of Etherege's words in order of frequency. It is amusing but not unexpected to discover that Love is the thirty-fifth most common word in his works (used 335 times) and that it is more common than 5Ae, Do, Has, They, Come, On, etc. Useful as it is, this work has two drawbacks. One is the lack of cross-references in an old-spelling concordance: we must remember that the word Lov'd also appears...